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 priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the doubter, 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 are centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is “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 has revealed,” they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought but the most complete submission.  But while man aspires after truth, while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars upward into the empyrean of speculation and “beats the air with tireless wing,” so long shall those who demand faith from him be met by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even though her eyes should turn him into stone.  It was during this same autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them by Mr. Voysey.  At that time Thomas 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.  Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought.  His wife, “his right hand,” as he justly called her, was young enough to be his daughter—­a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken.  Mr. Scott for many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written, cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have something to say, and must say it in good English.  His correspondence was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards.  At his house met people of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical salon.  Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray, Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the entree was gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.  For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months after, “On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth,” by the wife of a benefited clergyman.  My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any essays from my pen should be anonymous.