“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, every way 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 Teufelsdrockh, 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 still intelligence) called upon for little voluntary movement there.  Hitherto, accordingly, his aspect is rather generic, that of an incipient Philosopher and Poet in the abstract; perhaps it would puzzle Herr Heuschrecke himself to say wherein the special Doctrine of Clothes is as yet foreshadowed or betokened.  For with Gneschen, as with others, the Man may indeed stand pictured in the Boy (at least all the pigments are there); yet only some half of the Man stands in the Child, or young Boy, namely, his Passive endowment, not his Active.  The more impatient are we to discover what figure he cuts in this latter capacity; how, when, to use his own words, “he understands the tools a little, and can handle this or that,” he will proceed to handle it.