The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

MY MOTHER'S INFLUENCE OVER HER CHILDREN. 4

41

was ten years old I had the whole system at m 'y tongue's
end, and could restate it and dovetail it together like a
theological expert. This faith dominated my early life, and
has affected me more or less during all the years that have
followed. My father's nature was so large and generous
that his heart was continually at war with his creed. Nature had made him an optimist, while his creed transformed
him into a pessimist. He mourned and wept while he
taught that the doom of endless perdition hung over the
majority of the human race. He never escaped from his
early belief, and so lost the joy of life which nature had
designed for him.
If my mother htad a creed she never stated it. All her
talk was practical, and she dealt wholly with the ethical side
of questions. "1That would be wrong, for it would be really
telling a lie," was her quick way of settling the question
when one of us proposed to deceive a playmate by pantomime. "That would not be treating your sister as you
would be treated." "1You must be as good to your playmate
as you would be to yourself." "I should be ashamed of my
child if she were so selfish as not to share her pleasures with
her playmates." Axioms like these we heard continually
from her lips. And yet my father had very serious doubts
about the wisdom of her training the children. His method
was to teach doctrinal religion, to lay down laws, affix penalties to the violation of them, and the punishment was sure
to be executed if the laws were broken.
My mother made no laws, affixed no penalties, never
threatened, but dealt with every case as it came up in a
tolerant and liberal way She used to declare that "1she