"I can tell you. Our Protestant faith and our civil liberty would be taken from us; for the latter depends on the former, and all we have done since 1640 would be to do over again. Jericho has fallen, would you rebuild it?"
"All I want is peace."
"That we shall now have. Our steel bodies, that have galled us long with the wearing of them, may be cast off; our men will return to their homes and their daily work, and our worship shall never more be broken up, but our Sabbaths be full of good things."
"If we love God, I wonder if it makes so much difference how we worship Him?"
"I am astonished at you, Martha."
"I am astonished likewise at all the sorrow and blood-shedding about surplices and chasubles and written prayers and such things."
"My dear mother!"
"Oh, my dear Jane, it is so; and I was astonished when I was a girl and saw my father go to poverty and prison for such trifles. Yes, I say trifles—and I am a Puritan minister's child, and not ashamed of it—and my husband and sons have been taken from me, and my household left for the battle-field, and I know not what sorrows and trials——"
"Come, come, Martha, you are tired and fretted. If we believe in a great and terrible God, how we are most acceptably to worship Him is not a trifling thing; far from it! I tell you both, the form of worship we have in England measures our civil liberty. If we submit to spiritual slavery, any king or queen or successful soldier may make us civil slaves. Now let the subject drop; the war is over, we will think of peace."
"Peace comes too late for many a family. There are the de Wicks."