piring thoughts, generous ideals. But he had
formalised Christianity for all that; he had linked it closely to the
Judaic system; he was ultimately responsible for Puritanism; that is to
say, it was his influence more than any other that had given the Jewish
scriptures their weight in the Christian scheme. It seemed to Hugh to
be a terrible calamity that had reserved, so to speak, a place in the
chariot of Christ for the Jewish dispensation; it was the firm belief
in the vital inspiration of the Jewish scriptures that had produced
that harsh and grim type of Christianity so dear to the Puritan heart.
With the exception of certain of the Psalms, certain portions of Job
and of the prophets, there seemed to Hugh to be little in the Old
Testament that did not merely hamper and encumber the religion of
Christ. What endless and inextricable difficulties arose from trying
to harmonise the conception of the Father as preached by Christ, with
the conception of the vindictive, wrathful, national, local Deity of
the Old Testament. How little countenance did Christ ever give to that
idea! He did not even think of the Temple as a house of sacrifice, but
as a house of prayer! How seldom he alluded to the national history!
How human and temporary a character He gave to the law of Moses! How
constantly He appealed to personal rather than to national aspirations!
How he seemed to insist upon the fact that every man must make his
religion out of the simplest elements of moral consciousness! How
often he appealed to the poetry of symbols rather than to the
effectiveness of ceremony! How little claim he laid, at least in the
Synoptic Gospels, to any divinity, and then rather in virtue of his
perfect humanity! He called himself the Son of Man; in the only
recorded prayer He gave to His disciples, there was no hint that prayer
should be directed to Himself; it was all centred upon the Father.

Here again the Aristotelian method, the delight in analysis, the
natural human desire to make truth precise and complete, had intruded
itself. What was the Athanasian creed but an Aristotelian formula,
making a hard dogma out of a dim mystery? The outcome of it all for
Hugh was the resolution that for himself, at all events, his business
was to disregard the temptation to formularise his position. With
one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more
than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to