He stopped again, abstractedly boring the point of his sword into the earth, and went on: 

“I was born and bred and taught in a complete universe.  The supernatural was not natural, but it was perfectly reasonable.  Nay, the supernatural to me is more reasonable than the natural; for the supernatural is a direct message from God, who is reason.  I was taught that some things are natural and some things divine.  I mean that some things are mechanical and some things divine.  But there is the great difficulty, Turnbull.  The great difficulty is that, according to my teaching, you are divine.”

“Me!  Divine?” said Turnbull truculently.  “What do you mean?”

“That is just the difficulty,” continued MacIan thoughtfully.  “I was told that there was a difference between the grass and a man’s will; and the difference was that a man’s will was special and divine.  A man’s free will, I heard, was supernatural.”

“Rubbish!” said Turnbull.

“Oh,” said MacIan patiently, “then if a man’s free will isn’t supernatural, why do your materialists deny that it exists?”

Turnbull was silent for a moment.  Then he began to speak, but MacIan continued with the same steady voice and sad eyes: 

“So what I feel is this:  Here is the great divine creation I was taught to believe in.  I can understand your disbelieving in it, but why disbelieve in a part of it?  It was all one thing to me.  God had authority because he was God.  Man had authority because he was man.  You cannot prove that God is better than a man; nor can you prove that a man is better than a horse.  Why permit any ordinary thing?  Why do you let a horse be saddled?”

“Some modern thinkers disapprove of it,” said Turnbull a little doubtfully.

“I know,” said MacIan grimly; “that man who talked about love, for instance.”

Turnbull made a humorous grimace; then he said:  “We seem to be talking in a kind of shorthand; but I won’t pretend not to understand you.  What you mean is this:  that you learnt about all your saints and angels at the same time as you learnt about common morality, from the same people, in the same way.  And you mean to say that if one may be disputed, so may the other.  Well, let that pass for the moment.  But let me ask you a question in turn.  Did not this system of yours, which you swallowed whole, contain all sorts of things that were merely local, the respect for the chief of your clan, or such things; the village ghost, the family feud, or what not?  Did you not take in those things, too, along with your theology?”

MacIan stared along the dim village road, down which the last straggler from the inn was trailing his way.

“What you say is not unreasonable,” he said.  “But it is not quite true.  The distinction between the chief and us did exist; but it was never anything like the distinction between the human and the divine, or the human and the animal.  It was more like the distinction between one animal and another.  But——­”