Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my last chance of escape had failed me.  I recognised in this famous divine the spirit of the priest, which could be tender and pitiful to the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive, craving only for pardon and for guidance, but which was iron to the doubter, to the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of “revealed truth”, silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge of the traditions of the Church.  Out of such men were made the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic.  To them heretics were and are centres of infectious disease, and charity to them “the worst cruelty to the souls of men”.  Certain that they hold “by no merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God the one truth which he hath revealed”, they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought but the most complete submission.  But while man aspires after truth, while his brain yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars upward into the heaven of speculation and “beats the air with tireless wing”, so long shall those who demand faith be met by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be defeated by his determination to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even though her eyes should turn him into stone.

During this same visit to London I saw Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott for the first time.  I had gone down to Dulwich to see Mr. and Mrs. Voysey, and after dinner we went over to Upper Norwood, and I was introduced to one of the most remarkable men I have ever met.  At that time Mr. Scott was an old man, with beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from under shaggy eyebrows; he had been a man of magnificent physique, and though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.  Of Scotch descent and wellborn, Thomas Scott had, as a boy, been a page at the French Court; his manhood was spent in many lands, for he “was a mighty hunter”, though not “before the Lord”.  He had lived for months among the North American Indians, sharing the hardships of their wild life; he had hunted and fished all over the world.  At last, he came home, married, and ultimately settled down at Ramsgate, where he made his home a centre of heretical thought.  He issued an enormous number of tracts and pamphlets, and each month he sent out a small packet to hundreds of subscribers and friends.  This monthly issue of heretical literature soon made itself a power in the world of thought; the tracts were of various shades of opinion, but were all heretical:  some moderate, some extreme; all were well-written, cultured and polished in tone—­this was a rule to which Mr. Scott made no exceptions; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have something real to say, and they must say that something in good English.  The little white packets found their way into many