I was a very strict disciplinarian--too much so, perhaps, sometimes:
Ethelwyn, on the other hand, was too much inclined, I thought, to excuse
everything. I was law, she was grace. But grace often yielded to law, and
law sometimes yielded to grace. Yet she represented the higher; for in the
ultimate triumph of grace, in the glad performance of the command from love
of what is commanded, the law is fulfilled: the law is a schoolmaster to
bring us to Christ. I must say this for myself, however, that, although
obedience was the one thing I enforced, believing it the one thing upon
which all family economy primarily depends, yet my object always was to set
my children free from my law as soon as possible; in a word, to help them
to become, as soon as it might be, a law unto themselves. Then they would
need no more of mine. Then I would go entirely over to the mother's higher
side, and become to them, as much as in me lay, no longer law and truth,
but grace and truth. But to return to my children--it was soon evident not
only that Wynnie had grown more indulgent to Dora's vagaries, but that Dora
was more submissive to Wynnie, while the younger children began to
obey their eldest sister with a willing obedience, keeping down their
effervescence within doors, and letting it off only out of doors, or in the
out-houses.
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