“I have recognized in teaching you a fact but too little known, that a classical education, properly understood, is the foundation of all learning.  There is little that is worth saying which has not already been beautifully said by the ancients, little that is worthy of meditation on which they have not already profoundly reflected, save, indeed, the one great subject of Christian meditation.  This foundation, my dear Angela, you possess to an eminent degree.  Henceforth you will need no assistance from me or any other man, for, to your trained mind, all ordinary knowledge will be easy to assimilate.  You will receive in the course of a few days a parting present from myself in the shape of a box of carefully chosen books on European literature and history.  Devote yourself to the study of these, and of the German language, which was your mother’s native tongue, for the next year, and then I shall consider that you are fairly finished, and then, too, my dear Angela, I shall expect to reap a full reward for my labours.”

“What is it that you will expect of me?”

“I shall expect, Angela,” and he rose from his chair and walked up and down the room in his excitement—­“I shall expect to see you take your proper place in your generation.  I shall say:  ’Choose your own line, become a critical scholar, a practical mathematician, or—­and perhaps that is what you are most suited for with your imaginative powers—­a writer of fiction.  For remember that fiction, properly understood and directed to worthy aims, is the noblest and most far-reaching, as it is also the most difficult of the arts.’  In watching the success that will assuredly attend you in this or any other line, I shall be amply rewarded for my trouble.”

Angela shook her head with a gesture of doubt, but he did not wait for her to answer.

“Well, my dear, I must not keep you any longer—­it is quite dark and blowing a gale of wind—­except to say one more word.  Remember that all this is—­indirectly perhaps, but still none the less truly—­a means to an end.  There are two educations, the education of the mind and the education of the soul; unless you minister to the latter, all the time and toil spent upon the former will prove to little purpose.  The learning will, it is true, remain; but it will be as the quartz out of which the gold has been already crushed, or the dry husks of corn.  It will be valueless and turn to no good use, will serve only to feed the swine of intellectual voluptuousness and infidelity.  It is, believe me, the higher learning of the soul that gilds our earthly lore.  The loftier object of all education is so to train the intellect that it may become competent to understand something, however little, of the nature of our God, and to the true Christian the real end of learning is the appreciation of His attributes as exemplified in His mysteries and earthly wonders.  But perhaps that is a subject on which you are as well fitted to discourse as I am, so I will not enter into it.  ‘Finis,’ my dear, ‘finis.’”