“No, Mary; that can never be!  Nothing but death can separate us for so long a time!  While we meet, we shall at least be friends; and friends love 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 deliberately, and with a full sense of what she is doing, the wife of one who regards her God as merely a man—­I care not how you qualify this opinion, by saying a pure and sinless man; it will be man, still.  The difference between God and man is too immense, to be frittered away by any such qualifications as that”