ther teacher,
was her stainless piety. In this respect, if in no other, women are
always more sincere and single-hearted than men--perhaps because the
distribution of social duties gives her less temptation to
hypocrisy--and even the worldly, strong-minded, and self-reliant
daughter of the church-hating Puritan-Zion, displayed a tendency toward
genuine religious feeling.[80]

But in our subject, this was not a mere bias, but a constant, unflagging
sentiment, an everyday manifestation. She was as warm in the cause of
religion on one day as upon another, in small things as in great--as
zealous in the repression of all unbecoming and ungodly levity, as in
the eradication of positive vice. Life was too solemn a thing with her
to admit of thoughtless amusements--it was entirely a state of
probation, not to be enjoyed in itself, or for itself, but purgatorial,
remedial, and preparatory. She hated all devices of pleasure as her
ancestors did the abominations of popery. A fiddle she could tolerate
only in the shape of a bass-viol; and dancing, if practised at all, must
be called "calisthenics." The drama was to her an invention of the Enemy
of Souls--and if she ever saw a play, it must be at a _museum_, and not
within the walls of that temple of Baal, the theatre. None but "serious"
conversation was allowable, and a hearty laugh was the expression of a
spirit ripe for the destination of unforgiven sinners.

Errors in religion were too tremendous to be tolerated for a moment, and
the form (or rather anti-form) of worship handed down by her fathers,
had cost too much blood and crime to be oppugned. She thought
Barebones's the only godly parliament that ever sat, and did not hate
Hume half so much for his infidelity, as for his ridicule of the
roundheads. Her list of martyrs was made up of the intruders ousted by
Charles's "Act of Conformity," and her catalogue of saints was headed by
the witch-boilers of Massachusetts Bay. She abhorred the memory of all
_popish_ persecutions, and knew no difference between catholic and
cannibal. Her running calendar of living saints were born "to inherit
the earth," and heaven, too: they possessed a monopoly of all truth, an
unlimited "indulgence" to enforce conformity, and, in their zeal, an
infallible safeguard against the commission of error. She had no
patience with those who could not "see the truth;" and he who reviled
the puritan mode of worship, was "worse than the infidel." The only
ar