on to
Infinite Wisdom and Goodness. The Lord reigneth, and will at last bring
infinite good out of evil, whether _our_ small portion of existence be
included or not."

After a few moments more of conference, Mrs. Scudder and the Doctor
departed, leaving Mary alone in the house of mourning.

CHAPTER XXIII.

We have said before, what we now repeat, that it is impossible to write
a story of New England life and manners for superficial thought or
shallow feeling. They who would fully understand the springs which moved
the characters with whom we now associate must go down with us to the
very depths.

Never was there a community where the roots of common life shot down so
deeply, and were so intensely grappled around things sublime and
eternal. The founders of it were a body of confessors and martyrs, who
turned their backs on the whole glory of the visible, to found in the
wilderness a republic of which the God of Heaven and Earth should be the
sovereign power. For the first hundred years grew this community, shut
out by a fathomless ocean from the existing world, and divided by an
antagonism not less deep from all the reigning ideas of nominal
Christendom.

In a community thus unworldly must have arisen a mode of thought,
energetic, original, and sublime. The leaders of thought and feeling
were the ministry, and we boldly assert that the spectacle of the early
ministry of New England was one to which the world gives no parallel.
Living an intense, earnest, practical life, mostly tilling the earth
with their own hands, they yet carried on the most startling and
original religious investigations with a simplicity that might have been
deemed audacious, were it not so reverential. All old issues relating to
government, religion, ritual, and forms of church organization having
for them passed away, they went straight to the heart of things, and
boldly confronted the problem of universal being. They had come out from
the world as witnesses to the most solemn and sacred of human rights.
They had accustomed themselves boldly to challenge and dispute all sham
pretensions and idolatries of past ages,--to question the right of kings
in the State, and of prelates in the Church; and now they turned the
same bold inquiries towards the Eternal Throne, and threw down their
glove in the lists as authorized defenders of every mystery in the
Eternal Government. The task they proposed to themselves was that of
reconciling the most tr