ut will almost certainly
teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape
of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape
of the mitre. One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed;
some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has
told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you
with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more.
But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living,
to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow,
or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a
single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes
to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato
and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting
to see some truth that he has never seen before. There is one
only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel
of the life in which we all began. When your father told you,
walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet,
you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the
bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence.
When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude,
barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep
delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your father,
because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing
that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth
to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father,
it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine,
to whom this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather
futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much
every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact
that they alone rule education until education becomes futile:
for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late
to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already,
and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man
is womanised, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman;
but every man is a feminised man. And if ever men walk to Westminster
to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join
their procession.

For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact;
that the very time when I was most under a woman's authority,