'Were you in great danger?'
     'Some of the Chinese mobs were quite unbelievable. I can still see them at our door, howling for blood. And father fending them off with words! We were driven out in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek took over. Some of our missionaries were hung. There was a lot of martyrdom. Then my father went back for seven years on his own, while mother stayed at home to look after us. Just as he retired in 1935, there was the Long March, and they destroyed all the churches he had built, shot all the pastors.'
     Tom Torrance completed his schooling in Scotland, gradually coming to terms with the odder Scottish customs. In his first week, he upset his mother when he returned from a shopping errand empty-handed and explained that the shopkeeper had thrown him out. 'Well I'd started to bargain with them. We always bargained in China!'
     He decided that he would go to Tibet, and become a missionary.

     'Do you think faith is a gift?'
     'I think faith is quite natural. When you're brought up to it, as I was, it becomes very deeply instinctive. I have never had – people think this is crazy – I have never had any doubts.'
     'No crisis of faith at all? No difficulty?'
     'Absolutely certain, always,' he insisted, smiling serenely. Then he thumped the flat of his hand on the table beside him. 'Just as certain as that table.' It was a solid piece of furniture, and held steady against the theologian's blow. 'You don't have doubts about your own existence or the realities around you. God's just like that.'
     'Do you pray a lot?'
     'I have a sanctuary here. I find I need to pray on my knees, and I pray morning and night. I usually read at least five chapters of the Bible every day, reflect on them, and pray.'
     When I said I hadn't noticed the sanctuary, Professor Torrance rose and took me to it. It is in a dark, hidden place behind the books, on the other side of the attic from the word processor.
     I said something banal about science and religion co-existing.
     'Science and theology,' he corrected me. How terrifying it must have been, it suddenly occurred to me, to have had this formidable intellectual as one's Professor of Christian Dogmatics.
     'Do you find praying fairly peaceful?'
     'On the whole, very. But there are occasions when prayer is an agony. Then you believe that you really are in touch with God, asking and receiving.'
     'So we're quite entitled to expect our prayers to be answered?'
     'Well, they have to be prayers in accordance with the will of God, and the will of God doesn't only concern us as individuals.'
     With this enigmatic qualification, we returned to our afternoon tea at the table by the window, the table as solid and unshakable as the Professor's faith. And I wondered aloud about Christians who could not share his enviable certainty, who openly expressed their doubts. What did a hard thump on the attic table do for them?
     'Unfortunately,' said Professor Torrance, brisk as an Edinburgh breeze, 'the general framework of our culture is derived from old-fashioned Newtonian science, that anything you can't explain in hard causal terms, you can't accept. Of course I wasn't brought up to that, I didn't have that kind of cultural framework. But I can understand that many people are like that. I remember one of my own sons coming home from school one day and asking me, "How do you prove God exists?" And I said "Well, if you could prove it, it wouldn't be God you were talking about. You can't prove him." Years later, he said to me that he had no problems after that.'

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