WEDGECROFT.  No matter what they teach?

TREBELL.  No ... the matter is how they teach it.  I see schools in the future, Gilbert, not built next to the church, but on the site of the church.

WEDGECROFT.  Do you think the world is grown up enough to do without dogma?

TREBELL.  Yes, I do.

WEDGECROFT.  What!... and am I to write my prescriptions in English?

TREBELL.  Yes, you are.

WEDGECROFT.  Lord save us!  I never thought to find you a visionary.

TREBELL.  Isn’t it absurd to think that in a hundred years we shall be giving our best brains and the price of them not to training grown men into the discipline of destruction ... not even to curing the ills which we might be preventing ... but to teaching our children.  There’s nothing else to be done ... nothing else matters.  But it’s work for a priesthood.

WEDGECROFT. [Affected; not quite convinced.] Do you think you can buy a tradition and transmute it?

TREBELL.  Don’t mock at money.

WEDGECROFT.  I never have.

TREBELL.  But you speak of it as an end not as a means.  That’s unfair.

WEDGECROFT.  I speaks as I finds.

TREBELL.  I’ll buy the Church, not with money, but with the promise of new life. [A certain rather gleeful cunning comes over him.] It’ll only look like a dose of reaction at first ...  Sectarian Training Colleges endowed to the hilt.

WEDGECROFT.  What’ll the Nonconformists say?

TREBELL.  Bribe them with the means of equal efficiency.  The crux of the whole matter will be in the statutes.  I’ll force on those colleges.

WEDGECROFT.  They’ll want dogma.

TREBELL.  Dogma’s not a bad thing if you’ve power to adapt it occasionally.

WEDGECROFT.  Instead of spending your brains in explaining it.  Yes, I agree.

TREBELL. [With full voice.] But in the creed I’ll lay down as unalterable there shall be neither Jew nor Greek....  What do you think of St. Paul, Gilbert?

WEDGECROFT.  I’d make him the head of a college.

TREBELL.  I’ll make the Devil himself head of a college, if he’ll undertake to teach honestly all he knows.

WEDGECROFT.  And he’ll conjure up Comte and Robespierre for you to assist in this little rechauffée of their schemes.

TREBELL.  Hullo!  Comte I knew about.  Have I stolen from Robespierre too?

WEDGECROFT. [Giving out the epigram with an air.] Property to him who can make the best use of it.

TREBELL.  And then what we must do is to give the children power over their teachers?

      Now he is comically enigmatic. WEDGECROFT echoes him.

WEDGECROFT.  And what exactly do you mean by that?