So they were. He could not be convinced that moral
standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian
morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless.
Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any
previous century, would have led him into the Church; he
inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time;
and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery
politics to sweep him back into Puritanism with a violence as
great as that of a religious war.
Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was
chiefly inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his
father alone counted for much. If he were to worry successfully
through life's quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's
pilotage; but, for his father, the channel lay clear, while for
himself an unknown ocean lay beyond. His father's business in
life was to get past the dangers of the slave-power, or to fix
its bounds at least. The task done, he might be content to let
his sons pay for the pilotage; and it mattered little to his
success whether they paid it with their lives wasted on
battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity.
The generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well
with the old forms of education; that which had its work to do
between 1870 and 1900 needed something quite new.
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