“If anything can keep him straight when he grows up it will be what you have taught him,” said Frithiof. “You wonder that I admit that, and a year ago I couldn’t have said as much, but I begin to think that there is after all a very great restraining power in the old faith. The difficulty is to get up any sort of interest in that kind of thing.”
“You talk as if it were a sort of science,” said Cecil.
“That is precisely what it seems to me; and just as one man is born with a love of botany, another takes naturally to astronomy, and a third has no turn for science whatever, but is fond of hunting and fishing, so it seems to me with religion. All of you, perhaps, have inherited the tendency from your Puritan forefathers, but I have inherited quite the opposite tendency from my Viking ancestors. Like them, I prefer to love my friend and hate my enemy, and go through life in the way that best pleases me. I am not a reading man; I can’t get up the faintest sort of interest in these religious matters.”
“We are talking of two different things,” said Cecil. “It is of the mere framework of religion that you are speaking. Very likely many of us are born without any taste for theology, or sermons, or Church history. We are not bound surely to force up an interest in them.”
“Then if all that is not religion, pray what is it? You are not like Miss Charlotte, who uses phrases without analyzing them. What do you mean by religion?”
“I mean knowing and loving God,” she said, after a moment’s pause.
Her tone was very gentle, and not in the least didactic.
“I have believed in a God always—more or less,” said Frithiof slowly. “But how do you get to know Him?”
“I think it is something in the same way that people get to know each other,” said Cecil. “Cousin James Horner, for instance, sees my father every day; he has often stayed in the same house with him, and has in a sense known him all his life. But he doesn’t really know him at all. He never takes the trouble really to know any one. He sees the outside of my father—that is all. They have hardly anything in common.”
“Mr. Horner is so full of himself and his own opinions that he never could appreciate such a man as your father,” said Frithiof. Then, perceiving that his own mouth had condemned him, he relapsed into silence. “What is your receipt, now, for getting to know a person?” he said presently, with a smile.