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Howie arrives at the laird's castle and meets Lord Summerisle. To Christopher Lee's dismay, large sections of dialogue were removed from these scenes. The full conversation was as follows...

Lord Summerisle: Well, he's dead. He can't complain. He had his chance and, in modern parlance, blew it.

(Howie stands angrily)

Howie: What!

Lord Summerisle: Don't you mean how? The people were persuaded that He had become less powerful than the old gods who still lived on in the woods and the water and the fire and the stone.

Howie: It's not possible after so long. Who did this?

Lord Summerisle: My grandfather, actually. It wasn't all that difficult. The tradition of the arcane and the mysterious cleaves to the people of this island with a tenacity which makes it seem an inherent and inalienable possession. And as even you must be aware, Sergeant, there's no race which cultivates a keener sense of spiritual vision than the Celtic.

Howie: I don't understand.

Lord Summerisle: It's very simple - let me show you.

(Summerisle opens a folder of photographs of the island's old days)

Lord Summerisle: In the last century, the islanders were starving. Like our neighbours today, they were scratching a bear subsistence from sheep and sea. But mutton and mullet, so to speak, are hardly the counters of prosperity. Dutifully, every Sunday the people - Baptist and Catholic, Presbyterian and Free Kirk - bowed as low as their respective religions permitted, to the Christian God and prayed for prosperity. But inevitably none appeared. In due course they came to realise that their reward was to be either in the colonies or - as the various priests indicated in a rare moment of agreement - in the next world. Then, in 1868, my grandfather bought this barren island and began to change things.

(Summerisle indicates a painting of his grandfather on the wall)

Lord Summerisle: A distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, free-thinker. How formidably benevolent he seems. Essentially, the face of a man incredulous of all human good.

Howie: You're very cynical, my lord.

(Summerisle leads Howie into the dining room)

Lord Summerisle: What attracted my grandfather to the island, apart from the profuse source of wiry labour that it promised, was the unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm Gulf-Stream that surrounded it.

(Summerisle leads Howie outside)

Lord Summerisle: You see, his experiments had led him to believe it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he'd developed. So, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, he set to work. But of course, almost immediately, he met opposition from the fundamentalist priests who threw tons of his artificial fertiliser into the harbour on the grounds that if God had meant us to use it, He'd have provided it. My grandfather took exactly the same view of priests, and realised he had to find a way to be rid of them.

(He guides Howie into a greenhouse)

Lord Summerisle: The best way of accomplishing this, so it seemed to him, was to rouse the people from their apathy by giving them back their joyous old gods. So he encouraged, as it were, a retreat down memory lane backwards from Christianity, through the Ages of Reason and Belief, to the Age of Mysticism.

Howie: I ask again, sir, how was this possible?

Lord Summerisle: And I refer you again, sir, to the spiritual vision of the Celts. These islanders needed little urging. My grandfather simply told them about the The Stones - how they, in fact, formed an ancient temple - and that he, The Lord of the Manor, would make a sacrifice there every day to their old gods and goddesses, particularly those of fertility and fruitfulness. And as a result of this worship, the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance. For an atheist, grandfather had a singularly biblical turn of phrase, don't you think?

Howie: And they believed him?

Lord Summerisle: Well, of course, to begin with they worked for him because he fed them and clothed them but then, when the trees started fruiting, it became a very different matter. The priests told the people to withdraw their labour as they were "trucking with the devil". My father told the people that if they did so, he would leave and the island would become barren again as all the others. It will come as no surprise to you to hear that the old gods defeated the Christian God, and the ministers fled the island, never to return.

Howie: But how did the trees come to fruit, when so many other attempts to grow things on these islands have failed? Don't tell me your grandfather really worshipped the gods of fertility?

Lord Summerisle: Come, come, Sergeant. As I've already told you, he worshipped science. What he did, of course, was to develop new cultivars of hardy fruit suited to local conditions. Out here we have his original experimental orchard, much developed of course. Come and have a look.

(They walk into an orchard)

Lord Summerisle: You are looking at the parents of the Summerisle apple. Ashmead's Kernel, here on my left, was originally raised by a Doctor Ashmead of Gloucester in the year 1710. It is a grey-brown russet which is not particularly attractive in appearance but was originally selected on account of its age and excellent flavour - superior, many have judged, to the famous Cox's Orange Pippin. Here, see for yourself.

(Summerisle cuts open an apple and offers it to Howie, who tastes it)

Howie: Very sweet.

Lord Summerisle: As I say, it has a fine flavour, but its appearance is somewhat against it and it has a regrettable tendency to shrivel in refrigeration. In order to combat this latter disadvantage grandfather crossed it with St Athelstane's Pippin, an orange-flushed russet of great sturdiness and quite phenomenal shelf-life, discovered about 1830 by a Mr Talmage of St Ives in Cornwall. Receptivity to the beneficial effects of the Gulf-Stream, combined with the high resistance to salt water air currents, were bred in at this stage. Note the large, partly open eye with convergent to erect sepals set in a wide, shallow, unusually even basin.

(Summerisle cuts open another apple for Howie and, just as Howie is about to take it, he throws it to the ground)

Lord Summerisle: Don't bother to taste it, it's quite unremarkable, unlike those splendid deep purple-flushed Pauncefoot Pearmains which you can see over there and which were brought in as the last crossing, in order to correct appearance.

(He points out the tree in question and then suddenly produces a huge red apple which he cuts open)

Lord Summerisle: But save your appetite for this feller - the renowned Summerisle Famous.

(Howie takes a piece and eats it)

Howie: Extraordinary, my lord. Naturally I have had them before. Lord Summerisle: Yes, yes, of course you have.

(Summerisle bizarrely caresses the apple)

Lord Summerisle: Creamy white flesh, firm, full-flushed, blood-red bloomed skin with a truly noble, sweet, vinous flavour. It took years of my grandfather's and my father's life, but it was worth it, for on this we base our prosperity.

Howie: I didn't know your father was as keen a horticulturist, my lord.

Lord Summerisle: Oh yes. He went on developing and improving the apples and produced other fruit as well, notably Star of Summerisle, a remarkably heady pear, and Flame of Summerisle, an extremely juicy slightly sub-acid apricot of superb colour.

Howie: And did he too keep up the godless charades of your grandfather, sir?

Lord Summerisle: He became fascinated by the old ways, if that's what you mean. Indeed, he went further. What my grandfather started out of expediency, my father continued out of love. He brought me up the same way - to reverence the music and the drama and the rituals of the old gods. To love nature and to fear it and to rely on it and to appease it where necessary. He brought me up...

Howie: He brought you up to be a pagan!

Lord Summerisle: A heathen conceivably but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.

Howie: Lord Summerisle, I am interested in only one thing - the law. I must remind you, sir, that despite everything you've said, you are the subject of a Christian country. Now, sir, if I may have your permission to exhume the body of Rowan Morrison?

Lord Summerisle: I was under the impression I'd already given it to you.

(The pony and trap appear)

Lord Summerisle: Ah, there's your transport. It's been a great pleasure to meet a Christian copper!