hus their sense of the unknown.

But there has always been a natural terror in the religious mind of
laying too much stress on this, or of seeming to encourage too much an
aesthetic emotion. If the first business of religion is to purify life,
there will always be a suspicion of idolatry about ritual, a fear of
substituting a vague desire for beauty for a practical devotion to right
conduct.

Hugh wrote to me some years later what he felt about it all:

"... Liturgy, to my mind, is nothing more than a very fine and
splendid art, conveying things, to people who possess the
liturgical faculty, in an extraordinarily dramatic and vivid way.
I further believe that this is an art which has been gradually
brought nearer and nearer perfection by being tested and developed
through nineteen centuries, by every kind of mind and nationality.
The way in which it does, indisputably, appeal to such very
different kinds of people, and unite them, does, quite apart from
other things, give it a place with music and painting.

* * * * *

"I do frankly acknowledge Liturgy to be no more than an art--and
therefore not in the least generally necessary to salvation; and I
do not in the least 'condemn' people who do not appreciate it. It
is only a way of presenting facts--and, in the case of Holy Week
Ceremonies, these facts are such as those of the Passion of
Christ, the sins of men, the Resurrection and the Sovereignty of
Christ."

* * * * *

I have laid stress upon all this, because I believe that from this time
the poetry and beauty of ritual had a deep and increasing fascination
for Hugh. But it is a thing about which it is so easy for the enemy to
blaspheme, to ridicule ceremonial in religion as a mere species of
entertainment, that religious minds have always been inclined to
disclaim the strength of its influence. Hugh certainly inherited this
particular perception from my father. I should doubt if anyone ever knew
so much about religious ceremonial as he did, or perceived so clearly
the force of it. "I am almost ashamed to seem to know so much about
these things," I have often heard him say; and again, "I don't ever seem
able to forget the smallest detail of ritual." My father had a very
strong artistic nature--poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture,
scenery, were all f