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 that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a
materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and
you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker,
with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy
Christianity. What he does destroy is the Free-