"No, he was a Moravian. At least, his parents were. I don't think he
belonged to any section of the church in particular."

"But oughtn't he, papa?"

"Certainly not, my dear, except he saw good reason for it. But what is the
use of asking such questions, after a hymn like that?"

"O, I didn't think anything bad, papa, I assure you. It was only that I
wanted to know more about him."

The tears were in her eyes, and I was sorry I had treated as significant
what was really not so. But the constant tendency to consider Christianity
as associated of necessity with this or that form of it, instead of as
simply obedience to Christ, had grown more and more repulsive to me as I
had grown myself, for it always seemed like an insult to my brethren in
Christ; hence the least hint of it in my children I was too ready to be
down upon like a most unchristian ogre. I took her hand in mine, and she
was comforted, for she saw in my face that I was sorry, and yet she could
see that there was reason at the root of my haste.

"But," said Wynnie, who, I thought afterwards, must have strengthened
herself to speak from the instinctive desire to show Percivale how far she
was from being out of sympathy with what he might suppose formed a barrier
between him and me--"But," she said, "the lovely feeling in that poem
seems to me, as in all the rest of such poems, to belong only to the New
Testament, and have nothing to do with this world round about us. These
things look as if they were only for drawing and painting and being glad
in, not as if they had relations with all those awful and solemn things. As
soon as I try to get the two together, I lose both of them."