“And moreover, 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.”

“No doubt of that either.  And 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.”

“Well, then, can you not see how pleasant it was to me to find someone who would give me a peep into the unseen world, without requiring as an entrance-fee any religious emotions and experiences?  Here I had been for years, shut out; told that I had no business with anything eternal, and pure, and noble, and good; that to all intents and purposes I was nothing better than a very cunning animal who could be damned; because I was still ‘carnal,’ and had not been through all Jane’s mysterious sorrows and joys.  And it was really good news to me to hear that they were not required after all, and that all I need do was to be a good man, and leave devotion to those who were inclined to it by temperament.”

“Not to be a good man,” said I, “but only a good specimen of some sort of man.  That, I think, would be the outcome of Emerson’s ‘Representative Men,’ or of those most tragic ’Memoirs of Margaret Puller Ossoli.’”

“How then, hair-splitter?  What is the mighty difference?”

“Would you call Dick Turpin a good man, because he was a good highwayman?”

“What now?”

“That he would be an excellent representative man of his class; and therefore, on Mr. Emerson’s grounds, a fit subject for a laudatory lecture.”

“I hate reductiones ad absurdum.  Let Turpin take care of himself.  I suppose I do not belong to such a very bad sort of men, but that it may be worth my while to become a good specimen of it?”

“Certainly not; only I think, contrary to Mr. Emerson’s opinion, that you will not become even that, unless you first become something better still, namely, a good man.”

“There you are too refined for me.  But can you not understand, now, the causes of my sympathy even with Windrush and his ’spirit of truth’?”

“I can, and those of many more.  It seems that you thought you found in that school a wider creed than the one to which you had been accustomed?”

“There was a more comprehensive view of humanity about them, and that pleased me.”

“Doubtless, one can be easily comprehensive if one comprehends good and bad, true and false, under one category, by denying the absolute existence of either goodness or badness, truth or falsehood.  But let the view be as comprehensive as it will, I am afraid that the creed founded thereon will not be very comprehensive.”

“Why then?”