And the
explanation of this power, which unifies an otherwise incoherent
personality, is to be found, I am quite confident, in his burning hatred
of iniquity.
As a boy, like the poet Gray and the late Lord Salisbury, he suffered a
good deal of bullying, and thus learned at school something beyond the
reach of the Latin Grammar, namely, the brutality of human nature. He
has never forgotten that discovery. Indeed, his after-life has widened
and intensified that early lesson. Sin is brutality. It is selfishness
seeking its low pleasure and its base delight in vilest self-indulgence
involving the suffering of others, sometimes their profoundest
degradation, even their absolute destruction. Particularly did he
experience this burning conviction when he came to understand the
well-nigh inconceivable brutality of sexual vice. I believe that it was
a poor harlot in the slums of London who first opened for him the door
of fanaticism.
He had longed as a schoolboy to hit back at his tyrants, and now in the
dawn of manhood that long repression made its weight felt in the blows
he showered on the face of evil. For a year or two he was a wild man of
evangelicalism, leading attacks on evil, challenging public attention,
seeking imprisonment, courting martyrdom. It was from the flaming
indignation of his soul that Mr. Stead took fire, and led a crusade
against impurity which shocked the conscience of the eighties.
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