"carnal," and had not been through his teacher's mysterious sorrows and joys.
Mr. Kingsley's method of curing this patient by a stringent course of dialectics is not very promising, in the book itself, or out of it. There is something significant in the finale of the dialogue: "Here come Lewis and the luncheon." Templeton is fast settling down upon his lees. Long has he been getting fonder and fonder of a good dinner and a second bottle of claret—for about their meaning, says he, there is no mistake; he has taken the hounds, in order to have something to do in the winter which requires no thought, and to have an excuse fur falling asleep after dinner, instead of arguing with Mrs. T. about the Record newspaper. "Have a cigar," he proposes to the parson, when the dialectics are getting deep—"have a cigar, and let us say no more about it." Yes, he is right in protesting, "There is more here, old fellow, than you will cure by doses of Socratic dialectics," though the "old fellow" is more sanguine. Can they administer to a mind thus diseased? Meantime it is fain to seek relief in the advent of Lewis and the luncheon.
In the strictures on Emersonianism with which "Phaethon" abounds, Mr. Kingsley does not omit the acknowledgment that the Windrush school have said a great many clever and noble things about man, and society, and art, and nature. "And moreover," says Templeton, "they seem to connect all they say with—with—I suppose you will laugh at me—with God, and spiritual truths, and eternal divine laws; in short, to consecrate common matters in that very way which I could not find in my poor mother's teaching." To this also his "guide, philosopher, and friend" in black, assents—confessing that therein is one real value of them as protests in behalf of something nobler and more unselfish than the mere dollar-getting spirit. of their country. But, on the other hand, he sees in Emerson's teaching, as a whole, nothing better than a "cosy and tolerant epicurism," which, hearing men cry for deliverance from their natures, as knowing that they are not that which they were intended to be, because they follow their natures, answers that cry, and ignores that misgiving by the dictum, "Follow your natures, and be that which you were intended to be." He sees a fearful analogy between the tendencies of this school and those of the Alexandrian Platonists—a downward lapse from a spiritualism of notions and emotions, unmistakeably materialistic, to the appalling discovery that consciousness does not reveal God, not even matter, but only its own existence; and then onward, "in desperate search after something external wherein to trust, towards theurgic fètish worship, and the secret virtues of gems, and flowers, and stars; and, last of all, to the lowest depth of bowing statues and winking pictures;"—the probability moreover being, that in our nineteenth century re-enactment of Neo-Platonism and nature-worship, "the superstitions will be more clumsy and foolish, in proportion as our Saxon brain is less acute and discursive, and our educationless severely scientific, than those of the old Greeks." Whether this Saxon inferiority in dialectical equipments threatens to deepen the calamity, admits of doubt in this particular case. The general protest, however, against the morbid developments of Emersonianism, whether in matter or manner, doctrine or form, system (?) or style, has a special value as coming from an apostle of Christian socialism, a Church messenger to working men, an inditer of politics for the people, and a biographer of
