gible and gigantic handwriting, which revealed so
impenetrable, so imperturbable a will, they sought to trace His
influence only in some bewildered region of the human spirit, the
struggles of inherited conscience, the patient charity of men, that
would seek to knot up the loose ends which, in their pathetic belief in
self-developed principles, they could not help imagining that the Maker
of all had left unravelled and untied.

To believe in God and yet to seek to improve upon His ways! what a
strange and incredible contradiction! And yet what made the position a
more bewildering one still was the certainty that these very inner
impulses to amend, to improve, came from God as clearly as the very
evils that He permitted and indeed originated. What was the exit from
this intolerable tangle of thought? Law indeed seemed absolute, law on
a scale at once so colossal and so minute, law that sent the planets
whirling through space round the central sun--and yet dwelt, cell
within cell, in the heart of the smallest pebble that rolled upon the
sea-beach. And side by side with this law ran a thwarting force, an
impulse to make man do blindly the very things that led inevitably to
destruction, to endow him with an intense desire of life, and yet to
leave him ignorant of the laws that hurried him, reluctant and amazed,
to death. Hugh grew to feel that some compromise was necessary; that
to live in the natural impulses alone, or in the developed impulses
alone, was an impossibility. A hundred voices called him, a hundred
hands beckoned or waved him back; nature prompted one thing, reason
another, association another, piety another; and yet each was in a
sense the calling of God. The saddest thing was that to obey any of
the voices brought no peace or tranquillity; he obeyed piety, and
nature continued fiercely to prompt the opposite; he obeyed
association, and reason mocked his choice. He became aware that in
order to triumph over these manifold and uneasy contradictions, a
certain tranquillity of mind must be acquired; he found that to a large
extent he must trust intuition, which could at all events settle, if it
could not reconcile, conflicting claims; even when reason indicated a
choice of paths, the voice of the soul cried out clearly the way that
he must choose; the obedience to intuition was generally approved by
experience, until Hugh began to see, at last, that it was the safest
guide of all, and that thus we came n