The silent man, alone with these strange creations of his brain, fell to tracing the work of this iron-bound monster back to its birth or beginning. And as he pondered and questioned, it came to him with a distinct shock that the first intolerance was that which opposed itself to God’s creation in the Garden of Eden. Its first form was that of a sinuous serpent; its voice that of the subtle testimony of the senses! He found also that this monster had assumed a form, and found a voice in every age in which mortal man had lived. And it came to him straight as an arrow and as keen to his highly-wrought senses that the relentless iron pen was writing, along with the other records, the history of the Church, the Church which had seemed to him to be infallible, which had come to him fraught with the faith of his ancestors, steeped in the blood of martyrs, and which held within its sacred teachings the only possible redemption for mankind, the Church for which he had labored. But he was not yet spared; remorse and contrition were having their way with him, and the sweat of agony was on his brow. For the first time in his life he entertained a doubt as to a literal hell; for what could a quenchless fire do to the physical body, compared to this which the bigotry and intolerance of his life were uncovering before him?
It was a relief to turn from this mental gloom, this verge of madness, from all this record of pain and woe, the history of the world’s wrongs, to turn and behold the supple figure in white, writing with the diamond’s flashing point. Here was a record of God’s creation, untouched by mortal sense; a story of man untempted and woman unbeguiled; all things the image and reflection of the one God. Only that which is good and true and pure, that which is noble and righteous, was recorded by the flashing pen; the freedom which God gives to man can write no other record.
The events of the ages passed as a panorama before the solitary observer. From the bookshelves of the world were selected volumes written by a master hand, books that had stood the test of time and lived through the years. And the fact stood out with distinctness that the souls of the men who wrote them were not shackled, they were not slaves to another’s will, nor bound by another’s power, but that the minds that conceived them stood in absolute freedom before God. He was made to feel the throb and pulse of freedom, unbound and unfettered, that surged through the life of the artists that have painted the world’s famous pictures and fashioned its works of art. He saw man expanding beneath the touch of the Infinite, answerable to the Infinite only.