communions. The
Roman doctrine was over-developed, not primitive enough; the Protestant
nonconformists were neglectful of ecclesiastical ordinances. The only
people, it seemed, who were in the right path were a small band of
rather rigid Anglicans, who appeared to Maitland to be the precise type
of humanity that Christ had desired to develop.

As he spoke, his eye became bright, his lip intolerant, and Hugh was
haunted by the text, "The zeal of Thine house hath ever eaten me."
Maitland seemed to be literally devoured by an idea, which, like the
fox in the old story of the Spartan boy, appeared to prey on his
vitals. Hugh became gradually nettled by the argument, but he was no
match for Maitland in scholastic disputation. Maitland felled his
arguments with an armoury of texts, which he used like cudgels. Hugh
at last said that what he thought was the weak point in Maitland's
argument was this--that in every sect and every church there were
certainly people who held with the same inflexible determination to the
belief that they were absolutely in the right, and had unique
possession of the exact faith delivered to the saints; and that each of
these persons would be able to justify themselves by a rigid
application of texts. Hugh said that it seemed to him to be
practically certain that no one of them was infallibly in the right,
and that the truth probably lay in certain wide religious ideas which
underlay all forms of Christian faith. Maitland rejected this with
scorn as a dangerous and nebulous kind of religion--"nerveless and
flabby, without bone or sinew." They then diverged on to a wider
ground, and Hugh tried to defend his theory that God called souls to
Himself by an infinite variety of appeal, and that the contest was not
between orthodoxy on the one hand and heterodoxy on the other, but
between pure and unselfish emotion on the one hand and hard and
self-centred materialism on the other. To this Maitland replied by
saying that such vagueness was one of the darkest temptations that
beset cultured and intellectual people, and that the duty of a
Christian was to follow precise and accurate religious truth, as
revealed in Scripture and interpreted by the Church, however much
reason and indolence revolted from the conclusions he was forced to
draw. They parted, however, in a very friendly way, and pledged
themselves to meet again and continue their discussion on Maitland's
return.

A few days afterwards