he talk of a friend who had been staying
with him, a man of lofty socialistic ideals, who spoke much and
eloquently of the worship of humanity. Reflecting upon the phrase,
Hugh felt that he could attach no sort of meaning to it. What was the
humanity that one was to worship? Was it the glory of the average man?
was it the memory of the past? was it the possibility of the future?
It seemed to Hugh to be an impossible abstraction. He had said as much
to his friend, who had replied that it was like the worship of Nature,
which Hugh himself practised. But Hugh replied that he did not worship
Nature at all. There was much in Nature that he did not understand,
much that he feared and disliked. There was an abundance of beautiful
things in Nature, beautiful objects, beautiful moments; but it was the
beautiful in Nature that he worshipped, not Nature as a whole; there
was enough, he said, in Nature that was desirable, to give him a kind
of hope that there was some high and beautiful thought behind it; at
which his friend became eloquent, veiling, Hugh thought, a great
confusion of mind behind a liberal use of rhetoric, and spoke of
suffering, toiling, sorrowing, onward-looking humanity, its impassioned
relations, its great wistful heart. Hugh again, could not understand
him; he thought that his friend had formed some exotic and fanciful
conception, arrived at by subtracting from humanity all that was not
pathetic and solemn and dignified, and then fusing the residue into a
sort of corporeal entity. He did not see any truth or reality about
the conception. It seemed to him as unreal as though one had
personified the Great Western Railway into a sort of gigantic form,
striding westward, covered with packages of merchandise, and carrying a
typical human being, as St. Christopher carried the sacred child across
the flood. It was pure Anthropomorphism.

Hugh could understand a personal relation, even the passionate
idealisation of an individual. He could conceive of the latter as
giving one a higher idea of the possibilities of the human race: but to
lump a vast and complex system together, to concentrate unknown races,
dead and living, negroes, Chinamen, Homeric heroes and palaeolithic
men, into one definite conception, and to worship it, seemed to Hugh an
almost grotesque thought. He could conceive of a species of Pantheism,
in which the object of one's awe and worship was the vast force
underlying all existing things