heavy-seeded grass of the meadow and the bright
flower-borders. The priest said to Hugh suddenly, "I have often
wondered what your religion really is. Do you mind my speaking of it?
You seem to me exactly the sort of man who needs a strong, definite
faith to make him happy."

Hugh smiled and said, "Well, I am trying, not very successfully I fear,
to find out what I really do believe. I am trying to construct my
faith from the bottom; and I am anxious not to put into the foundations
any faulty stones, anything that I have not really tested."

"That is a very good thing to do," said the priest. "But how are you
setting to work?"

"Well," said Hugh, "I have never had time before to think my religion
out; I seem to have accepted all kinds of loose ideas and shaky
traditions. I want to arrive at some certainties; I try to apply a
severe intellectual test to everything: and the result is that I seem
obliged to discard one thing after another that I once believed."

"Perhaps," said the priest after a silence, "you are doing this too
drastically? Religion, it seems to me, has to be apprehended in a
different region, the mystical region, the region of intuition rather
than logic."

"Yes," said Hugh, "and intuitions are what one practically lives by;
but I think that they ought to be able to stand an intellectual test
too--for, after all, it is only intellectually that one can approach
them."

The priest shook his head at this, with a half-smile. And Hugh added,
"I wish you would give me a short sketch, in a few words if you can, of
how you reached your present position."

"That is not very easy," said the priest; "but I will try." He sate
for a moment silent, and then he said, "When one looks back into
antiquity, before the coming of Christ, one sees a general searching
after God in the world; the one idea that seems to run through all
religions, is the idea of sacrifice--a coarse and brutal idea
originally, perhaps; but the essence of it is that there is such a
thing as sinfulness, and such a thing as atonement; and that only
through death can life be reached. The Jews came nearest to the idea
of a personal, ruling God: and the sacrificial system is seen in its
fullest perfection with them. Then, in the wise counsels of God, it
came about that our Saviour was born a Jew. You will say that I beg
the question here; but approaching the subject intellectually, one
satisfies oneself that the purest and completes