household, and with a father who took singular delight in ceremonial and
liturgical devotion, I think that religion did impress itself rather too
much as a matter of solemn and dignified occupation than as a matter of
feeling and conduct. It was not that my father ever forgot the latter;
indeed, behind his love for symbolical worship lay a passionate and
almost Puritan evangelicalism. But he did not speak easily and openly of
spiritual experience. I was myself profoundly attracted as a boy by the
Êsthetic side of religion, and loved its solemnities with all my heart;
but it was not till I made friends with Bishop Wilkinson at the age of
seventeen that I had any idea of spiritual religion and the practice of
friendship with God. Certainly Hugh missed it, in spite of very loving
and earnest talks and deeply touching letters from my father on the
subject. I suppose that there must come for most people a spiritual
awakening; and until that happens, all talk of emotional religion and
the love of God is a thing submissively accepted, and simply not
understood or realised as an actual thing.

Hugh was not at Eton very long--not more than three or four years. He
never became in any way a typical Etonian. If I am asked to say what
that is, I should say that it is the imbibing instinctively of what is
eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a
certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and
duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an
overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual
interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless
superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon--modesty entirely
forbids that--but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the
book of Job, when the patriarch says to the elders, "No doubt but ye are
the people, and wisdom shall die with you." It is a tacit belief that
all has been done for one that the world can do, and that one's standing