by comparison, and my father spoiled us for any one but himself;
indeed, in after life, I remember my mother's telling me, with many
tears, how jealous she had often been of the love we bore him, and
how mean she had thought it of him to entrust all scolding or
repression to her, so that he might have more than his due share of
our affection. Not that I believe my father did this consciously;
still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare say we might often
have got off scot free when we really deserved reproof had not my
mother undertaken the onus of scolding us herself. We therefore
naturally feared her more than my father, and fearing more we loved
less. For as love casteth out fear, so fear love.

This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the way
to bear it. She tried to upbraid us, in little ways, into loving her
as much as my father; the more she tried this, the less we could
succeed in doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need not
be detailed. Not but what we really loved her deeply, while her
affection for us was unsurpassable still, we loved her less than we
loved my father, and this was the grievance.

My father entrusted our religious education entirely to my mother.
He was himself, I am assured, of a deeply religious turn of mind, and
a thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England; but he
conceived, and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who should
first teach her children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart to
them a knowledge of the One in whom we live and move and have our
being. My mother accepted the task gladly, for in spite of a certain
narrowness of view--the natural but deplorable result of her earlier
surroundings--she was one of the most truly pious women whom I have
ever known; unfortunately for herself and us she had been trained in