Though of Puritan stock, though reared in the austere faith of John Knox, there was nothing hard or harsh in this mother's character, and still less was there anything of the materialist about her. She would have utterly scouted the doctrine of Cabanis and his school, which held that the physical was the whole structure of man; that all instincts, passions, thoughts, emanated from the body; that sensibility is an effect of the nervous system, that passion is an emanation of the viscera, that intellect is nothing more than a cerebral secretion, and "self-consciousness but a general faculty of living matter." She had drunk inspiration of a different kind from her infancy. In her New England home the very atmosphere was charged with religious influences. She was taught, or rather she had learned without a teacher, not only to see God in the flowers and in the stars, but to recognize his immediate agency in all things terrestrial. Night after night, listening to the tremulous tones of her father as he read a lesson from the sacred page, not only to those of his own blood, but to his "man-servant, his maid-servant, and the stranger within his gates," she had felt the presence of a tangible God, and when, at last, she followed the fortunes of the chosen one of her heart far into the great North Woods, nature spoke to her from the forest and the cataract, deepening each early impression and intensifying each early belief, until she realized as a living fact that the "Lord was ever in his holy temple" and that his temple was the universe. To a woman like this every act of life became a matter of conscience, and the training of her child of course became such to Mrs. Glazier. She had watched the pitfalls which the "world, the flesh and the devil"--that trinity of evil--provide for the feet of the unwary, and she determined that young Willard's steps, if she could prevent it, should never stray that way. Her husband took life and its duties much more easily. He was less rigid in his sense of parental responsibility. While a man of great rectitude of purpose, he was good-natured to a fault--somewhat improvident, careless of money, ever ready to extend aid to the needy, and especially disinclined to the exercise of harshness in his home, even when the stern element of authority was needed. In short, he was one of those big-hearted men who are so brimful of the "milk of human kindness" that the greatest pain they ever feel is the pain they see others suffer. His plan therefore was, spare the rod even if you _do_ spoil the child.