she called Aunt Judy, and with whom she was naturally a great favourite.
Wynnie, on the other hand, was sedate, and rather severe--more severe, I
must in justice say, with herself than with anyone else. I had sometimes
wished, it is true, that her mother, in regard to the younger children,
were more like her; but there I was wrong. For one of the great goods that
come of having two parents, is that the one balances and rectifies the
motions of the other. No one is good but God. No one holds the truth, or
can hold it, in one and the same thought, but God. Our human life is often,
at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the
truth; and it is not a bad thing in a family, that the pendulums of father
and mother should differ in movement so far, that when the one is at one
extremity of the swing, the other should be at the other, so that they meet
only in the point of _indifference_, in the middle; that the predominant
tendency of the one should not be the predominant tendency of the other.
I was a very strict disciplinarian--too much so, perhaps, sometimes:
Ethelwyn, on the other hand, was too much inclined, I thought, to excuse
everything. I was law, she was grace. But grace often yielded to law, and
law sometimes yielded to grace. Yet she represented the higher; for in the
ultimate triumph of grace, in the glad performance of the command from love
of what is commanded, the law is fulfilled: the law is a schoolmaster to
bring us to Christ. I must say this for myself, however, that, although
obedience was the one thing I enforced, believing it the one thing upon
which all family economy primarily depends, yet my object always was to set
my children free from my law as soon as possible; in a word, to help them
to become, as soon as it might be, a law unto themselves. Then they would
need no more of mine. Then I would go entirely over to the mother's higher
side, and become to them, as much as in me lay, no longer law and truth,
but grace and truth. But to return to my children--it was soon evident not
only that Wynnie had grown more indulgent to Dora's vagaries, but that Dora
was more submissive to Wynnie, while the younger children began to