religion had never given her any disturbance.----Strictly attached to
the Church of England, as her forefathers had been from its first
establishment, she included in an adherence to this not only all the
graces of religion, but all the virtues of morality; and she could
hardly conceive how there could be majesty in the sovereign, or loyalty
in the subject, or valour in man, or virtue in woman, unless they were
comprised within the pale of the Church of England. These qualities,
with their adjuncts, had been always represented to her as co-existent
with an attachment to monarchy and Episcopacy, and vested solely in
those heroic characters of her ancestry, whose lives, and even deaths,
it was a proud delight to their young descendant to listen to,--while
all the opposite qualities,--all that man can hate, or woman
despise,--had been represented to her as instinctively resident in the
partizans of republicanism and the Presbytery. Thus her feelings and her
principles,--her reasoning powers and the habits of her life, all took
one way; and she was not only unable to make the least allowance for a
divergence from this way, but utterly unable to conceive that another
existed for those who believed in a God, or acknowledged human power at
all. She was as much at a loss to conceive how any good could come out
of that Nazareth of her abhorrence, as an ancient geographer would have
been to have pointed out America in a classical map.--Such was Margaret.
“Elinor, on the other hand, bred up amid a clamour of perpetual
contention,--for the house of her mother’s family, in which her first
years had been passed, was, in the language of the profane of those
times, a scruple-shop, where the godly of all denominations held their
conferences of contradiction,--had her mind early awakened to
differences of opinion, and opposition of principle. Accustomed to hear
these differences and oppositions often expressed with the most unruly
vehemence, she had never, like Margaret, indulged in a splendid
aristocracy of imagination, that bore every thing before it, and made
prosperity and adversity alike pay tribute to the pride of its triumph.
Since her admission into the house of her grandfather, the mind of
Elinor had become still more humble and patient,--more subdued and
self-denied. Compelled to hear the opinions she was attached to decried,
and the characters she reverenced vilified, she sat in reflective
silence; and, balancing the opposite extremes which she was destined to
witness, she came to the right conclusion,--that there must be good on
both sides, however obscured or defaced by passion and by interest, and
that great and noble qualities must exist in either party, where so much
intellectual power, and so much physical energy, had been displayed by
both. Nor could she believe that these clear and mighty spirits would be
for ever opposed to each other in their future destinations,--she loved
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