associates!

He was ordained deacon in 1894 at Addington, or rather in Croydon parish
church, by my father, whose joy in admitting his beloved son to the
Anglican ministry was very great indeed.

Before the ordination Hugh decided to go into solitary retreat. He took
two rooms in the lodge-cottage of Burton Park, two or three miles out
of Lincoln. I suppose he selected Lincoln as a scene endeared to him by
childish memories.

He divided the day up for prayer, meditation, and solitary walks, and
often went in to service in the cathedral. He says that he was in a
state of tense excitement, and the solitude and introspection had an
alarmingly depressing effect upon him. He says that the result of this
was an appalling mental agony: "It seemed to me after a day or two that
there was no truth in religion, that Jesus Christ was not God, that the
whole of life was an empty sham, and that I was, if not the chiefest of
sinners, at any rate the most monumental of fools." He went to the
Advent services feeling, he says, like a soul in hell. But matters
mended after that, and the ordination itself seemed to him a true
consecration. He read the Gospel, and he remembered gratefully the
sermon of Canon Mason, my father's beloved friend and chaplain.

VIII

THE ETON MISSION

There were many reasons why Hugh should begin his clerical work at
Hackney Wick, though I suspect it was mainly my father's choice. It was
a large, uniformly poor district, which had been adopted by Eton in
about 1880 as the scene of its Mission. There were certain disadvantages
attending the choice of that particular district. The real _raison
d'etre_ of a School Mission is educative rather than philanthropic, in
order to bring boys into touch with social problems, and to give them
some idea that the way of the world is not the way of a prosperous and
sheltered home. It is open to doubt whether it is possible to touch
boys' hearts and sympathies much except by linking a School Mission on
to some institution for the care of boys--an orphan school or a
training ship. Only the most sensitive are shocked and distressed by the
sight of hard conditions of life it all, and as a rule boys have an
extraordinarily unimaginative way of taking things as they see them, and
not thinking much or anxiously about mending them.

In any case the one aim ought to be to give boys a personal interest in
such problems, and put them in personal touch with them. But the E