ine pen and tinted with coloured
chalk, which are at all events enough to show what he could have done in
this direction.

XX

ATTAINMENT

And then Hugh made the great change of his life, and, as a Catholic,
found his dreams realized and his hopes fulfilled. He found, indeed, the
life which moves and breathes inside of every faithful creed, the power
which supplements weakness and represses distraction, the motive for
glad sacrifice and happy obedience. I can say this thankfully enough,
though in many ways I confess to being at the opposite pole of religious
thought. He found relief from decision and rest from conflict. He found
sympathy and confidence, a sense of corporate union, and above all a
mystical and symbolical devotion embodied in a great and ancient
tradition, which was visibly and audibly there with a movement like a
great tide, instead of a scheme of worship which had, he thought, in
the Anglican Church, to be eclectically constructed by a group or a
circle. Every part of his nature was fed and satisfied; and then, too,
he found in the Roman Catholic community in England that sort of eager
freemasonry which comes of the desire to champion a cause that has won a
place for itself, and influence and respect, but which is yet so much
opposed to national tendencies as to quicken the sense of active
endeavour and eager expectation.

After his quiet period of study and thought in Rome and at Llandaff
House, came the time when he was attached to the Roman Catholic Church
in Cambridge; and this, though not congenial to him, gave him an insight
into methods and conditions; and all the while his own forces and
qualities were learning how to concentrate and express themselves. He
learned to write, he learned to teach, to preach, to speak, to be his
own natural self, with all his delicate and ingenuous charm, in the
presence of a great audience; so that when at last his opportunity came
to free himself from official and formal work, he was able to throw all
his trained faculties into the work which he had at heart. Moreover, he
found in direction and confession, and in careful discussion with
inquirers, and in sympathetic aid given to those in trouble, many of the
secret sorrows, hopes, and emotions of the human heart, so that his
public work was enforced and sustained by his ever-increasing range of
private experience.

He never, however, took whole-heartedly to pastoral work. He said
frankly that he "sp