croaking accent, I knew that it would not really have been right to kill
you. It would have been a venial sin."

"I am much obliged," said Turnbull, gruffly.

"You must give me time," said MacIan, quite patiently, "for I am trying
to tell the whole truth. I am trying to tell more of it than I know."

"So you see I confess"--he went on with laborious distinctness--"I
confess that all the people who called our duel mad were right in a way.
I would confess it to old Cumberland Vane and his eye-glass. I would
confess it even to that old ass in brown flannel who talked to us about
Love. Yes, they are right in a way. I am a little mad."

He stopped and wiped his brow as if he were literally doing heavy
labour. Then he went on:

"I am a little mad; but, after all, it is only a little madness. When
hundreds of high-minded men had fought duels about a jostle with the
elbow or the ace of spades, the whole world need not have gone wild over
my one little wildness. Plenty of other people have killed themselves
between then and now. But all England has gone into captivity in order
to take us captive. All England has turned into a lunatic asylum in
order to prove us lunatics. Compared with the general public, I might
positively be called sane."

He stopped again, and went on with the same air of travailing with the
truth:

"When I saw that, I saw everything; I saw the Church and the world. The
Church in its earthly action has really touched morbid things--tortures
and bleeding visions and blasts of extermination. The Church has had her
madnesses, and I am one of them. I am the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
I am the Inquisition of Spain. I do not say that we have never gone mad,
but I say that we are fit to act as keepers to our enemies. Massacre is
wicked even with a provocation, as in the Bartholomew. But your modern
Nietzsche will tell you that massacre would be glorious without a
provocation. Torture should be violently stopped, though the Church is
doing it. But your modern Tolstoy will tell you that it ought not to be
violently stopped whoever is doing it. In the long run, which is most
mad--the Church or the world? Which is madder, the Spanish priest who
permitted tyranny, or the Prussian sophist who admired it? Which is
madder, the Russian priest who discourages righteous rebellion, or the
Russian novelist who forbids it? That is the final and blasting test.
The world left to itself grows wilder than any creed. A few d