"Mother!" said Charles with solemn earnestness, "Mr. Cartwright's doctrines are dreadful and sinful in my eyes. My excellent and most beloved father was a Protestant Christian, born, educated, and abiding to his last hour in the faith and hope taught by the established church of his country. In that faith and hope, mother, I also have been reared by him and by you; and rather than change it for the impious and frightful doctrines of the sectarian minister you name, who most dishonestly has crept within the pale of an establishment whose dogmas and discipline he profanes,--rather, mother, than adopt this Mr. Cartwright's unholy belief, and obey his unauthorised and unscriptural decrees, I would kneel down and implore that my bones might be at once laid beside my father's." "Leave the room, Charles Mowbray!" exclaimed his mother almost in a scream; "let not the walls that shelter me be witness to such fearful blasphemy!" "I cannot, and I will not leave you, mother, till I have told you how very wretched you are making me and my poor sister Helen by thus forsaking that form of religion in which from our earliest childhood we have been accustomed to see you worship. Why,--why, dearest mother, should you bring this dreadful schism upon your family? Can you believe this to be your duty?" "By what right, human or divine, do you thus question me, lost, unhappy boy? But I will answer you; and I trust that I shall be forgiven for intercommuning with one who lives in open rebellion to the saints! Yes, sir; I do believe it is my duty to hold fast the conviction which Heaven in its goodness has sent me. I do believe it is my duty to testify by my voice, and by every act of my life during the remaining time for which the Lord shall spare me for the showing forth of his glory, that I consider the years that are past as an abomination in his sight; that my living in peace and happiness with your unawakened and unregenerate father was an abomination in the sight of the Lord; and that now, at the eleventh hour, my only hope of being received rests in my hating and abhorring, and forsaking and turning away from, all that is, and has been, nearest and dearest to my sinful heart!" Charles listened to this rant with earnest and painful attention, and, when she ceased, looked at her through tears that presently overflowed his eyes. "Have I then lost my only remaining parent?" said he. "And can you thus close your heart against me, and your poor Helen, my mother?"