The hour might come when he would say, "My father taught me that!"-- who could tell?
And he knew he had the words correct, wherever he had dropped their meaning.

For the sake of Gibbie's immortal part, therefore, he would repeat the answer to that first, most momentous of questions, over and over as he worked, in the hope of insinuating something--he could not say what--into the small mental pocket of the innocent.
The first, therefore, and almost the only words which Gibbie heard from his father's lips that morning, were these, dozens of times repeated--"Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." But so far was Gibbie from perceiving in them any meaning, that even with his father's pronunciation of chief end as chifenn, they roused in his mind no sense or suspicion of obscurity.

The word stuck there, notwithstanding; but Gibbie was years a man before he found out what a chifenn was.

Where was the great matter?
How many who have learned their catechism and deplore the ignorance of others, make the least effort to place their chief end even in the direction of that of their creation?
Is it not the constant thwarting of their aims, the rendering of their desires futile, and their ends a mockery, that alone prevents them and their lives from proving an absolute failure?
Sir George, with his inveterate, consuming thirst for whisky, was but the type of all who would gain their bliss after the scheme of their own fancies, instead of the scheme of their existence; who would build their house after their own childish wilfulness instead of the ground-plan of their being.
How was Sir George to glorify the God whom he could honestly thank for nothing but whisky, the sole of his gifts that he prized?
Over and over that day he repeated the words, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever," and all the time his imagination, his desire, his hope, were centred on the bottle, which with his very back he felt where it stood behind him, away on the floor at the head of his bed.

Nevertheless when he had gone over them a score of times or so, and Gibbie had begun, by a merry look and nodding of his head, to manifest that he knew what was coming next, the father felt more content with himself than for years past; and when he was satisfied that Gibbie knew all the words, though, indeed, they were hardly more than sounds to him, he sent him, with a great sense of relief, to fetch the broth and beef and potatoes from Mistress Croale's.
Eating a real dinner in his father's house, though without a table to set it upon, Gibbie felt himself a most privileged person.