The major wondered if God could ever have called him and he had not listened? Of course it was all a fancy! And yet as he looked at the child and met his simple, believing eyes, he could not help wondering if there were things in the world of which he was unaware. Could there be things this child understood but he did not? Happily there were no conventional religious phrases in the mouth of the child to repel him. His father and mother had a horror of formal Christianity. They had both seen in their youth too many religious prigs to endure temple white-wash on their children. Except what they heard at church, hardly a specially religious phrase ever entered their ears. Those of the New Testament were avoided from reverence, lest they should grow too common and fail their purpose when the children read them for themselves.

How such a plan could have succeeded with Hester and Mark and not with Cornelius is a hard question which cannot be answered without considering each person’s own bent of choice, and how they respond to the influences before them. Hester and Mark had responded by making right choices, that is, unselfish ones. Cornelius had responded by making wrong, that is, selfish ones. But had the common forms of a so-called religious education been added to that youth’s upbringing, he would have been a far more offensive fellow, and harder to influence for the good. The best true teaching for children is persons, history, and doctrine in the old sense of the New Testament—instruction in righteousness, that is—not human theory about divine facts.

The major was still at Yrndale when, in the gloomy month of November, Cornelius arrived for his holiday. He was more than usually polite to the major. He was, after all, in the army, the goal of Corney’s aspiration! But he laughed in private at what he called the major’s vulgarity. Because Cornelius prized nothing of the kind, he could see nothing of his essential worth, and took note merely of his blunders, personal ways, and oddities. The major was not truly vulgar, only ill-bred, for there are many ladylike mothers whose children do not turn out to be ladies and gentlemen because they do not teach them as they were taught themselves. But the feelings of the major went far deeper than those of Cornelius, though the latter’s surface manners may have shown to better effect in the society of London. The one was capable of genuine sympathy, the other not yet of any. The major would have been sorry to find he had hurt the feelings of a dog, Cornelius would have whistled on learning that he had hurt the feelings of a woman.