Baird laid a hand on his shoulder and shook him. It was a singular movement with passion in it.
“No! No!” he cried. “Rouse, man, and let your reason speak. In peril? Lost—for some poor rigid law broken to spare others? Great God! No!”
“Reason!” said Latimer. “What you and I must preach each week of our lives is that it is not reason a man must be ruled by, but blind, wilful faith.”
“I do not preach it,” Baird interposed. “There are things I dare to leave unsaid.”
“I have spoken falsely,” Latimer went on, heavily. “I have lived a lie—a lie—but it was to save pure hearts from breaking. They would have broken beneath the weight of what I have borne for them. If I must bear punishment for that, I—Let me bear it.”
The rigid submission of generations of the Calvinistic conscience which presumed to ask no justice from its God and gave praise as for mercy shown for all things which were not damnation, and which against damnation’s self dared not lift its voice in rebellion, had so far influenced the very building of his being that the revolt of reason in his brain filled him with gloomy terror. There was the appeal of despair on his face as he looked at Baird.
“Your life, your temperament have given you a wider horizon than mine,” he said. “I have never been in touch with human beings. I have only read religious books—stern, pitiless things. Since my boyhood I have lived in terror of the just God—the just God—who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. I—Baird—” his voice dropping, his face pallid, “I have hated Him. I keep His laws, it is my fate to preach His word—and I cower before Him as a slave before a tyrant, with hatred in my heart.”
“Good God!” Baird broke forth, involuntarily. The force of the man’s desperate feeling, his horror of himself, his tragic truthfulness, were strange things to stand face to face with. He had never confronted such a thing before, and it shook him.
Latimer’s face relaxed into a singular, rather pathetic smile.
“Good God!” he repeated; “we all say that—I say it myself. It seems the natural human cry. I wonder what it means? It surely means something—something.”