t it was a working theory that seemed to contain a large
element of truth. Sometimes a technically religious person would say
that the world was created for the glory of God, a phrase which filled
Hugh with a sense of bewildered disgust. It either implied that God
demanded recognition, or that it was all done in a species of
intolerable pride of heart, as a mere exhibition of power. That God
should yield to a desire for display seemed to Hugh entirely
inconsistent with a belief in His awful supremacy.

It seemed to him rather that God must have abundant cause to be
dissatisfied with the world as it was, but that at the same time He
must have some overpoweringly just reason for acquiescing for a time in
its imperfection. How else could one pray, or aspire, or hope at all?

But the sight of human beings, such as Hugh had before his eyes that
day, filled him with perplexity. One was only possessed by an intense
desire that they might be different from what they were. Hugh indeed
knew that he himself had sore need to be different from what he was.
But the qualities that lay behind the motions and speech of these
lads--inconsiderateness, indifference to others, vanity,
grossness--were the things that he had always been endeavouring to
suppress and eradicate in himself; they were the things that were
detested by poets, saints, and all chivalrous and generous souls.

Sometimes indeed one was confronted, in the world of men, by a
perfectly sincere, noble, quiet, gentle, loving personality; and then
one perceived, as in a gracious portrait, what humanity could hope to
aspire to. But on the other hand Hugh had seen, in the pages of a
periodical, an attempt to arrive at a typical human face, by
photographing a number of individuals upon the same plate; and what a
blurred, dim, uncomfortable personality seemed to peer forth! To
worship humanity seemed to Hugh like trying to worship this
concentrated average; and he had little hope that, if an absolutely
average man were constructed, every single living individual
contributing his characteristics to the result, the result would be
edifying, encouraging, or inspiring. Hugh feared that the type would
but sink the most tolerant philosopher in a sense of irreclaimable
depression. And yet if, guided by prejudice and preference, one made
up a figure that one could wholly admire, how untrue to nature it would
be, how different from the figure that other human beings would conse