But even as Garret spoke all the old sense of fascination which this man had exercised upon him in London returned in full force upon Dalaber.  The brilliant eyes held him by their spell, the fighting instinct rose hot within him.  His heart had been full of thoughts of love and human bliss; now there arose a sense of coming battle, and the lust of fighting which is in every human heart, and which, in a righteous cause, may be even a God-like attribute, flamed up within him, and he cried aloud: 

“I am on the Lord’s side.  Shall I fear what flesh can do unto me?  I will go forth in the strength of the Lord.  I fear not.  I will be true, even unto death.”

There was no quavering in his voice now.  His face was aglow with the passion of his earnestness.

Next moment Garret was in the midst of one of his fiery orations.  A fresh batch of pamphlets had come over from Germany.  They exposed new and wholesale corruptions which prevailed in the papal court, and which roused the bitterest indignation amongst those who were banded together to uphold righteousness and purity.  Unlike men of Clarke’s calibre of mind, and full of the zeal which in later times blazed out in the movement of the Reformation, Garret could not regard the Catholic Church in its true and universal aspect, embracing all Christian men in its fold—­the one body of which Christ is the head.  He looked upon it as a corrupt organization of man’s devising, a hierarchy of ambitious and scheming men, who, having lost hold of the truth, require to be scathingly denounced and their iniquity exposed; whilst those who thus held her in abhorrence heard the voice of the Spirit in their hearts saying, “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partaker of her plagues.”

The mystical unity of the Catholic Church was a thing understood by few in those days.  The one party held themselves the true church, and anathematized their baptized and Christian brethren as heretics and outcasts; whilst, as a natural outcome of such a state of affairs, these outcasts themselves were disposed to repudiate the very name of Catholic.  And to this very day, in spite of the light which has come to men, and the better understanding with regard to Christian unity, Romanists arrogate that title exclusively to themselves, whilst others in Protestant sections of the church accord them the name willingly, and repudiate it for themselves, with no sense of the anomaly of such repudiation.

But in these days there had been no open split between camp and camp in the Church Catholic, though daily it was growing more and more patent to men that if the abuses and corruptions within the fold were not rectified, some drastic attack from without must of necessity take place.