The Puritans

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The Puritans
Arlo Bates
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. All's Well That Ends Well , iv. 3.
Abandoning my heart, and rapt in ecstasy, I ran after her till I came to a place in which religion and reason forsook me. _Persian Religious Hymn.
AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT Henry VIII., i. 3.
We are all the children of the Puritans, Mrs. Herman said smiling. Of course there is an ethical strain in all of us.
Her cousin, Philip Ashe, who wore the dress of a novice from the Clergy House of St. Mark, regarded her with a serious and doubtful glance.
But there is so much difference between you and me, he began. Then he hesitated as if not knowing exactly how to finish his sentence.
The difference, she responded, is chiefly a matter of the difference between action and reaction. You and I come of much the same stock ethically. My childhood was oppressed by the weight of the Puritan creed, and the reaction from it has made me what you feel obliged to call heretic; while you, with a saint for a mother, found even Puritanism hardly strict enough for you, and have taken to semi-monasticism. We are both pushed on by the same original impulse: the stress of Puritanism.
She had been putting on her gloves as she spoke, and now rose and stood ready to go out. Philip looked at her with a troubled glance, rising also.