every misdemeanour, but it was always noticed, and the children were shown with grave gentleness where they were wrong; or when there was a squabble among them, the mother’s question, ‘Who will give up?’ generally produced a chorus of ‘I!  I!  I!’ Withal ‘mamma’ was the very life of all the fun, and play, and jokes, enjoying all with spirits and merriment like the little ones’ own, and delighting in the exchange of caresses and tender epithets.  Thus affection and generosity grew up almost spontaneously towards one another and all the world.

On this disposition was grafted that which was the one leading characteristic of Coley’s life, namely, a reverent and religious spirit, which seems from the first to have been at work, slowly and surely subduing inherent defects, and raising him, step by step, from grace to grace.

Five years old is in many cases an age of a good deal of thought.  The intelligence is free from the misapprehensions and misty perceptions of infancy; the first course of physical experiments is over, freedom of speech and motion have been attained, and yet there has not set in that burst of animal growth and spirits that often seems to swamp the deeper nature throughout boyhood.  By this age Coley was able to read, and on his birthday he received from his father the Bible which was used at his consecration as Bishop twenty-seven years later.

He had an earnest wish to be a clergyman, because he thought saying the Absolution to people must make them so happy, ’a belief he must have gleaned from his Prayer-book for himself, since the doctrine was not in those days made prominent.’  The purpose was fostered by his mother.  ’She delighted in it, and encouraged it in him.  No thought of a family being to be made, and of Coley being the eldest son, ever interfered for a moment.  That he should be a good servant at God’s altar was to her above all price.’

Of course, however, this was without pressing the thought on him.  He grew on, with the purpose accepted but not discussed, except from time to time a half-playful, half-grave reference to himself as a future clergyman.

Reverence was strongly implanted in him.  His old nurse (still his sister’s valued servant) remembers the little seven years old boy, after saying his own prayers at her knee, standing opposite to his little brother, admonishing him to attention with ’Think, Jemmy; think.’  In fact, devoutness seems to have been natural to him.  It appears to have been the first strongly traceable feature in him, and to have gradually subdued his faults one by one.