at
while the child "must unquestionably be brought up in the creed of the
Church of England," it might nevertheless be in accordance with
the spirit of the times to exclude from his religious training the
inculcation of a belief in "the supernatural doctrines of Christianity."
This, however, would have been going too far; and all the royal children
were brought up in complete orthodoxy. Anything else would have grieved
Victoria, though her own conceptions of the orthodox were not very
precise. But her nature, in which imagination and subtlety held so small
a place, made her instinctively recoil from the intricate ecstasies
of High Anglicanism; and she seemed to feel most at home in the simple
faith of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This was what might have
been expected; for Lehzen was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and the
Lutherans and the Presbyterians have much in common. For many years Dr.
Norman Macleod, an innocent Scotch minister, was her principal spiritual
adviser; and, when he was taken from her, she drew much comfort from
quiet chats about life and death with the cottagers at Balmoral.
Her piety, absolutely genuine, found what it wanted in the sober
exhortations of old John Grant and the devout saws of Mrs. P.
Farquharson. They possessed the qualities, which, as a child of
fourteen, she had so sincerely admired in the Bishop of Chester's
"Exposition of the Gospel of St. Matthew;" they were "just plain and
comprehensible and full of truth and good feeling." The Queen, who gave
her name to the Age of Mill and of Darwin, never got any further than
that.

From the social movements of her time Victoria was equally remote.
Towards the smallest no less than towards the greatest changes she
remained inflexible. During her youth and middle age smoking had been
forbidden in polite society, and so long as she lived she would not
withdraw her anathema against it. Kings might protest; bishops and
ambassadors, invited to Windsor, might be reduced, in the privacy of
their bedrooms, to lie full-length upon the floor and smoke up the
chimney--the interdict continued! It might have been supposed that a
female sovereign would have lent her countenance to one of the most
vital of all the reforms to which her epoch gave birth--the emancipation
of women--but, on the contrary, the mere mention of such a proposal sent
the blood rushing to her head. In 1870, her eye having fallen upon the
report of a meeting in favour of