times, places, and races, who have sat in judgment on doubters,
actual or suspected. In whatsoever 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 the greatest
of sins?

The lad soon grew composed. These judges were still his friends, not
his masters. His masters were the writers of the books in which he
believed, and he spoke for them, for what he believed to be the truth,
so far as man had learned it. The conference lasted through that short
winter afternoon. In all that he said the lad showed that he was full
of many confusing voices: the voices of the new science, the voices of
the new doubt. One voice only had fallen silent in him: the voice of
the old faith.

It had grown late