Naturally my religious education during these early years was of the severest orthodox character, and my mother’s sincere, fervent, and practical piety brought home to me, with the conviction of certainty, the persuasion of its divine authority.  Hell and its terrors were always present to me, and she taught me that the wandering suggestions of childish imagination, the recurrence of profane expressions heard from others, and all forms of irreverent fantasies were the very whisperings of the devil, to her, as to me, consequently, an ever-present spirit, perpetually tempting me to repeat, and so make myself responsible for the wickedness in them.  I remember with great vividness a caricature of Mrs. Trollope in a satirical illustrated edition of her travels in America, representing her sitting in a large armchair surrounded by negroes on their knees, one of whom was represented as saying, “De Lord lub Missee Trollope,” an expression which my mother stigmatized as impious and not to be repeated, but which perhaps for that very reason would recur to me in thought, and which I set myself to pray against as the very whisper of the devil in my ears.  And naturally, the more I tried to put it out of my head, the more it got fixed there, and it was long a source of great misery to me that I could not keep the devil away from my ears.  I was never allowed a candle to go to bed with, and as I slept in the huge garret, covering the whole house, I used to shut my eyes when I left the kitchen, where we all sat in the evening, and groped my way to bed without ever again opening my eyes until the next morning, for fear of seeing the devil on my way.  Awful spiritual presences haunted me always in the dark, when I passed a churchyard or an empty and solitary house.  Such a house stood in the pasture where I used to drive the cow, and when it happened that she had not come home at nightfall, and I had to go to find her, the panic I endured from the necessity of searching around this old house no one can imagine but a boy naturally timid and accustomed to see ghosts and evil spirits in the dusk.  But I kept my fears to myself and always made a conscientious search.

The peculiar ideas concerning conversion and regeneration, held in common by all the branches of the adult-Baptist churches, were in my mother’s mind an obsession.  Conviction of sin, repentance, the public confession, profession of faith, and baptism were the necessary degrees to regeneration, and, looking back on the tortures to which my mother was subjected by those theological problems and the daily anxiety she endured until each of us had passed through the gates of salvation into the narrow way, I must wonder at that divine maternal instinct which made her rejoice at my birth, as I know she did.