Yet, in truth, and looking below the surface, that might be fair matter of doubt.

For the same reason which had induced the boy to fly his native village, he no longer repaired to the church of Hazeldean.

The old intimate intercourse between him and the parson became necessarily suspended, or bounded to an occasional kindly visit from the latter,--visits which grew more rare and less familiar, as he found his former pupil in no want of his services, and wholly deaf to his mild entreaties to forget and forgive the past, and come at least to his old seat in the parish church.

Lenny still went to church,--a church a long way off in another parish,--but the sermons did not do him the same good as Parson Dale's had done; and the clergyman, who had his own flock to attend to, did not condescend, as Parson Dale would have done, to explain what seemed obscure, and enforce what was profitable, in private talk, with that stray lamb from another's fold.
Now I question much if all Dr.Riccabocca's maxims, though they were often very moral and generally very wise, served to expand the peasant boy's native good qualities, and correct his bad, half so well as the few simple words, not at all indebted to Machiavelli, which Leonard had once reverently listened to when he stood by Mark's elbow-chair, yielded up for the moment to the good parson, worthy to sit in it; for Mr.Dale had a heart in which all the fatherless of the parish found their place.
Nor was this loss of tender, intimate, spiritual lore so counterbalanced by the greater facilities for purely intellectual instruction as modern enlightenment might presume.

For, without disputing the advantage of knowledge in a general way, knowledge, in itself, is not friendly to content.