lly and theoretically,
but it may be said that the methods of the Church have at least been
national, in the sense that they have suited the national temperament,
which is independent and averse to coercive discipline. It may, I
believe, be truly asserted that in England any Church which attempted
any inquisition into the precise doctrine held by its lay members would
lose adherents in large numbers. Of late the influence of the English
Church has been mainly exerted in the cause of social reform, and her
tendency is more and more to condone divergences of doctrine and opinion
in the case of her ministers when they are accompanied by spiritual
fervour and practical activity. The result has certainly been to pacify
the intellectual revolt against religious opinion which was in full
progress some forty years ago. When I myself was at the university some
thirty years ago, the attitude of pronounced intellectuals against
religious opinion was contemptuous and even derisive. That is not the
case now. The instinct for religion is recognised as a vital part of the
human mind, and though intellectual young men are apt at times to tilt
against the travesty of orthodoxy which they propound for their own
satisfaction, there is a far deeper and wider tolerance and even
sympathy for every form of religious belief. Religion is recognised as a
matter of personal preference, and the agnostic creed has lost much of
its aggressive definiteness.

It appears to me that, so far as I can measure the movement of my
brother's mind, when he decided first to take Orders his religion was of
a mystical and aesthetic kind; and I do not think that there is any
evidence that he really examined the scientific and agnostic position at
all. His heart and his sense of beauty were already engaged, and life
without religion would have scented an impossibility to him. When he
took Orders, his experience was threefold. At the Eton Mission he was
confronted by an Anglicanism of a devout and simple kind, which
concentrated itself almost entirely on the social aspect of
Christianity, on the love of God and the brotherhood of man. The object
of the workers there was to create comradeship, and to meet the problems
of conduct which arose by a faith in the cleansing and uplifting power
of God. Brotherly love was its first aim.

I do not think that Hugh had ever any real interest in social reform, in
politics, in causes, in the institutions which aim at the consoli