else differing, united in this: that they have always held
themselves to be divinely appointed agents of the Judge of all the
earth: His creatures chosen to punish His creatures. And so behind
those professors, away back in history, were ranged Catholic popes
and Protestant archbishops, and kings and queens, Protestant and
Catholic, and great mediaeval jurists, and mailed knights and palm-
bearing soldiers of the cross, and holy inquisitors drowning poor
old bewildered women, tearing living flesh from flesh as paper,
crushing bones like glass, burning the shrieking human body to
cinders: this in the name of a Christ whose Gospel was mercy, and
by the authority of a God whose law was love. They were all there,
tier after tier, row above row, a vast shadowy colosseum of intent
judicial faces--Defenders of the Faith.

But no inquisitor was in this room now, nor punitive intention, nor
unkind thought. Slowly throughout the emerging life of man this
identical trial has gained steadily in charity and mildness.
Looking backward over his long pathway through bordering mysteries,
man himself has been brought to see, time and again, that what was
his doubt was his ignorance; what was his faith was his error; that
things rejected have become believed, and that things believed have
become rejected; that both his doubt and his faith are the
temporary condition of his knowledge, which is ever growing; and
that rend him faith and doubt ever will, but destroy him, never.

No Smithfield fire, then, no Jesuitical rack, no cup of hemlock, no
thumb-screw, no torture of any kind for David. Still, here was a
duty to be done, an awful responsibility to be discharged in sorrow
and with prayer; and grave good men they were. Blameless was this
lad in all their eyes save in his doubt. But to doubt--was not that