nd comfort, and who cared neither for humanity
nor for beauty, except in so far as they ministered to their own
convenience. Hugh did not sympathise with such people, and indeed he
found it hard to conceive, if what philosophers and priests predicated
of the purpose of God was true, how such people came into being. The
mistake, the generous mistake, that Sheldon made, was to think that
humanity was righting itself. It was perhaps being righted, but ah,
how slowly! The error was to believe that one's theories were the
right ones. It was all far larger, vaster, more mysterious than that.
Hugh knew that the element in nature and the world to which he himself
responded most eagerly was the element of beauty. The existence of
beauty, the appeal it made to the human spirit, seemed to him the most
hopeful thing in the world. But he could not be sure that the
salvation of the world lay there. Meantime, while he felt the appeal,
it was his duty to tell it out among the heathen, just as it was
Sheldon's duty to preach the corporateness of humanity; but Hugh
believed that the truth lay with neither, but that both these instincts
were but as hues of a prism, that went to the making up of the pure
white light. They were rather disintegrations of some central truth,
component elements of it rather than the truth itself. They were not
in the least inconsistent with each other, though they differed
exceedingly; and so he determined to follow his own path as faithfully
as he could, and not, in response to strident cries of justice and
truth, and still less in deference to taunts of selfishness and
epithets of shame, to lend a timorous hand to a work in the value of
which he indeed sincerely believed, but which he did not believe to be
his own work. The tide was indeed rolling in, and the breakers
plunging on the beach; but so far as helping it on went, it seemed to
him to matter little whether you sat and watched it with awe and
amazement, with rapture and even with terror, or whether you ran to and
fro, as Sheldon seemed to him to be doing, busying himself in digging
little channels in the sand, that the roaring sea, with the wind at its
back, might foam a little higher thus upon the shore.

XXIX

Bees--A Patient Learner

The morning sun fell brightly on Hugh's breakfast-table; and a
honeycomb that stood there, its little cells stored with translucent
sweetness, fragrant with the pure breath of many flowers, spark