The major felt, like Wordsworth with the leech-gatherer, that the child was there to give him "apt admonishment." Could God have ever called him and he not have listened? Of course it was all a fancy! And yet as he looked at the child, and met his simple believing eyes, he felt he had been a great sinner, and the best things he had done were not fit to be looked at. Happily there were no conventional religious phrases in the mouth of the child to repel him; his father and mother had a horror of pharisaic Christianity: I use the word _pharisaic_ in its true sense--as _formal_, not as _hypocritical_. They had both seen in their youth too many religious prigs to endure temple-whitewash on their children. Except what they heard at church, hardly a special religious phrase ever entered their ears. Those of the New Testament were avoided from reverence, lest they should grow common and fail of their purpose when the children read them for themselves. "But if this succeeded with Hester and Mark, how with Cornelius?" I answer, if to that youth's education had been added the common _forms_ of a religious one, he would have been--not perhaps a worse fellow, but a far more offensive one, and harder to influence for good. Inclined to scoff, he would have had the religious material for jest and ribaldry ready to his hand; while if he had wanted to start as a hypocrite, it would have been specially easy. The 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.