d neither linger nor make haste: he would not catch at the past
as containing a lost and faded sweetness; neither would he anticipate,
so far as he could help it, the closing of the windows of the soul.

XXV

A Narrow Path--A Letter--Asceticism--The Narrow Soul

One morning when he was sitting in his rooms at Cambridge, Hugh heard a
knock at the door; there presently entered a clergyman, whom at first
sight Hugh thought to be a stranger, but whom he almost immediately
recognised as an old school-fellow, called Ralph Maitland, whom he had
not seen for more than twenty years. Maitland had been an idle,
good-humoured boy, full of ideas, a great reader and a voluble talker.
Hugh had never known him particularly well; but he remembered to have
heard that Maitland had fallen under religious impulses at Oxford, had
become serious, had been ordained, and had eventually become a devoted
and hard-working clergyman in a northern manufacturing town. He had
been lately threatened with a break-down in health, and had been
ordered abroad; he had come to Cambridge to see some friends, and
hearing that Hugh was in residence there, had called upon him. Hugh
was very much interested to see him, and gradually began to discern the
smooth-faced boy he had known, under the worn and hard-featured mask of
the priest. They spent most of that day together, and went out for a
long walk. Hugh thought he perceived a touch of fanaticism about
Maitland, who found it difficult to talk except on matters connected
with his parish. But eventually he began to talk of the religious
life, and Hugh gradually perceived that Maitland held a very ardent and
almost fierce view of the priestly vocation; he drew a picture of the
joys of mortification and self-denial, which impressed Hugh, partly
because of its intensity, and partly also from an uneasy sense of
strain and self-consciousness which it gave him. Maitland's idea
seemed to be that all impulses, except the religious impulse in its
narrowest sense, needed to be sternly repressed; that the highest life
was a severe detachment from all earthly things; that the Christian
pilgrim marched along a very narrow way, bristling with pitfalls both
of opinion and practice; that the way was defined, hazily by Scripture
and precisely by the Church, along which the believer must advance;
"Few there be that find it!" said Maitland, with a kind of menacing
joy. He was full of the errors of other sects and