“Now, it is natural for men to prefer an animal life.  By-and-by they will learn that such a life necessitates force, absolutism.  It is natural for unreflecting men to complain when custom or institutions hold them up to some higher degree.  But that higher degree has in it an element of emancipation from the necessary despotisms of physical life.  If it were possible to bring the whole community up to a plane of spirituality, it would be found that there and there only could be the highest measure of liberty.  And this is my answer to those who grumble at the restriction of Sunday liberty.  It is only the liberty of the senses that suffers.  A higher and nobler civil liberty, moral liberty, social liberty, will work out of it.  Sunday is the common people’s Magna Charta.”

“Well done, Doctor!  I give up.  Hereafter you shall see me radiant on Sunday.  I must not get my hay in if storms do threaten to spoil it; but I shall give my conscience a hitch up, and take it out in that.  I must not ride out; but then I shall regard every virtuous self-denial as a moral investment with good dividends coming in by-and-by.  I can’t let the children frolic in the front dooryard; but then, while they sit waiting for the sun to go down, and your Sun-day to be over, I shall console myself that they are one notch nearer an angelic condition every week.  But good-night, good-night, Mrs. Wentworth.  I hope you may not become so spiritual as quite to disdain the body.  I really think, for this world, the body has some respectable uses yet.  Good-night, Rose.  The angels take care of you, if there is one of them good enough.”

And so the judge left.

They sat silently looking at the sun, now but just above the horizon.  A few scarfs of cloud, brilliant with flame-color, and every moment changing forms, seemed like winged spirits, half revealed, that hovered round the retiring orb.

Mrs. Wentworth at length broke the silence.

“I always thought, Doctor, that you believed Sunday over-strictly kept, and that you were in favor of relaxation.”

“I am.  Just as fast as you can make it a day of real religious enjoyment, it will relax itself.  True and deep spiritual feeling is the freest of all experiences.  And it reconciles in itself the most perfect consciousness of liberty with the most thorough observance of outward rules and proprieties.  Liberty is not an outward condition.  It is an inward attribute, or rather a name for the quality of life produced by the highest moral attributes.  When communities come to that condition, we shall see fewer laws and higher morality.

“The one great poem of New England is her Sunday!  Through that she has escaped materialism.  That has been a crystal dome overhead, through which Imagination has been kept alive.  New England’s imagination is to be found, not in art and literature, but in her inventions, her social organism, and above all in her religious life.  The Sabbath has been the nurse of that.  When she ceases to have a Sunday, she will be as this landscape is:—­now growing dark, all its lines blurred, its distances and gradations fast merging into sheeted darkness and night.  Come, let us go in!”