eep
two or three engagements in the day, and even about these there was
great elasticity. The independence, the liberty, the kindliness of it
all, came home to him with immense charm. And then, too, the city full
of mediaeval palaces, the quiet dignity, the incomparable beauty of
everything, gave him a deep though partly unconscious satisfaction.
But for the first year he was merely a big schoolboy in mind. The real
change in his mental history dated from his election to a small society
which met weekly, where a paper was read, and a free discussion
followed. Up to this time Hugh's religion had been of a purely
orthodox and sensuous description. He had grown up in an
ecclesiastical atmosphere, and the ritual of Church Services, the
music, the ceremonial, had been all attractive to him. As for the
dogmatic side, he had believed it unquestioningly, just as he had
believed in the history or the science that had been taught him. But
in this society he met young men--and older men too, for several of the
Dons were members--who were rationalists, materialists, and definitely
sceptical. It dawned on his mind for the first time that, while all
other sciences were of a deductive kind, endeavouring to approach
principles from the observation and classification of phenomena, from
the scrutiny of evidence, that theology was a science based on
intuitions, and dependent on assumptions which it was impossible to
test scientifically. The first effect of this was to develop a great
loyalty to his traditions, and almost the first hard thinking he had
ever done was in the direction of attempting to defend his faith on
scientific principles. But the attempt proved fruitless; one by one
his cherished convictions were washed away, though he never owned it,
not even to himself. He was regarded as a model of orthodoxy. He made
friends with a young Fellow of his college, who was an advanced
free-thinker, and set himself to enlighten the undergraduate, whose
instinctive sympathy gave him a charm for older men, of which he was
entirely unconscious. They had many serious talks on the subject; and
his friend employed a kind of gentle irony in undermining as far as he
could the foundations of what seemed to him so irrational a state of
mind. One particular conversation Hugh remembered as vividly as he
remembered anything. He and his friend had been sitting, one hot June
day, in the college garden, then arrayed in all its mid-summer pom