Both she and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight faults until the blood came.

Nevertheless, as the son himself recognized, they meant heartily well by it.

But for the self-sacrifice and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of the son would have been impossible.
Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy by spiritual terrors.

Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to death.

God and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready to thrust sinners into hell.