ll equally important, and
thus they were bent on seeing that the Gospel should fulfil rather than
supersede the law. This was in part the spirit of St. Paul; and thus
the Puritan Gospel was the Gospel of St. Paul rather than the Gospel of
the Saviour. To Hugh the Old Testament was a very wonderful thing,
wonderful because it showed the rise of a spirit of personal
righteousness in the world, a spirit that worshipped morality with the
same vehemence and enthusiasm as that with which the Greeks worshipped
beauty. And thus because they had loved righteousness and hated
iniquity, there had been given to their imperious nation the reward
that the humanity of their race should be chosen to enshrine the Divine
Spirit of the Saviour.

Hugh felt that the weakness of the ecclesiastical position was its
obstinate refusal to admit the possibilities of future development. A
century ago, a man who ventured to hint that the story of Noah's Ark
might not be historically and exactly true would have been pronounced a
dangerous heretic. Now no one was required to affirm his belief in it.
Nowadays the belief in the miraculous element even of the New Testament
was undeniably weakening. Yet the orthodox believer still pronounced a
Christian unsound who doubted it.

Here lay the insecurity of the orthodox champions. They stumbled on,
fully accepting, when they could not help themselves, the progressive
developments of thought, yet loudly condemning any one who was a little
further ahead upon the road, until they had caught him up.

Still, the old Puritan poet, for all his over-preciseness of
definition, all his elaborate scheme of imputed righteousness, all his
dreary metaphysic, had yet laid his hand upon the essential truth.
Life was indeed a pilgrimage; and as the new law, the law of science,
was investigated and explored, it seemed hardly less arbitrary, hardly
more loving than the old. It was a scheme of infinite delay; no ardent
hopes, no burning conceptions of justice and truth could hasten or
retard the working of the inflexible law, which blessed without
reference to goodness, and punished without reference to morality. No
one could escape by righteousness, no man could plead his innocence or
his ignorance. One was surrounded by inexplicable terrors, one's path
was set with gins and snares. Here the smoke and the flame burst
forth, or the hobgoblins roared in concert; here was a vale of peace,
or a house of grave and ki