people's weaknesses, or
with such a talent for putting them in the most disagreeable light. Hugh
once nearly got into serious trouble; a small boy in the set was
remorselessly and disgracefully bullied; it came out, and Hugh was
involved--I remember that Dr. Warre spoke to me about it with much
concern--but a searching investigation revealed that Hugh had really had
nothing to do with it, and the victim of the bullying spoke insistently
in Hugh's favour.

Hugh describes how the facts became known in the holidays, and how my
father in his extreme indignation at what he supposed to be proved, so
paralysed Hugh that he had no opportunity of clearing himself. But
anyone who had ever known Hugh would have felt that it was the last
thing he would have done. He was tenacious enough of his own rights, and
argumentative enough; but he never had the faintest touch of the
savagery that amuses itself at the sight of another's sufferings. "I
hate cruelty more than anything in the whole world," he wrote later;
"the existence of it is the only thing which reconciles my conscience to
the necessity of Hell."

Hugh speaks in his book, _The Confession of a Convert_, about the
extremely negative character of his religious impressions at school. I
think it is wholly accurate. Living as we did in an ecclesiastical
household, and with a father who took singular delight in ceremonial and
liturgical devotion, I think that religion did impress itself rather too
much as a matter of solemn and dignified occupation than as a matter of
feeling and conduct. It was not that my father ever forgot the latter;
indeed, behind his love for symbolical worship lay a passionate and
almost Puritan evangelicalism. But he did not speak easily and openly of
spiritual experience. I was myself profoundly attracted as a boy by the
aesthetic side of religion, and loved its solemnities with all my heart;
but it was not till I made friends with Bishop Wilkinson at the age of
seventeen that I had any idea of spiritual religion and the practice of
friendship with God. Certainly Hugh missed it, in spite of very loving
and earnest talks and deeply touching letters from my father on the
subject. I suppose that there must come for most people a spiritual
awakening; and until that happens, all talk of emotional religion and
the love of God is a thing submissively accepted, and simply not
understood or realised as an actual thing.

Hugh was not at Eton very long--not more