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.
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