tiger, but a good looking young man with nothing abnormal about
him except his appalling courage and resolution (that is why the
terrified shriek Coward at him): one to whom murdering a happy
young couple on their wedding morning would have been an
unthinkably unnatural abomination under rational and kindly human
circumstances.

Then comes the climax of irony and blind stupidity. The wolves,
balked of their meal of fellow-wolf, turn on the man, and proceed
to torture him, after their manner, by imprisonment, for refusing
to fasten his teeth in the throat of the dynamiter and hold him
down until they came to finish him.

Thus, you see, a man may not be a gentleman nowadays even if he
wishes to. As to being a Christian, he is allowed some latitude
in that matter, because, I repeat, Christianity has two faces.
Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief
sensation a sanguinary execution after torture, for its central
mystery an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation.
But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms
the sacred mystery of Equality, and forbids the glaring futility
and folly of vengeance, often politely called punishment or
justice. The gibbet part of Christianity is tolerated. The other
is criminal felony. Connoisseurs in irony are well aware of the
fact that the only editor in England who denounces punishment as
radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity; calls his paper
The Freethinker; and has been imprisoned for two years for
blasphemy.