Weighed and Wanting | Page 7

one who would
enter and share it with her; but now for a long time he who thus
knocked had been her companion in the chamber whose walls are the
infinite. Why is it that men and women will welcome any tale of love,
devotion, and sacrifice from one to another of themselves, but turn
from the least hint at the existence of a perfect love at the root of it all?
With such a message to them, a man is a maundering prophet. Is it not
that their natures are yet so far from the ideal, the natural, the true, that
the words of the prophet rouse in them no vision, no poorest perception
of spiritual fact?
Helen Raymount was now a little woman of fifty, clothed in a sweet
dignity, from which the contrast she disliked between her plentiful gray
hair, and her great, clear, dark eyes, took nothing; it was an opposition
without discord. She had but the two daughters and two sons already
introduced, of whom Hester was the eldest.
Wise as was the mother, and far-seeing as was the father, they had
made the mistake common to all but the wisest parents, of putting off to
a period more or less too late the moment of beginning to teach their
children obedience. If this be not commenced at the first possible
moment, there is no better reason why it should be begun at any other,
except that it will be the harder every hour it is postponed. The spiritual
loss and injury caused to the child by their waiting till they fancy him
fit to reason with, is immense; yet there is nothing in which parents are
more stupid and cowardly, if not stiff-necked, than this. I do not speak
of those mere animal parents, whose lasting influence over their
progeny is not a thing to be greatly desired, but of those who, having a

conscience, yet avoid this part of their duty in a manner of which a
good motherly cat would be ashamed. To one who has learned of all
things to desire deliverance from himself, a nursery in which the
children are humored and scolded and punished instead of being taught
obedience, looks like a moral slaughter-house.
The dawn of reason will doubtless help to develop obedience; but
obedience is yet more necessary to the development of reason. To
require of a child only what he can understand the reason of, is simply
to help him to make himself his own God--that is a devil. That some
seem so little injured by their bad training is no argument in presence
of the many in whom one can read as in a book the consequences of
their parents' foolishness.
Cornelius was a youth of good abilities, and with a few good qualities.
Naturally kind-hearted, yet full of self and its poor importance, he had
an admiration of certain easy and showy virtues. He was himself not
incapable of an unthinking generosity; felt pity for picturesque
suffering; was tempted to kindness by the prospect of a responsive
devotion. Unable to bear the sight of suffering, he was yet careless of
causing it where he would not see it; incapable of thwarting himself, he
was full of weak indignation at being thwarted; supremely conceited,
he had yet a regard for the habits and judgments of men of a certain
stamp which towards a great man would have been veneration, and
would have elevated his being. But the sole essentials of life as yet
discovered by Cornelius were a good carriage, good manners,
self-confidence, and seeming carelessness in spending. That the
spender was greedy after the money he yet scorned to work for, made
no important difference in Cornelius's estimate of him. In a word, he
fashioned a fine gentleman-god in his foolish brain, and then fell down
and worshipped him with what worship was possible between them. To
all home-excellence he was so far blind that he looked down upon it;
the opinion of father or mother, though they had reared such a son as
himself, was not to be compared in authority with that of Reginald
Vavasor, who, though so poor as to be one of his fellow-clerks, was
heir apparent to an earldom.

CHAPTER III

.
THE MAGIC LANTERN.
Cornelius, leaving his mother, took refuge with his anger in his own
room. Although he had occupied it but a fortnight the top of its chest of
drawers was covered with yellow novels--the sole kind of literature for
which Cornelius cared. Of this he read largely, if indeed his mode of
swallowing could be called reading; his father would have got more
pleasure out of the poorest of them than Cornelius could from a dozen.
And now in this day's dreariness, he had not one