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don't know. I dare say there was a quarrel beforehand and that was what made him give the lectures. Anyhow, when he started trying to undermine the beliefs of your parishioners, your hatred reached such a pitch that you determined to do away with him. I am not going to moralize about all that; I suppose you felt at the time that you were doing God's work, and you fortified yourself with precedents from the Bible. To you, perhaps, it was like crushing some noxious insect. I'm not going to argue morality.

"One characteristic scruple detained you. You did not shrink from undoing God's work by destroying the material body of the man you hated, but you trembled for the prospects of his soul if his life was thus suddenly brought to an end. You decided that you must warn him of the danger he ran, but how were you to warn him without risk of discovery? You sent him a present of a book about immortality; that seemed natural enough, as it was the subject he had been lecturing about. Then, anonymously, you sent him a message which consisted only of figures, yet so arranged that a clever man like Brotherhood could see that the figures were a cipher, and that this book was the key to the cipher. The message you sent ran, 'You will perish if you go back upon your faith.' Then you felt you had warned him sufficiently. As a matter of fact, he left the book in the train on Monday, and therefore your warning, which reached him on Tuesday, was in any case too late.