At home he praised the school, thanked his parents for his liberation, and said that he preferred it to any former one. He forgot former acts of injustice, and became more gentle and unreserved in his behaviour. His mother began to admire his erudition. He learned five languages besides his own. His eldest brother was already in a place of business, and the second in Paris. John received a kind of promotion at home and became a companion to his mother. He gave her information from books on history and natural history, and she, having had no education, listened with docility. But after she had listened awhile, whether it was that she wished to raise herself to his level, or that she really feared worldly knowledge, she would speak of the only knowledge which, she said, could make man happy. She spoke of Christ; John knew all this very well, but she understood how to make a personal application. He was to beware of intellectual pride, and always to remain simple. The boy did not understand what she meant by "simple," and what she said about Christ did not agree with the Bible. There was something morbid in her point of view, and he thought he detected the dislike of the uncultured to culture. "Why all this long school course," he asked himself, "if it was to be regarded as nothing in comparison with the mysterious doctrine of Christ's Atonement?" He knew also that his mother had caught up this talk from conversations with nurses, seamstresses, and old women, who went to the dissenting chapels. "Strange," he thought, "that people like that should grasp the highest wisdom of which neither the priest in the church nor the teacher in the school had the least notion!" He began to think that these humble pietists had a good deal of spiritual pride, and that their way to wisdom was an imaginary short-cut. Moreover, among his school-fellows there were sons of barons and counts, and, when in his stories out of school he mentioned noble titles, he was warned against pride.

Was he proud? Very likely; but in school he did not seek the company of aristocrats, though he preferred looking at them rather than at the others, because their fine clothes, their handsome faces, and their polished finger-nails appealed to his æsthetic sense. He felt that they were of a different race and held a position which he would never reach, nor try to reach, for he did not venture to demand anything of life. But when, one day, a baron's son asked for his help in a lesson, he felt himself in this matter, at any rate, his equal or even his superior. He had thereby discovered that there was something which could set him by the side of the highest in society, and which he could obtain for himself, i.e., knowledge.