fervent faith overshadowing my young life, produced a moulding of my
character which has never changed. I lived in an atmosphere of prayer
and trust in God which impressed me so that to this day the habit of
thought and conduct so formed is invincible, and in all the subsequent
modifications of the primitive and Hebraic conception of the spiritual
life which she inoculated me with, an unconscious aspiration in prayer
and an absolute and organic trust in the protection of the divine
Providence persist in my character, though reason has long assured me
that this is but a crude and personal conception of the divine law.
Truly from the environment of our early religious education we can
never escape. This the Jesuits know and profit by.

My mother was also haunted by the dread of God's wrath at her loving
her children more than she did Him, for, with all the fervency of her
gentle devotion, she never escaped the ghastly Hebrew conception of
God, always in wrath at every omission or transgression of the Law,
who, at the last great day, would demand of her an account of every
neglect of duty, every idle word and thought, and especially of the
manner in which she had taught her children to obey his commandments.
She seemed to scan her life continually to find some sin in the past,
for which she had not specifically repented, and, at times, as I knew
by the confidences of my later years, when she would appeal to me
for my opinion, the problem of the unpardonable sin became one of
absorbing study, which she finally laid aside in the supreme trust in
his goodness, who alone knew her intentions and desire to be obedient
to the Law.

Every one of her sons, as they were born, she dedicated to the service
of the Lord, in the ardent hope that one of them would become a
minister, and over me, the last, she let her hopes linger longest,