n when custom or institutions
hold them up to some higher degree. But that higher degree has in it an
element of emancipation from the necessary despotisms of physical life.
If it were possible to bring the whole community up to a plane of
spirituality, it would be found that there and there only could be the
highest measure of liberty. And this is my answer to those who grumble
at the restriction of Sunday liberty. It is only the liberty of the
senses that suffers. A higher and nobler civil liberty, moral liberty,
social liberty, will work out of it. Sunday is the common people's
Magna Charta."

"Well done, Doctor! I give up. Hereafter you shall see me radiant on
Sunday. I must not get my hay in if storms do threaten to spoil it; but
I shall give my conscience a hitch up, and take it out in that. I must
not ride out; but then I shall regard every virtuous self-denial as a
moral investment with good dividends coming in by-and-by. I can't let
the children frolic in the front dooryard; but then, while they sit
waiting for the sun to go down, and your _Sun_-day to be over, I shall
console myself that they are one notch nearer an angelic condition every
week. But good-night, good-night, Mrs. Wentworth. I hope you may not
become so spiritual as quite to disdain the body. I really think, for
this world, the body has some respectable uses yet. Good-night, Rose.
The angels take care of you, if there is one of them good enough."

And so the judge left.

They sat silently looking at the sun, now but just above the horizon. A
few scarfs of cloud, brilliant with flame-color, and every moment
changing forms, seemed like winged spirits, half revealed, that hovered
round the retiring orb.

Mrs. Wentworth at length broke the silence.

"I always thought, Doctor, that you believed Sunday over-strictly kept,
and that you were in favor of relaxation."

"I am. Just as fast as you can make it a day of real religious
enjoyment, it will relax itself. True and deep spiritual feeling is the
freest of all experiences. And it reconciles in itself the most perfect
consciousness of liberty with the most thorough observance of outward
rules and proprieties. Liberty is not an outward condition. It is an
inward attribute, or rather a name for the quality of life produced by
the highest moral attributes. When communities come to that condition,
we shall see fewer laws and higher morality.

"The one great poem of New England is her Sunday! Throug