But Audrey shook her head.
"Thou art quite mistaken, Bessie," she said. "It is a help to me to go to church and join in the prayers. I can understand what you mean, I think; and it may be that some do think only of the church, and not of God or our Lord Jesus Christ, when they are there, but they might do the same in your Quaker meeting-house as well as at church."
"But there is nothing at our meeting-house to make us forget we go to listen to the voice of the Spirit, either in ourselves or spoken by the mouth of one of our brethren, as he is moved to speak at the time, either for our warning or our encouragement. We have no words written down in a book to be repeated over and over again, whether we like them or not. Nay, verily; such things are not for Quakers, who have learned the power of sin, and the power of God also!"
The girl spoke in such fierce scorn that Audrey felt rather displeased, and angry words trembled upon her lips; but she remembered the talk she had had with her aunt that afternoon, and she kept them back, for she really wanted to find out more than she knew about these people, and why they were so hated and despised.
"Then it is our churches you dislike so much?" she said at last, after a long pause.
"Your churches, your world, and your sin and wickedness, which are all tangled up together, hiding the light—the true light—that God would put into every man, if he did not smother it with this tangle of corruption."
"Nay, but, Bessie, the church is not the evil thing you think it. Is not my aunt a good woman? and she goes to church sometimes, as well as to your meeting-house."
"Martha Drayton is a right worthy woman; but, verily, she is a stumbling-block unto many, because she goeth to this house of Baal," said the little Quakeress fiercely; and Audrey saw that it was of little use arguing with her further, for, however they might agree in the more essential points of their religious faith, the outer forms of it they were never likely to appreciate truly, or the position of the other. Audrey might be a little more tolerant, but she was no less sincerely attached to the forms and ceremonies of the Established Church than Bessie, taught by her father to hate all such forms, was in her determination to see no good in anything but the simple meeting-house.
If the girls would have continued their discussion they could not, for they had scarcely spoken the last words when Deborah opened the door, and ushered in a tall dignified young man and the old Quaker whom Bessie had been to see earlier in the day.
"This is Friend William Penn," said the old man. "He hath come to make inquiries concerning Martha Drayton, for he hath heard that she is sorely stricken with grief and sickness at this time."