"How long have you been a Quaker, Mistress Westland?"
"Nay, I am but Friend Bessie," replied the other girl quickly. "We are a plain people, and use but plain speech. My father belonged to the Society of Friends many years; how many I know not, but I can remember a time when he was wild and often unkind to my mother, though that was before he heard our leader Fox preach."
"But what do Quakers believe? My nurse told me the other day that they were atheists, and did not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ," said Audrey, drawing her chair a little closer to Bessie's in the dimly-lighted room.
"Many have slandered us thus, not knowing aught concerning us," replied Bessie in an eager tone, for somehow, although this girl was in the world and partook of its ways, Bessie felt drawn towards her; and so she added, "We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came down from heaven to die for us. We believe, too, that the life He gave for us must be in us, or we can never be saved."
"Then you believe as we do, that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin?" interrupted Audrey, who was anxious to find out some points of agreement between her own faith and that of the Quakers, since her beloved aunt was a Quaker.
"Yes, perhaps that is it," answered Bessie slowly. "Only we say that Christ must be the inner life of every man, and that this life we must be careful to cultivate, in order to be saved from darkness and evil."
"But—but if you believe all that, why should you not come to church as I do?" said Audrey eagerly. "It is what my father teaches in his sermons. Won't you go with me on Sunday and hear him preach?" asked Audrey eagerly.
"Go to a steeple-house!" exclaimed Bessie, in a tone of horror. "Nay, verily, for my father would curse me, an he thought I had forgotten what he had taught me."
"You call a church a steeple-house, and think it such a dreadful place," said Audrey, in a tone of wondering amazement. "Why should you speak of it in this way? It is God's house."
But Bessie shook her head to this. "Nay, nay, it cannot be that," she said decidedly. "Only we who have the life of Christ within us can be the house of God. Your steeple-house, with its forms and ceremonies, makes men forget this true life within them. This light that God only can put into the soul of man can alone be a house of God. That is why my father hated steeple-houses, because they made men forget God, he said."