What Rome habitually did or permitted, what at any rate she had habitually done or permitted in the past, could not--it seemed--be known by a pure woman! And she would glance from the books to the engraving of her grandfather above them,--to the stern and yet delicate face of the old Calvinist, with its high-peaked brow, and white neckcloth supporting the sharp chin; lifting her heart to him in a passionate endorsement, a common fierce hatred of wrong and tyranny.
She had grown older since then, and her country with her.

New England Puritanism was no longer what it had been; and the Catholic Church had spread in the land.

But in Uncle Ben's quiet household, and in her own feeling, the changes had been but slight and subtle.

Pity, perhaps, had insensibly taken the place of hatred.

But those old words 'priest' and 'mass' still rung in her ears as symbols of all that man had devised to corrupt and deface the purity of Christ.
And of what that purity might be, she had such tender, such positive traditions! Her mother had been a Christian mystic--a 'sweet woman,' meek as a dove in household life, yet capable of the fiercest ardours as a preacher and missionary, gathering rough labourers into barns and by the wayside, and dying before her time, worn out by the imperious energies of religion.