love and laughter, pathos and sorrow, were alike sweet.
Instead of approaching life with a sense of its gravity, its
heinousness, its complexity, timid of joy and emotion and delight,
practising sadness and solemnity, Plato and his followers began at the
other end, and with an irrepressible optimism believed that joy was
conquering and not being conquered, that light was in the ascendant,
rippling outwards and onwards. And then the supreme figure of all,
whether imaginary or not mattered little, Socrates himself, with what a
joyful soberness and gravity did he move forward through experience,
never losing his balance, but serenely judging all, till the moment
came for him to enter behind the dark veil of death; and this he did
with the same imperturbable good-humour, neither lingering or hasting,
but with a tranquil confidence that life was beginning rather than
ending.

And then Hugh saw in a flash that the essence of the Gospel itself was
like that. When he read the sacred record in the light of Plato, it
seemed to him as if it must in some subtle way be pervaded by the same
bright intuitions as those which lit up the Greek mind. It seemed to
Hugh a strange and bewildering thing that the pure message of
simplicity and love, with its tender waiting upon God, its delight in
flowers and hills, its love of great ideas, its rich poetry, its
perfect art, had taken on the gloomy metaphysical tinge that St. Paul,
with all his genius, had contrived to communicate to it. Surely it was
intolerable to believe that all those subtle notions of sacrificial
satisfaction, of justification, of substitution, had ever crossed the
Saviour's mind at all. In a sense He fulfilled the law and the
prophets, for they had laid down, in grief and doubt, a harsh code of
morality, because they saw no other way of leavening the conscience of
the world. But the Saviour, at least in the simple records, had not
trafficked in such thoughts; he had but shown the significance of the
primary emotions, had taught humanity that it was free as air, dear to
the heart of God, heir of a goodly inheritance of love and care. St.
Paul was a man of burning ardour, but had he not made the mistake of
trying to lend too intellectual, too erudite, too complicated a colour
to it all? The essence of the Gospel seemed to be that man should not
be bound by the tradition of men; but St. Paul had been so intent upon
drawing in those to whom tradition was dear, that i