Master Clement very truly worshipped the God whom he had seated on the throne, and was jealous for his honour and glory and solicitous for his praise among men, and would give life itself to bring all mankind under his Lord’s supremacy. As little as any man-at-war of an earthly feudal suzerain would he have hesitated to compel them to come in. Was it not to their endless, boundless good, and without was there any other thing than hell eternal and everlasting and the evil lord? If, contumaciously, they would not come in, or if being in they rebelled and broke from their allegiance, what else was to be done but to carry fire and sword—that is, to put into operation the laws of the land—against his Lord’s enemies? Had any one called his attention to the fact of how largely liegemen like himself had brought these laws into being, he would have answered, Yes; under the direction of their Suzerain’s own Word, writ down for their perpetual guidance, shortly after the making of the world! It was not alone eager jealousy for his Lord’s glory and honour, nor anxious care that he himself prove in no wise an idle and unprofitable servant, that was felt by Master Clement. To his intense zeal and his own cries for life eternal was added a thwart love of mankind—that portion of it enclosed in the great sheepfold, and that portion who, wandering outside, lost upon the mountain-sides in the cold and darkness, yet had in them no stubbornness, but would hasten to the fold so soon as they heard the shepherd’s voice through the mist. He was eager for them, his brothers and children in the fold; eager, too, for the poor lost souls upon the mountains,—lost, yet not wilfully, stubbornly, and abandonedly lost, but capable of being found and regained, so many as were elected. But the others, ah, the others! they who set up their own wills and professed other knowledge, or, if not knowledge, then doubt and scepticism of the liegeman’s knowledge, writing a question mark beside that which was not to be questioned—they who moved away from the fold in its completeness! Master Clement’s zeal flared downward no less than upward, to the left no less than to the right. He hated with intensity—with the greater intensity that he was so sure his hatred was disinterested. “Have I not hated _Thy_ enemies?” But if those without were manifestly rather than invisibly of the Kingdom of Satan,—if their ill-doing was so great that it became as it were _corporeal_,—if the people saw them open atheists, wizards, and witches,—if their foot had slipped or their master had been negligent to cover them with his mantle of darkness,—the soul of Master Clement experienced a grim and deadly exaltation. He tightened his belt, he saw that his axe was sharp, he went forth to hew the dead and poisoned wood out of the forest of the Lord.