lities, as redounding in any way to his credit, but as the gift
of God. He never fell into the error of imagining himself to have
achieved anything by his own ability or originality, but only as the
outcome of a desire implanted in him by God, Who had also furnished him
with the requisite perseverance to carry them out. He could not lay
his finger on any single quality, and say that he had of his own effort
improved it. And, in studying the lives and temperaments of others, he
did not think of their achievements as things which they had
accomplished; but rather as a sign of the fuller greatness of glory
which had been revealed to them. Life thus became to him a following
of light; he desired to know his own limitations, not because of the
interest of them, but as indicating to him more clearly what he might
undertake. It was a curious proof to him of the appropriateness of
each man's conditions and environment to his own particular nature,
when he reflected that no one whom he had ever known, however unhappy,
however faulty, would ever willingly have exchanged identities with any
one else. People desired to be rid of definite afflictions, definite
faults; they desired and envied particular qualities, particular
advantages that others possessed, but he could not imagine that any one
in the world would exchange any one else's identity for his own; one
would like perhaps to be in another's place, and this was generally
accompanied by a feeling that one would be able to make a much better
thing of another's sources of happiness and enjoyment, than the person
whose prosperity or ability one envied seemed to make. But he could
hardly conceive of any extremity of despair so great as to make a human
being willing to accept the lot of another in its entirety. Even one's
own faults and limitations were dear to one; the whole
thing--character, circumstances, relations with others, position--made
up to each person the most interesting problem in the world; and this
immense consciousness of separateness, even of essential superiority,
was perhaps the strongest argument that Hugh knew in favour of the
preservation of a personal identity after death.

Hugh then found himself in this position; he was no longer young, but
he seemed to himself to have retained the best part of youth, its
openness to new impressions, its zest, its sense of the momentousness
of occasions, its hopefulness; he found himself with duties which he
felt