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inquiries, I _cannot_ believe."
"I am sorry it is so, on every account," returned Mary, in a low and
saddened tone. "Sorry, that one of so frank, ingenuous a mind, should find
it impossible to accept the creed of his fathers, and sorry that it must
leave so impassable a chasm between us, for ever."
"No, Mary; that can never be! Nothing but death can separate us for so
long a time! While we meet, we shall at least be friends; and friends love
to meet and to see each other often."
"It may seem unkind, at a moment like this, Roswell, but it is in truth
the very reverse, if I say we ought not to meet each other here, if we are
bent on following our own separate ways towards a future world. My God is
not your God; and what can there be of peace in a family, when its two
heads worship different deities? I am afraid that you do not think
sufficiently of the nature of these things.
"I did not believe you to be so illiberal, Mary! Had the deacon said as
much, I might not have been surprised; but, for one like you to tell me
that my God is not your God, is narrow, indeed!"
"Is it not so, Roswell? And, if so, why should we attempt to gloss over
the truth by deceptive words? I am a believer in the Redeemer, as the Son
of God; as one of the Holy Trinity; while you believe in him only as a
man--a righteous and just, a sinless man, if you will, but as a man only.
Now, is not the difference in these creeds immense? Is it not, in truth,
just the difference between God and man? I worship my Redeemer; regard him
as the equal of the Father--as a part of that Divine Being; while you look
on him as merely a man without sin--as a man such as Adam probably was
before the fall."
"Do we know enough of these matters, Mary, to justify us in allowing them
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to interfere with our happiness?"
"We are told that they are all-essential to our happiness--not in the
sense you may mean, Roswell, but in one of far higher import--and we
cannot neglect them, without paying the penalty."
"I think you carry these notions too far, dearest Mary, and that it is
possible for man and wife most heartily to love each other, and to be
happy in each other, without their thinking exactly alike on religion. How
many good and pious women do you see, who are contented and prosperous as
wives and mothers, and who are members of meeting, but whose husbands make
no profession of any sort!"
"That may be true, or not. I lay no claim to a right to judge of any
other's duties, or manner of viewing what they ought to do. Thousands of
girls marry without _feeling_ the very obligations that they profess to
reverence; and when, in after life, deeper convictions come, they cannot
cast aside the connections they have previously formed, if they would; and
probably would not, if they could. That is a different thing from a young
woman, who has a deep sense of what she owes to her Redeemer, becoming
deliberately, and with a full sense of what she is doing, the wife of one
who regards her God as merely a man--I care not how you qualify this
opinion, by saying a pure and sinless man; it will be man, still. The
difference between God and man is too immense, to be frittered away by any
such qualifications as that"
"But, if I find it _impossible_ to believe all you believe, Mary, surely
you would not punish me for having the sincerity to tell you the truth,
and the whole truth."
"No, indeed, Roswell," answered the honest girl, gently, not to say
tenderly. "Nothing has given me a better opinion of your principles,
Roswell--a higher notion of what your upright and frank character really
is, than the manly way in which you have admitted the justice of my
suspicions of your want of faith--of faith, as I consider faith can alone
exist. This fair dealing has made me honour you, and esteem you, in
addition to the more girlish attachment that I do not wish to conceal from
you, at least, I have so long felt."
"Blessed Mary!" exclaimed Roswell Gardiner, almost ready to fall down on
his knees and worship the pretty enthusiast, who sat at his side, with a
countenance in which intense interest in his welfare was beaming from two
of the softest and sweetest blue eyes that maiden ever bent on a youth in
modest tenderness, whatever disposition he might be in to accept her God
as his God. "How can one so kind in all other respects, prove so cruel in
this one particular!"
"Because that one particular, as you term it, Roswell, is all in all to
her," answered the girl, with a face that was now flushed with feeling. "I
must answer you as Joshua told the Israelites of old--'Choose you, this
day, whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served, that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]