Being the youngest of nine children, I can remember my mother only in the days of comparative freedom from anxiety, when, the day’s work over and the house quiet, she used, as she sat by the fire with her knitting, which occupied all the moments when her hands were not required for other duties,—­she knit all the stockings required for the family,—­to tell me incidents of her past life, mostly to show how kind God had been to her and hers, and how faith in his providence was justified in the event.  Of herself she spoke only incidentally.  Dominating every act and thought of her existence was the profoundest religious veneration I have ever met with, an openness of her mind upward, as if she felt that the eternal eye was on her and reading her thoughts.  The sense of her responsibility was so serious that I think that only the absorbing activity of her daily life, and the way in which every moment was occupied with positive duties, prevented her from falling into religious insanity.  Her life was a constant prayer, a wrestling with God for the salvation of her children.  No image of her remains in my mind so clear as that in which I see her sitting by the fireside in the dim light of our single home-made candle, her knitting-needles flying and her lips moving in prayer, while the tears stole down her cheeks in the fervency of her devotion, until she felt that she was being noticed, when the windows of her soul were suddenly shut, and she turned to some subject of common interest, as if ashamed to be discovered praying, for she permitted herself no ostentation of devotion, but reserved it for her nights and solitary moments.  Of her own salvation she had only a faltering hope, harassed always by a fear that she had at some time in her life committed the unpardonable sin, as to the nature of which she knew nothing, and which was, therefore, all the more feared, as the nature of it was to her the terrible mystery of life and death.

What I inherit from her, and doubtless the indelible impression of her 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.