Religious development.
They greatly mistake the New England religious development who suppose that it was a mere culture of the head in dry, metaphysical doctrines. As in the rifts of the granite rocks grow flowers of wonderful beauty and delicacy, so in the secret recesses of Puritan life, by the fireside of the farmhouse, in the contemplative silence of austere care and labor, grew up religious experiences that brought a heavenly brightness down into the poverty of commonplace existence.
Family worship.
The custom of family worship was one of the most rigid inculcations of the Puritan order of society, and came down from parent to child with the big family Bible, where the births, deaths, and marriages of the household stood recorded.
In Zeph’s case, the custom seemed to be merely an inherited tradition, which had dwindled into a habit purely mechanical. Yet, who shall say?
Of a rugged race, educated in hardness, wringing his substance out of the very teeth and claws of reluctant nature, on a rocky and barren soil, and under a harsh, forbidding sky, who but the All-seeing could judge him? In that hard soul, there may have been, thus uncouthly expressed, a loyalty to Something Higher, however dimly perceived. It was acknowledging that even he had his master. One thing is certain, the custom of family prayers, such as it was, was a great comfort to the meek saint by his side, to whom any form of prayer, any pause from earthly care, and looking up to a Heavenly Power, was a blessed rest. In that daily toil, often beyond her strength, when she never received a word of sympathy or praise, it was a comfort all day to her to have had a chapter in the Bible and a prayer in the morning. Even though the chapter were one that she could not by any possibility understand a word of, yet it put her in mind of things in that same dear book that she did understand,—things that gave her strength to live and hope to die by,—and it was enough! Her faith in the Invisible Friend was so strong that she needed but to touch the hem of His garment. Even a table of genealogies out of His book was a sacred charm, an amulet of peace.
The kitchen fireplace.