nterceding hands
for the parted soul.

But the clear logic and intense individualism of New England deepened
the problems of the Augustinian faith, while they swept away all those
softening provisions so earnestly clasped to the throbbing heart of that
great poet of theology. No rite, no form, no paternal relation, no faith
or prayer of church, earthly or heavenly, interposed the slightest
shield between the trembling spirit and Eternal Justice. The individual
entered eternity alone, as if he had no interceding relation in the
universe.

This, then, was the awful dread which was constantly underlying life.
This it was which caused the tolling bell in green hollows and lonely
dells to be a sound which shook the soul and searched the heart with
fearful questions. And this it was that was lying with mountain weight
on the soul of the mother, too keenly agonized to feel that doubt in
such a case was any less a torture than the most dreadful certainty.

Hers was a nature more reasoning than creative and poetic; and whatever
she believed bound her mind in strictest chains to its logical results.
She delighted in the regions of mathematical knowledge, and walked them
as a native home; but the commerce with abstract certainties fitted her
mind still more to be stiffened and enchained by glacial reasonings, in
regions where spiritual intuitions are as necessary as wings to birds.

Mary was by nature of the class who never reason abstractly, whose
intellections all begin in the heart, which sends them colored with its
warm life-tint to the brain. Her perceptions of the same subjects were
as different from Mrs. Marvyn's as his who revels only in color from his
who is busy with the dry details of mere outline. The one mind was
arranged like a map, and the other like a picture. In all the system
which had been explained to her, her mind selected points on which it
seized with intense sympathy, which it dwelt upon and expanded till all
else fell away. The sublimity of disinterested benevolence,--the harmony
and order of a system tending in its final results to infinite
happiness,--the goodness of God,--the love of a self-sacrificing
Redeemer,--were all so many glorious pictures, which she revolved in her
mind with small care for their logical relations.

Mrs. Marvyn had never, in all the course of their intimacy, opened her
mouth to Mary on the subject of religion. It was not an uncommon
incident of those times for persons of gr