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."
