ve
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
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
deliberatel