ing, sincere, honest, affectionate; there was, it was
true, an absence of intellectual and artistic appeal in them, though
there were parables, like the parable of the talents, which seemed to
point to the duty of exercising faithfully a diversity of gifts; but it
was not, Hugh thought, due to a want of sympathy with the things of the
mind, but seemed to arise from an intense and burning desire to prove
that the secret lay rather in one's relations to humanity, and even to
nature, than in one's intellectual processes and conceptions.

And then as to the point that Christ enforced upon men a fierce ideal
of mortification and self-denial, Hugh could see no trace of it.
Christ did not turn his back upon the world; He loved and enjoyed
beautiful sights and sounds, such as birds and flowers. He did indeed
clearly assert that one must not be at the mercy of material
conditions, and that it was the privilege of man to live among the
things of the soul. It was the path of simplicity, not the path of
asceticism, that was indicated. Christ seemed to Hugh to be entirely
preoccupied with one idea--that love was the strongest and most
beautiful thing in the world; and that if one recognised that love
alone could be victorious over evil and pain and death, one might be
certain that its source and origin lay deepest of all in the vast heart
of God, however sadly and strangely that seemed to be contradicted by
actual experience. And so Hugh felt that whatever befell him, he would
not be persuaded to desert the broad highway of love and beauty and
truth, for the narrow and muddy alley of ecclesiastical opinion. The
kingdom of God seemed to him to have suffered more disastrous violence
from the hands of bigoted ecclesiastics than it had ever suffered from
the onslaughts of the world. Ecclesiastics polluted the crystal stream
at its very source by confining the river of life to a small and
crooked channel. Hugh prayed with all his heart that he might escape
from any system that led him to judge others harshly, to condemn their
beliefs, to define their errors. That seemed to him to be the one
spirit against which the Saviour had uttered denunciations of an almost
appalling sternness. The Lord's Prayer and not the Athanasian Creed
seemed to him to sum up the essential spirit of Christ. He believed
himself to be following the will of God in yielding to every emotional
impulse that made life more sacred, more beautiful, more tender,