Hugh made friends at Cambridge with a young Roman Catholic priest, who was working there. His new friend was a very simple-minded man; he seemed to Hugh the only man of great gifts he had ever known, who was absolutely untouched by any shadow of worldliness. Hugh knew of men who resisted the temptations of the world very successfully, to whom indeed they were elementary temptations, long since triumphed over; but this man was the only man he had ever known who was gifted with qualities that commanded the respect and admiration of the world, yet to whom the temptations of ambition and success seemed never to have appeared even upon the distant horizon. He was an interesting talker, a fine preacher, and a very accomplished writer; but his interest was entirely centred upon his work, and not upon the rewards of it. He was very poor; but he had no regard for anything--luxury, power, position--that the world could give him. He had no wish to obtain influence; he only cared to make the work on which he was engaged as perfect as he could. The man was really an artist pure and simple; he seemed to have little taste even for pastoral work. One day they sat together, on a hot breathless afternoon, in a college garden, on a seat beneath some great shady chestnut-trees, and looked out lazily upon the heavy-seeded grass of the meadow and the bright flower-borders. The priest said to Hugh suddenly, "I have often wondered what your religion really is. Do you mind my speaking of it? You seem to me exactly the sort of man who needs a strong, definite faith to make him happy." Hugh smiled and said, "Well, I am trying, not very successfully I fear, to find out what I really do believe. I am trying to construct my faith from the bottom; and I am anxious not to put into the foundations any faulty stones, anything that I have not really tested." "That is a very good thing to do," said the priest. "But how are you setting to work?" "Well," said Hugh, "I have never had time before to think my religion out; I seem to have accepted all kinds of loose ideas and shaky traditions. I want to arrive at some certainties; I try to apply a severe intellectual test to everything: and the result is that I seem obliged to discard one thing after another that I once believed." "Perhaps," said the priest after a silence, "you are doing this too drastically? Religion, it seems to me, has to be apprehended in a different region, the mystical region, the region of intuition rather than logic." "Yes," said Hugh, "and intuitions are what one practically lives by; but I think that they ought to be able to stand an intellectual test too--for, after all, it is only intellectually that one can approach them." The priest shook his head at this, with a half-smile. And Hugh added, "I wish you would give me a short sketch, in a few words if you can, of how you reached your present position."