r fixed
and flaming certainties. If truths could not be evaded by their
enemies, neither could they be altered even by their friends. But what
are the certain truths that the secular arm must now lift the sword to
enforce? Why, they are that very mass of bottomless questions and
bewildered answers that we have been studying in the last
chapters--questions whose only interest is that they are trackless and
mysterious; answers whose only glory is that they are tentative and
new. The devotee boasted that he would never abandon the faith; and
therefore he persecuted for the faith. But the doctor of science
actually boasts that he will always abandon a hypothesis; and yet he
persecutes for the hypothesis. The Inquisitor violently enforced his
creed, because it was unchangeable. The _savant_ enforces it violently
because he may change it the next day.

Now this is a new sort of persecution; and one may be permitted to ask
if it is an improvement on the old. The difference, so far as one can
see at first, seems rather favourable to the old. If we are to be at
the merciless mercy of man, most of us would rather be racked for a
creed that existed intensely in somebody's head, rather than
vivisected for a discovery that had not yet come into anyone's head,
and possibly never would. A man would rather be tortured with a
thumbscrew until he chose to see reason than tortured with a
vivisecting knife until the vivisector chose to see reason. Yet that
is the real difference between the two types of legal enforcement. If
I gave in to the Inquisitors, I should at least know what creed to
profess. But even if I yelled out _a credo_ when the Eugenists had me
on the rack, I should not know what creed to yell. I might get an
extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed they confessed
quite a week ago.

Now let no light-minded person say that I am here taking extravagant
parallels; for the parallel is not only perfect, but plain. For this
reason: that the difference between torture and vivisection is not in
any way affected by the fierceness or mildness of either. Whether they
gave the rack half a turn or half a hundred, they were, by hypothesis,
dealing with a truth which they knew to be there. Whether they
vivisect painfully or painlessly, they are trying to find out whether
the truth is there or not. The old Inquisitors tortured to put their
own opinions into somebody. But the new Inquisitors torture to get
their own opinions out