To believe in God and yet to seek to improve upon His ways! what a strange and incredible contradiction! And yet what made the position a more bewildering one still was the certainty that these very inner impulses to amend, to improve, came from God as clearly as the very evils that He permitted and indeed originated. What was the exit from this intolerable tangle of thought? Law indeed seemed absolute, law on a scale at once so colossal and so minute, law that sent the planets whirling through space round the central sun--and yet dwelt, cell within cell, in the heart of the smallest pebble that rolled upon the sea-beach. And side by side with this law ran a thwarting force, an impulse to make man do blindly the very things that led inevitably to destruction, to endow him with an intense desire of life, and yet to leave him ignorant of the laws that hurried him, reluctant and amazed, to death. Hugh grew to feel that some compromise was necessary; that to live in the natural impulses alone, or in the developed impulses alone, was an impossibility. A hundred voices called him, a hundred hands beckoned or waved him back; nature prompted one thing, reason another, association another, piety another; and yet each was in a sense the calling of God. The saddest thing was that to obey any of the voices brought no peace or tranquillity; he obeyed piety, and nature continued fiercely to prompt the opposite; he obeyed association, and reason mocked his choice. He became aware that in order to triumph over these manifold and uneasy contradictions, a certain tranquillity of mind must be acquired; he found that to a large extent he must trust intuition, which could at all events settle, if it could not reconcile, conflicting claims; even when reason indicated a choice of paths, the voice of the soul cried out clearly the way that he must choose; the obedience to intuition was generally approved by experience, until Hugh began to see, at last, that it was the safest guide of all, and that thus we came nearest to the heart of God. He found, indeed, very often, that even when prudence and reason afforded excellent reasons for abstaining from action, to yield to intuition turned out to be the wisest and the kindest course; until, in practical matters, he learnt to trust it unhesitatingly, even if it led him, as the light led the pilgrim, to stumble for a time in a field full of dark mountains. XXI A Far-off Day--A Compact--Fragrant Memories