Those young girls, constitutionally pious and full of gratitude to God, sought renewed strength and comfort in the exercises of faith and religious duty. They devoted themselves to prayer and the study of the Scriptures. With the womanly nature of the vine, which must cling to something of firmer texture and stronger growth, they attached themselves trustingly to the priests and scribes and doctors of the law, with a natural and pardonable feeling. But they avoided Caiaphas. I do not remember that I ever felt any decided respect or love for the religious institutions of my country. I was born, I suppose, with the element of veneration for the past left out of my mental organization. I never could understand why men look back to the infancy and childhood of the race for the oracles of wisdom. It is rather the business of each century to scrutinize rigidly the inheritance it has received from the preceding century, and to reject everything which is worthless, unphilosophical and immature. I was largely indebted to my father for my progressive temperament. He despised pretension and ceremony. He conformed his life rather to the spirit than to the letter of the law. His understanding sturdily revolted against the mysterious and improbable. We were not trained after the strict manner of the Pharisees, but with that freedom of action which does not crush the individuality of the child. The reformer, the innovator, the man of new ideas and life, is seldom born of the narrow-minded literalist and bigot of an old system. The father is generally an intermediate link between the old and the new; adhering loosely to the old himself, and prophesying, inarticulately perhaps, the emancipation of his son from the thraldom of the past. When we get rid of the conventionalisms of an old and perishing system, we become peculiarly open and sensitive to the grand intuitions of natural religion. The gorgeous ceremonies of the temple made little impression even on my boyish fancy: they were tiresome and disgusting to my riper years. But I melted into tender admiration at the thought of John the Baptist, praying and toiling in the wilderness, unseen of men, trusting in God, and receiving to his loving bosom and care, the leper, the robber and the lost ones of the world. One of the teachers provided me by my excellent uncle Beltrezzor, was a Greek; and the study of that wonderful language and literature led me still farther away from the influence of Judaism, corrupted and failing as it was. I was not slow to assert that the poetry of Æschylus and Homer charmed me more than that of David and Isaiah; and that the philosophy of Plato exceeded in value all the learning of the Scribes.