saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely remote....

My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret I
feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and turned
his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I could look
back without that little twinge to two people who were both in their
different quality so good. But goodness that is narrow is a pedestrian
and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father seems to me one of
the essentially tragic things that have come to me personally, one of
those things that nothing can transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I
cannot soothe with any explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed
the most lovable of weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained
in a hard and narrow system that made evil out of many things not in
the least evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their
estrangement followed from that.

These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love
and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must needs
consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose I
am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I hate more
and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast by religious
organisations. All my life has been darkened by irrational intolerance,
by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and exclusions. Mahometanism
with its fierce proselytism, has, I suppose, the blackest record of
uncharitableness, but most of the Christian sects are tainted, tainted
to a degree beyond any of the anterior paganisms, with this same hateful
quality. It is their exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain
ambition that inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be
the one and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the
household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical goodness
and lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty difference is
exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a damning defect.
Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the believer's mind against
broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful are deterred by dark
allusions, by sinister warnings, from books, from theatres, from
worldly conversation, from all the kindly instruments that mingle human
sympathy. For only by isolating its flock can the organisation survive.

Every month there came to my mother a little ma