In his episodic story of the beginnings of the Quaker movement in England and the United States ["The Peaceable Kingdom"], de Hartog has steered each section around a person of wealth and intelligence who makes a great sacrifice through his commitment to the Quaker ideal. In the first section, Margaret Fell, who falls in love with the Quaker preacher George Fox, must exorcise the passion of sexual desire in order to achieve grace…. In the second section, the sacrificial lamb is a man who has little experience with practical affairs, yet he gives up his estate, his inheritance, his slaves and his standing in Philadelphia society to make a new home in the prairies. The other characters revolve around these two centers, and once de Hartog has completed the story of each of his two characters' conversion to sacrifice, he leaves them for a new plot of fictional...