"It is fanaticism, Jared; absolutely incomprehensible. Your son, even though a clergyman, must live in the world. I don't say make him worldly, but don't let him remain in complete ignorance. He is a handsome fellow, amiable, intelligent—really too good for a parson."
"Which you intended to be; which your father, grandfather and great-grandfather were."
"Don't think I depreciate them. But your boy is hardly formed on the Claghorn pattern. He has probably more of the Morleys. His mother must have been a very beautiful woman, if he resembles her."
"As good as she was beautiful," sighed the widower. "Yes, Leonard resembles the Morleys—the best of them."
And so the discussion had terminated. It has been recorded here to indicate paternal views as to the education of youth. In the practice of the views he held, Professor Claghorn had been ably seconded by an excellent and pious wife, and had he been alive to see the result in the young man who had just left Paula Lynford, he must assuredly have observed the proved soundness of his theories and practice.
CHAPTER X.
A YOUTH OF PROMISE, A FEMALE POLITICIAN AND A YELLOW MAN.
Paula watched Leonard until he disappeared. Then she sighed. Long ago Beverley Claghorn had paid a similar tribute to the charms which extorted the sigh. In Paula's eyes the attractions which pertained to Leonard were lost in the sect to which he belonged. As a priest of the Church (it was thus that she put it) he would have been externally perfect, his physical excellence of unspeakable value to the cause of pure truth, while his conception of the priestly role would have been even nobler than that of Father Cameril. Leonard would have been no meek saint, but a saint militant, and long ere this the Bishop would have been down upon him, to the episcopal discomfiture.
If Paula grieved that Leonard labored under the disadvantage of the rigid practice of his denomination as to vesture and pulpit accessories, to those by whom such disadvantages were unrecognized his personality was no less persuasive of his fitness for noble deeds. As a rising theologian and young teacher of the divine science, he was, to those who watched his course, of excellent promise; destined to be a defender of that ancient creed which of late had been often attacked by able, if deluded, foes. To him orthodoxy looked with confidence, as to one who, when the day of battle came, would valiantly assail the enemies without, and confound the machinations of those within the household of faith. A worthy successor of his father, Professor Jared Claghorn, and to be greater, as better equipped to meet skeptical reasoning with reason clarified by faith; to demonstrate that the eye of the philosopher is but a feeble instrument for scrutiny of the works of God.