“Materialist?” he said, with a very unpleasant mixture of smile and sneer. “No; materialism is very well for a beginning; but one must face the facts at last if one is to deal with them at all successfully.” “But,” said I, “some teach that matter is the very ultimate of all fact.” “It is perhaps well,” he said, with a renewal of the same sneer and smile, “that they should teach so, but you and I know better; matter is evidence of the fact, but not the fact itself.” “And free will in your view is real?” “Yes, it is real, doubtless, although so given as to make it for all but the very boldest practically unreal.” “So given, you say; it is a gift then?” “Yes, it is a gift, if you call that ‘given’ which you use at your peril.” “And who gives it?” said I. “Never mind that,” he said, with a bitter scowl, which recalled for the moment his malignant expression of the day but one before. “Call Him the Giver: a cursed way of giving is His. You know that you can use His gift if you dare, and you know that if you dare use it as you please He will scald you with what His bond-slaves call ‘the vials of His wrath’; that I think is the phrase.” “Perhaps,” I said, “the scalding is one’s own doing: power to use the gift is power to use it rightly or wrongly: if one choose to use it wrongly one takes the consequences.” “Right and wrong,” he said, “what are they?” and he spoke now with great coolness and without a sign of sneer; “trace back the ideas to their origin. Right is what I will, and wrong is what I will not. So it is with the Giver, and why should it not be so with you and me?” I observed that as he said this some of the mottoes on his dress grew bright and even flashed. Among them was that in Hebrew letters which I told you of just now. “But I know there are slaves,” he went on to say, “slaves (you surely are not one of them) who are afraid of liberty, and who are jealous of those who are not afraid of it. And these,” he said, and here the scowl returned, “these make use of such words as right and wrong to perpetuate the tyrannous rule of Him who gives with a curse, and who takes again with a fresh curse.” “Is He,” I said, “the tyrant on whom you are making war?” “Oh, yes,” he said, “for all tyrants hold from Him; they are His hired bullies whom he pampers and lashes as you might lash and pamper your dog.” “You say that He gives and takes, will He take the gift of the freedom of will from you?” If I had foreseen the effect which this question would have produced, I should certainly have been afraid to have asked it. His face became at once full of deadly fury and frenzy; “Yes,” he said, “curse Him! He will at last if He can!” And then he sprang up and caught at the air with both his hands, just like the hands, in the device of which I have told you, grasping at the forked lightning. In a moment, however, he resumed the quiet, stately and affable air, which he had worn before, and he sat down, and began to talk again quite calmly.