Besides, it was the usual thing. But the
boys must be given the opportunity of choosing--and they must
have first of all the Anglican teaching. He was perfectly
unshakable about this.
Leonora was in an agony during all this time. You will have to
remember she seriously believed that children who might be born
to her went in danger, if not absolutely of damnation, at any rate
of receiving false doctrine. It was an agony more terrible than she
could describe. She didn't indeed attempt to describe it, but I
could tell from her voice when she said, almost negligently, "I
used to lie awake whole nights. It was no good my spiritual
advisers trying to console me." I knew from her voice how terrible
and how long those nights must have seemed and of how little
avail were the consolations of her spiritual advisers. Her spiritual
advisers seemed to have taken the matter a little more calmly.
They certainly told her that she must not consider herself in any
way to have sinned. Nay, they seem even to have extorted, to have
threatened her, with a view to getting her out of what they
considered to be a morbid frame of mind. She would just have to
make the best of things, to influence the children when they came,
not by propaganda, but by personality.
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