e
valley, said Mr. Greatheart, "as well as ever I saw man in my life. I
never saw him better in all his pilgrimage than when he was in that
valley. Here he would lie down, embrace the ground, and kiss the very
flowers that grew in the valley. He would now be up every morning by
break of day tracing and walking to and fro in this valley."

Even so was it with Hugh. The place that he had feared was revealed to
him in a moment as his native air. Men do not lose all of a sudden
their temptations, and least of all those who have desired the prize
rather than the labour. But Hugh saw that the place where he set his
feet was holy. And as for his poor desires, he put them in the hands
of his Father, and rejoiced to find that they were faithfully and
serenely purged away.

He began to learn, but with what infinite difficulty, what entanglement
of delay, that the great mistake that he had made in his religious
life, was the limiting the direct influence of God to the pietistic,
the devotional region. All the tender and remote associations of
childhood had to be broken off and drawn away one by one, as one snaps
and pulls ivy down from a wall, before he could reach the thought he
was approaching; and how often, too, did the old conception surprise
him, interrupt him, entangle him again unawares! It seemed to Hugh,
reflecting on the problem, how strange a thing was the pageant of life
all about him, the march of invisible winds, the sweeping up of cloudy
vapours, the slow ruin of rocky places, the spilling of sweet streams;
and then, in a nearer region, the quaint arbitrary forms of living
creatures, their innate instincts, their intelligence, so profoundly
and delicately organised in one direction, so weak in another; and then
again the horrible threads of cruelty, of suffering, of death, inwoven
so relentlessly in the fabric of the world, the pitiless preying of
beast upon beast; and, further still, the subtle and pathetic wisdom of
the human spirit, sadly marking what is amiss, and setting itself so
feebly, so pitifully, to amend it; the shaping of communities, the
social moralities, so distinct from, so adverse to the morality of
nature--reflecting, as I say, on these things, Hugh became aware, with
a growing astonishment, that though mankind attributed, in an easy and
perfunctory way, all these phenomena to the creative hand of God, yet
instead of trying to form a conception of Him and His dark thoughts
from this le