a mirror focussing into feature and form the very same fact which they saw distorted and blurred in the troubled stream of time.  The Good, in the Greek world, was simply the essence and soul of the Real; and the Socrates of Xenophon who frankly identified justice with the laws, was only expressing, and hardly with exaggeration, the current convictions of his countrymen.  That, to my mind, is the attitude of health; and it is the one natural to the plain man in every well-organized society.  Good is best known when it is not investigated; and people like ourselves would do no useful service if we were to induce in others the habit of discussion which education has made a second nature to ourselves.”

“My dear Parry!” cried Ellis, “you alarm me!  Is it possible that we are all anarchists in disguise?”

“Parry,” I observed, “seems to agree with the view attributed by Browning to Paracelsus, that thought is disease, and natural health is ignorance.”

“Well,” rejoined Ellis, “there is a good deal to be said for that.”

“There’s a good deal to be said for everything,” I rejoined.  “But if thought indeed be disease, we must recognise the fact that we are suffering from it; and so, I fear, is the whole modern world.  It was easy for the Greeks to be ‘healthy’; practically they had no past.  But for us the past overweights the present; we cannot, if we would, get rid of the burden of it.  All that was once absolute has become relative, including our own conceptions and ideals; and as we look back down the ages and see civilization after civilization come into being, flourish and decay, it is impossible for us to believe that the society in which we happen to be born is more ultimate than any of these, or that its ideal, as reflected in its institutions, has any more claim than theirs to be regarded as a final and absolute expression of Good.”

“Well,” said Parry, “let us admit, if you like, that ideals evolve, but, in any case, the ideal of our own time has more validity for us than any other.  As to those of the past, they were, no doubt, important in their day, but they have no importance for the modern world.  The very fact that they are past is proof that they are also superseded.”

“What!” cried Leslie, indignantly, “do you mean to say that everything that is later in time is also better?  That we are better artists than the Greeks? better citizens than the Romans? more spiritual than the men of the Middle Ages? more vigorous than those of the Renaissance?”

“I don’t know,” replied Parry, “that I am bound to maintain all that.  I only say that on the whole I believe that ideals progress; and that therefore it is the ideals of our own time, and that alone, which we ought practically to consider.”

“The ideal of our own time?” I said, “but which of them? there are so many.”

“No, there is really only one, as I said before; the one that is embodied in current laws and customs.”