ppen that men are punished for wilfulness of
choice by missing great opportunities. A nature which cannot compromise
anything, cannot ignore details, cannot work with others, is sometimes
condemned to a fruitless isolation. But it would be wrong to disregard
the fact that circumstances more than once came to Hugh's aid; I see
very clearly how he was, so to speak, headed off, as by some Fatherly
purpose, from wasting his life in ineffectual ways. Probably he might
have worked on at the Eton Mission, might have lost heart and vigour,
might never have discovered his real powers, if he had not been rescued.
His illness at this juncture cut the knot for him; and then followed a
time of travel in Egypt, in the Holy Land, which revived again his sense
of beauty and width and proportion.

And then followed his Kemsing curacy; I have a letter written to me from
Kemsing in his first weeks there, in which he describes it as a paradise
and says that, so far as he can see, it is exactly the life he most
desires, and that he hopes to spend the rest of his days there.

But now I feel that he took a very real step forward. The danger was
that he would adopt a dilettante life. He had still not discovered his
powers of expression, which developed late. He was only just beginning
to preach with effect, and his literary power was practically
undeveloped. He might have chosen to live a harmless, quiet,
beauty-loving life, kindly and guileless, in a sort of religious
aestheticism; though the vivid desire for movement and even excitement
that characterised his later life would perhaps have in any case
developed.

But something stronger and sterner awoke in him. I believe that it was
exactly because the cup, mixed to his taste, was handed to him that he
was able to see that there was nothing that was invigorating about the
potion. It was not the community life primarily which drew him to
Mirfield; it was partly that his power of speech awoke, and more
strongly still the idea of self-discipline.

And so he went to Mirfield, and then all his powers came with a rush in
that studious, sympathetic, and ascetic atmosphere. He was in his
twenty-eighth year. He began by finding that he could preach with real
force and power, and two years later, when he wrote _The Light
Invisible_, he also discovered his gift of writing; while as a little
recreation, he took up drawing, and produced a series of sketches, full
of humour and delicacy, drawn with a f