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The Ball and the Cross

when the same man was brought before a magistrate and defied his enemy to mortal combat in the open court, then the columns would hardly hold the excruciating information, and the headlines were so large that there was hardly room for any of the text. The “Daily Telegraph” headed a column, “A Duel on Divinity,” and there was a correspondence afterwards which lasted for months, about whether police magistrates ought to mention religion. The “Daily Mail,” in its dull, sensible way, headed the events, “Wanted to fight for the Virgin.” Mr. James Douglas, in “The Star,” presuming on his knowledge of philosophical and theological terms, described the Christian’s outbreak under the title of “Dualist and Duellist.” The “Daily News” inserted a colourless account of the matter, but was pursued and eaten up for some weeks, with letters from outlying ministers, headed “Murder and Mariolatry.” But the journalistic temperature was steadily and consistently heated by all these influences; the journalists had tasted blood, prospectively, and were in the mood for more; everything in the matter prepared them for further outbursts of moral indignation. And when a gasping reporter rushed in in the last hours of