Mrs. Stowe was one of the earliest among us to choose our own ancestral life as a field for story-telling. To fix her place in the literary procession, we must recall that it was only in 1849 that Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” appeared, and that that great book, “The Scarlet Letter” of Hawthorne and that popular one, “The Wide, Wide World,” by Sarah Warner, were being written at the same time that Mrs. Stowe was writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Blithedale Romance” and “Queechy” and “The Lamplighter” came in the early fifties. The true literary descendants of Mrs. Stowe in the realm of New England tales are Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah O. Jewett and Kate Douglas Wiggin. It will perhaps be a help to remember, too, that at the same time when Mrs. Stowe was giving us our racy _Mary Scudder_, George Eliot was introducing _Mrs. Poyser_ in “Middlemarch” to the British public. In this New England field Mrs. Stowe had therefore a unique opportunity. She had seen that life; having been separated from it, it grew precious to her, and, as her artistic instinct developed, seemed worthy of preservation. No one else has reproduced as she has done the first Christmas of New England, the days in the harbor of Cape Cod, the first day on shore, Christmas tide in Plymouth Harbor, and Elder Brewster’s Christmas sermon. These were the first fruits of the seed planted when little Harriet, unperceived in a dim corner of the garret study of Dr. Lyman Beecher, began to peer into the pages of Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia” and thought it an excellent story-book. Finally the more and more highly developed artistic skill of the novelist and the widened taste of the woman, and the deep and ineradicable religious nature of her soul united in the production of the novel, “The Minister’s Wooing,” a book in which Mrs. Stowe lets her passionate interest in old New England life have full sway. It is a story built solely upon religious feeling. Nothing like it had been done before, though since she led the way myriads of novels like it in this respect have been attempted. It was a torch borne onward into the dark. Mrs. Stowe maintained the right of the soul’s interests to a place among themes fit for artistic treatment in the novel as Elizabeth Barrett Browning did in poetry. Both were pioneers in this field of artistic endeavor. But people were totally unaccustomed to think of the novel in the terms of theology, and they at once classed “The Minister’s Wooing” as a theological treatise. This was not in the least true. It was a novel pure and simple, however seriously it dealt with the effects on certain souls of certain kinds of theological speculation. Gladstone appreciated the true position of the book. In a letter to Mrs. Stowe he called it a “beautiful and noble picture of Puritan life,” “exhibited upon a pattern felicitous beyond example as far as my knowledge goes.” Our knowledge also goes no farther, even to this day.