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
insurpassable; 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 the lowest school of Evangelical
literalism--a school which in after life both my brother and myself came
to regard as the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of unbelief; we
therefore looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and for
my own part I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the
cause of Christ has ever encountered. But of this more hereafter.

My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of our religious
education. Whatever she believed she believed literally, and, if I may
say so, with a harshness of realisation which left little scope for
imagination or mystery. Her ideas concerning heaven and her soluti