“There is a voice I hear within me. And being divine it speaks only the truth.”
“How do you know it is divine?”
“How do I know the grass is green, the sky blue, the heather purple? How do I know the birds sing?”
“That is no answer,” said the vicar. “It is open to anyone to claim a divine voice within did not modesty forbid.”
The smile of John Smith was so sweetly simple that it could not have expressed an afterthought. “Had you a true vocation,” he said, “would you find such uses for your modesty?”
The vicar, torn between a desire to rebuke what he felt to be an intolerable impertinence and a wish to end an interview that boded ill to his dignity, could only stand irresolute. Yet this odd creature spoke so readily, with a precision so rare and curious that his every word seemed to acquire a kind of authority. Bitterly chagrined, half insulted as the vicar was, he determined to continue the argument if only for the sake of a further light upon the man’s state of mind.
“You claim to hear a divine voice. Is it for that reason, may one ask, that you feel licensed to utter such appalling blasphemies?”
John Smith smiled again in his odd way.
“You speak like the men of old time,” he said softly.
“I use the King’s English,” said the vicar. “And I use it as pointedly, as expressively, as sincerely as lies in my power. I mean every word I say. You claim the divine voice, yet all that it speaks is profanity and corruption.”