Not that Aunt Dorothy's nature was in any way vulgar, small, and narrow. Her heart was deep and high, if not always wide. To her convictions she would have sacrificed first herself, then the universe. Her convenience she would have sacrificed to the comfort of the meanest human being in the universe. She would not have swerved from her ridge of orthodoxy for the dearest love on earth. She would have stooped from it to save or help the most degraded wanderer, or her greatest enemy. But the most dangerous conviction she held was unfortunately one of the deepest. It was that of her own practical infallibility. It was strange that, with the profoundest and most practical convictions of her own sinfulness, she never could learn the impossibility that all error should be removed whilst any sin remains; that there should be no darkness in the mind while there is so much in the heart. Strange, but not uncommon. Her sin she acknowledged as her own. Her creed she identified entirely with the Holy Scriptures. It was not her own, she said, it was God's truth to the minutest point, and, as such, she would have suffered or fought for every clause. Nevertheless, with advancing years Roger and I grew into a deeper reverence for her character. If in our childhood she represented to us Justice with the sword and scales (often in our belief very effectually blindfolded), whilst Aunt Gretel enacted counteracting Mercy; in after years we grew rather to look on them as Truth and Tenderness, acting not counter to each other, but in combination. And in this imperfect world, where truth and love are never blended in perfect proportions in any one character, it is difficult to say on which we leant the most. It was strange to see how often their opposite attributes led them to the same actions. "Speaking the truth in love," was Aunt Dorothy's maxim; and if the love were sometimes lost in the emphasis on truth, neither truth nor love were ever sacrificed to selfish interest. "First pure then peaceable" was her wisdom; and I cannot say she always got as far as the "gentle, and easy to be entreated." But it is something to be able to look back on a life like hers, unprofaned by one stain of untruthfulness, or by one low or petty aim. It is only in looking back that we learn what a rock of strength she was to us all, or how the tenderest memories of home often cling like mosses around such rocks; the more closely, sometimes, for their very ruggedness. Thus our home at Netherby contained various elements ecclesiastical and political as well as moral, all of which, however, at the commencement of the civil wars were gathered together under the watchword, "Loyalty above all to the King of kings. Liberty to obey God."