We attended habitually a small chapel served by the Rev. William Shannon, an excellent but not exciting preacher, who was a devoted friend of Mrs. Harry Siddons; and occasionally we went to Dr. Allison’s church and heard him—­then an old man—­preach, and sometimes his young assistant, Mr. Sinclair, whose eloquent and striking sermons, which impressed me much, were the only powerful direct appeals made to my religious sentiments at that time.  I rather incline to think that I had, what a most unclerical young clergyman of my acquaintance once assured me I had, a natural turn for religion.  I think it not unlikely that a great deal of the direct religious teaching and influences of my Paris school-days was, as it were, coming up again to the surface of my mind, and occupying my thoughts with serious reflections upon the most important subjects.  The freedom I enjoyed gave scope and leisure to my character to develop and strengthen itself; and to the combined healthful repose and activity of all my faculties, the absence of all excitement and irritation from external influences, the pure moral atmosphere and kindly affection by which I lived surrounded during this happy year, I attribute whatever perception of, desire for, or endeavor after goodness I was first consciously actuated by.  In the rest and liberty of my life at this time, I think, whatever was best in me had the most favorable chance of growth, and I have remained ever grateful to the wise forbearance of the gentle authority under which I lived, for the benefit as well as the enjoyment I derived from the time I passed in Edinburgh.

I think that more harm is frequently done by over than by under culture in the moral training of youth.  Judicious letting alone is a precious element in real education, and there are certain chords which, often touched and made to vibrate too early, are apt to lose instead of gaining power; to grow first weakly and morbidly sensitive, and then hard and dull; and finally, when the full harmony of the character depends upon their truth and depth of tone, to have lost some measure of both under repeated premature handling.

I sometimes think that instead of beginning, as we do, with a whole heaven-and-earth-embracing theory of duty to God and man, it might be better to adopt with our children the method of dealing only with each particular instance of moral obligation empirically as it occurs; with each particular incident of life, detached, as it were, from the notion of a formal system, code, or theory of religious belief, until the recurrence of the same rules of morality under the same governing principle, invoked only in immediate application to some instance of conduct or incident of personal experience, built up by degrees a body of precedent which would have the force and efficacy of law before it was theoretically inculcated as such.  Whoever said that principles were moral habits spoke, it seems to me, a valuable truth, not generally sufficiently recognized or acted upon in the task of education.