whole fruitage of our life is
mingled and tempered.

'In which habituation to Obedience, truly, it was beyond measure safer
to err by excess than by defect. Obedience is our universal duty and
destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break: too early and too
thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that Would, in this world of
ours, is as mere zero to Should, and for most part as the smallest of
fractions even to Shall. Hereby was laid for me the basis of worldly
Discretion, nay, of Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with my
upbringing! It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively secluded,
everyway unscientific: yet in that very strictness and domestic
solitude might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness, of the
stem from which all noble fruit must grow? Above all, how unskilful
soever, it was loving, it was well-meant, honest; whereby every
deficiency was helped. My kind Mother, for as such I must ever love
the good Gretchen, did me one altogether invaluable service: she
taught me, less indeed by word than by act and daily reverent look and
habitude, her own simple version of the Christian Faith. Andreas too
attended Church; yet more like a parade-duty, for which he in the
other world expected pay with arrears,--as, I trust, he has received;
but my Mother, with a true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated
sense, was in the strictest acceptation Religious. How indestructibly
the Good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy
entanglements of Evil! The highest whom I knew on Earth I here saw
bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven: such
things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your
being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility
in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the divinest in man, springs
forth undying from its mean envelopment of Fear. Wouldst thou rather
be a peasant's son that knew, were it never so rudely, there was a God
in Heaven and in Man; or a duke's son that only knew there were
two-and-thirty quarters on the family-coach?'

To which last question we must answer: Beware, O Teufelsdroeckh, of
spiritual pride!

CHAPTER III

PEDAGOGY

Hitherto we see young Gneschen, in his indivisible case of yellow
serge, borne forward mostly on the arms of kind Nature alone; seated,
indeed, and much to his mind, in the terrestrial workshop; but (except
his soft hazel eyes, which we doubt not already gleamed with a sti