They had walked all night and talked all night also, and if the subject had been capable of being exhausted they would have exhausted it.  Their long and changing argument had taken them through districts and landscapes equally changing.  They had discussed Haeckel upon hills so high and steep that in spite of the coldness of the night it seemed as if the stars might burn them.  They had explained and re-explained the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in little white lanes walled in with standing corn as with walls of gold.  They had talked about Mr. Kensit in dim and twinkling pine woods, amid the bewildering monotony of the pines.  And it was with the end of a long speech from MacIan, passionately defending the practical achievements and the solid prosperity of the Catholic tradition, that they came out upon the open land.

MacIan had learnt much and thought more since he came out of the cloudy hills of Arisaig.  He had met many typical modern figures under circumstances which were sharply symbolic; and, moreover, he had absorbed the main modern atmosphere from the mere presence and chance phrases of Turnbull, as such atmospheres can always be absorbed from the presence and the phrases of any man of great mental vitality.  He had at last begun thoroughly to understand what are the grounds upon which the mass of the modern world solidly disapprove of her creed; and he threw himself into replying to them with a hot intellectual enjoyment.

“I begin to understand one or two of your dogmas, Mr. Turnbull,” he had said emphatically as they ploughed heavily up a wooded hill.  “And every one that I understand I deny.  Take any one of them you like.  You hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward and handed on a lamp of progress.  I deny it.  Nothing is plainer from real history than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces.  Who knows now exactly what Nestorius taught?  Who cares?  There are only two things that we know for certain about it.  The first is that Nestorius, as a heretic, taught something quite opposite to the teaching of Arius, the heretic who came before him, and something quite useless to James Turnbull, the heretic who comes after.  I defy you to go back to the Free-thinkers of the past and find any habitation for yourself at all.  I defy you to read Godwin or Shelley or the deists of the eighteenth century of the nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance, without discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you differ from the Pope.  You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature.  If you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature.  You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century.  Read them instead of praising them, and you will find