ad been bestowed upon one without any choice
of one's own? Was one bound to overwhelm one's companions with
abundance of pious suggestions, to rebuke vice, to rejoice in the
disasters that befell the ungodly? It seemed a hopeless business from
first to last; of course, if one had Bunyan's simple faith, if one
could believe that at a certain moment, on the Hill of Calvary, a thing
had been accomplished which had in an instant changed the whole scheme
of the world; that a wrathful Creator, possessed hitherto by a fierce
and vindictive anger with the frail creatures whom he moulded by
thousands from the clay, was in an instant converted into a tender and
compassionate father, his thirst for vengeance satisfied, it would be
plain enough; but Hugh felt in the depths of his heart that whatever
else might be true, that was not; or at least if it had any semblance
of truth in it, it simply consummated a mystery so appalling that one
must merely resign all hope and courage.

What could one make of a Gospel that could lend any colour to a theory
such as this? Was it the fault of the Gospel, or was the error rooted
in human nature, a melancholy misinterpretation of a high truth? It
seemed to Hugh that the mistake lay there; it seemed to arise from the
acceptance by the Puritans of the Bible as all one book, and by the
deliberate extrusion of the human element from it. Christ, in the
Gospel, seemed to teach, so far as Hugh could understand, not that He
had effected any change in the nature or disposition of God, but that
He had always been a Father of men, full of infinite compassion and
love; the miracle of Christ's life was the showing how a Divine spirit,
bound by all the sad limitations of mortality, could yet lead a life of
inner peace and joy, a life of perfect trust and simplicity. The
clouding of the pure Gospel came from the vehement breath of his
interpreters. His later interpreters were men in whose minds was
instinctively implanted the old harsh doctrine of man's perverse
corruption, and the dark severity of God's justice; and thus the
Puritans were misled, because they laid an equal stress upon the whole
of the Bible, and spoke of it as all of equal and Divine authority.
Instead of rejecting, as faulty human conceptions, what did not
harmonise with the purer Gospel light, they sought and found in the
Gospel a confirmation of the older human view. They treated the whole
collection of books as all equally true, a