st were the
good-natured and robust men with a generic interest in the young, who
could set a clean-minded, wholesome, and hearty example. But Hugh was
not of this type. His mind was full of mystical and poetical ideas of
religion, and his artistic nature was intent upon expressing them. He
was successful in a way, because he had by this time a great charm of
frankness and simplicity; he never had the least temptation to draw
social distinctions, but he desired to find people personally
interesting. He used to say afterwards that he did not really believe in
what involved a sort of social condescension, and, like another incisive
missioner, he thought that the giving up a few evenings a week by
wealthy and even fashionable young-men, however good-hearted and
earnest, to sharing the amusements of the boys of a parish, was only a
very uncomfortable way of showing the poor how the rich lived! There is
no sort of doubt about the usefulness and kindliness of such work, and
it obviously is one of the experiments which may tend to create social
sympathy: but Hugh came increasingly to believe that the way to lead
boys to religion was not through social gatherings, but by creating a
strong central nucleus of Christian instruction and worship; his heart
was certainly not in his work at this time, though there was much that
appealed to him particularly to his sense of humour, which was always
strongly developed.

There was an account he gave of a funeral he had to conduct in the early
days of his work, where, after a large congregation had assembled in the
church, the arrival of the coffin itself was delayed, and he was asked
to keep things going. He gave out hymns, he read collects, he made a
short address, and still the undertaker at the door shook his head. At
last he gave out a hymn that was not very well known, and found that the
organist had left his post, whereupon he sang it alone, as an
unsustained solo.

He told me, too, that after preaching written sermons, he resolved to
try an extempore one. He did so with much nervousness and hesitation.
The same evening St. Clair Donaldson said to him kindly but firmly that
preachers were of two kinds--the kind that could write a fairly coherent
discourse and deliver it more or less impressively, and the kind that
might venture, after careful preparation, to speak extempore; and that
he felt bound to tell Hugh that he belonged undoubtedly to the first
kind. This was curious, becau