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260 cordance with the tenets of that faith. She grew up beautiful and studious, and no pains were spared to make her education thorough, and such as befitted the daughter of a learned leader in Israel.

But Ernestine’s was an independent and thoughtful, as well as enthusiastic nature. She early gave evidence of rebellious criticism of the creed she had been taught to believe in as the true faith, and showed herself a worthy daughter of a scholar and thinker by plying her father with questions, which, as a teacher of the faith, he was bound to make clear to those who sought light of him, as did his daughter Ernestine. But her searching questions only troubled and annoyed him, while his answers failed to satisfy her in any degree. “A young girl,” he said to her, “does not want to understand the object of her creed, but to accept and believe it.”

But doubt once awakened, and without any reasonable evidence to silence and put it to rest, still continued its work in the