ch
became painful, mainly, I think, because of Hugh's vehemence and what I
can only call violence. He reiterates his consciousness of his own
stupidity in an irritating way. The point was this. He maintained that
it was uncharitable to say, 'What a bad sermon So-and-so preached,' and
not uncharitable to say, 'Well, it is better than the sickening stuff
one generally hears'; uncharitable to say, 'What nasty soup this is!'
and not uncharitable to say, 'Well, it is better than the filthy pigwash
generally called soup.' I maintained that to say that, one must have
particular soups in one's mind; and that it was abusing more sermons and
soups, and abusing them more severely, than if one found fault with one
soup or one sermon.

"But it was all no use. He was very impatient if one joined issue at any
point, and said that he was interrupted. He dragged all sorts of red
herrings over the course, the opinions of Roman theologians, and
differences between mortal and venial sin, &c. I don't think he even
tried to apprehend my point of view, but went off into a long rigmarole
about distinguishing between the sin and the sinner; and said that it
was the sin one ought to blame, not the sinner. I maintained that the
consent of the sinner's will was of the essence of the sin, and that the
consent of the will of the sinner to what was not in itself wrong was
the essence of sin--_e.g._ not sinful to drink a glass of wine, but,
sinful if you had already had enough.

"It was rather disagreeable; but I get so used to arguing with absolute
frankness with people at Eton that I forget how unpleasant it may sound
to hearers--and it all subsided very quickly, like a boiling pot."

I remember, too, at a later date, that he produced some photographs of
groups of, I think, Indian converts at a Roman Catholic Mission, and
stated that anyone who had eyes to see could detect which of them had
been baptized by the expression of their faces. It was, of course, a
matter which it was impossible to bring to the test; but he would not
even admit that catechumens who were just about to be baptized could
share the same expression as those who actually had been baptized. This
was a good instance of his provocative style. But it was always done
like a game. He argued deftly, swiftly, and inconclusively, but the
fault generally lay in his premisses, which were often wild assumptions;
not in his subsequent argument, which was cogent, logical, and admirably
qui