ndly entertainment; and sometimes from the
hill-tops of the land of Beulah, there seemed indeed to be a radiant
vision, dim-descried, of towers and pearly gates, a high citadel of
heavenly peace. But how little one learned even of one's own strength
and weakness! The one instinct, which might itself be a delusion, was
that one had a choice in the matter, a will, a power to act or to
refrain from acting; there was a deep-seated impulse to fare onward, to
hope, to struggle. It was useless to blame the mysterious conditions
of the journey, for they were certainly there. The only faith that was
possible was the belief that the truth was somehow larger, nobler, more
beautiful than one could conceive it to be; and there was a
restfulness, when one apprehended what seemed so dark at first, in the
knowledge that one's character and environment alike were not one's own
choice; the only way was to keep one's eye fixed upon the furthest
hope, and never to cease imploring the Power that made us what we were,
to give us not abundant, but sufficient, strength, and to guide us into
acting, so far as we had power to act, as He willed.

This then became for Hugh his practical religion; to commit himself
unceasingly, in joy and trouble alike, in the smallest matters, to the
Eternal will; until he grew to feel that if there were anything true in
the world, it was the power of that perpetual surrender. It was
surprising to him to find how anxiety melted into tranquillity, if one
could but do that. Not only, he learnt, must great decisions be laid
before God, but the smallest acts of daily life. How often one felt
the harassing weight of small duties, the distasteful business, the
anxious conversation, the dreary occasion; fatigue, disappointment,
care, uncertainty, timidity! If one could but put the matter into the
hands of God, instead of rehearsing and calculating and anticipating,
what a peace flowed into one's spirit! Difficulties melted away like
mist before it. The business was tranquilly accomplished; the
interview that one dreaded provided its own obvious solution, vexations
were healed, troubles were suddenly revealed as marvellously
unimportant. One blundered still, went perversely wrong, yielded
falteringly to an impulse knowing it to be evil; but even such events
had a wholesome humiliation about them which brought healing with it.
The essence of the whole situation was to have in one's heart the
romance of pilgrimag