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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
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