never went to church, because it was the Old Church. They
had no service of the New Church, the Swedenborgians were so few in the
place, except when some of its ministers stopped with us on their
travels. My boy regarded these good men as all personally sacred, and
while one of them was in the house he had some relief from the fear in
which his days seem mostly to have been passed; as if he were for the
time being under the protection of a spiritual lightning-rod. Their
religion was not much understood by their neighbors of the Old Church,
who thought them a kind of Universalists. But the boy once heard his
father explain to one of them that the New Church people believed in a
hell, which each cast himself into if he loved the evil rather than the
good, and that no mercy could keep him out of without destroying him,
for a man's love was his very self. It made his blood run cold, and he
resolved that rather than cast himself into hell, he would do his poor
best to love the good. The children were taught when they teased one
another that there was nothing the fiends so much delighted in as
teasing. When they were angry and revengeful, they were told that now
they were calling evil spirits about them, and that the good angels
could not come near them if they wished while they were in that state.
My boy preferred the company of good angels after dark, and especially
about bedtime, and he usually made the effort to get himself into an
accessible frame of mind before he slept; by day he felt that he could
look out for himself, and gave way to the natural man like other boys. I
suppose the children had their unwholesome spiritual pride in being
different from their fellows in religion; but, on the other hand, it
taught them not to fear being different from others if they believed
themselves right. Perhaps it made my boy rather like it.

The grandfather was of a gloomy spirit, but of a tender and loving
heart, whose usual word with a child, when he caressed it, was "Poor
thing, poor thing!" as if he could only pity it; and I have no doubt
the father's religion was a true affliction to him. The children were
taken to visit their grandmother every Sunday noon, and then the father
and grandfather never failed to have it out about the New Church and the
Old. I am afraid that the father would sometimes forget his own
precepts, and tease a little; when the mother went with him she was
sometimes troubled at the warmth with which the c