Christianity; and theirs, with all its rites, with all its pretensions, with all its heralded faith, was but a mockery to him.  It was but a shadow of a substantial reality.  He chose the substance; he rejected the shadow, and men called him ‘infidel’ who had not a tithe of vital religion in their own souls, while his was filled to repletion with that heavenly boon.  For a time the war of persecution raged without, and slander and base innuendoes the weapons were employed against us.  But within all was peace and quiet, and our home was indeed a heaven,—­for we judged that heaven is no locality, no ideal country staked off so many leagues this way, and so many that; but that it is in our own souls, and we could have our heaven here as well as beyond the grave.  We thought Christ meant so when he said ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you’!  We pitied those who were always saying that when they reached heaven there would be an end of all sorrow, and wished they could see as we did that heaven was to reach them, not they to reach it.  We feared that the saying of Pope, ‘Man never is, but always to be, blest,’ might prove true of them, and that even when they had passed the boundary which they fancied divided them from heaven, they would yet be looking on to so the future state for the anticipated bliss.

“What cared we, in our home, for the jibes and sneers and falsehoods without?  Those who are conscious of being in the right have no fear of the goal to which their feet are tending.  I heard from my father often, but never met him.  By some means he always evaded me.  That which troubled him most was the calmness with which I received the results of his course towards me.  He knew that I was happy and contented.  This was what troubled him.  Had I manifested a great sorrow and writhing beneath what he deemed troubles, he would have greatly rejoiced, and so would all his friends.  I had accumulated a small property, and was prospering, notwithstanding the efforts of many to embarrass me.  A few began to see that I was not so bad as I had been represented to be, and they began to sympathize with me.  This aroused my father’s anger afresh.  We had been married by a magistrate of another town, and the clouds above our outside or temporary affairs seemed breaking away, when an event occurred that frustrated all our plans.

“One evening I heard the cry of ‘fire,’ and, on attempting to go out, I found the entry of the house filled with a dense smoke.  The smoke poured into the room in which Evelina and her father were seated.  I rushed to the window, dashed it out, and, having seen my wife and her father safely deposited without, secured what of the property I could.  In a few moments the cottage was enveloped in flames, and it was not long before no vestige of our happy home remained, except the smoking embers and a heap of ashes.  We were now, indeed, poor in gold and lands; but it seemed to each of us that what had been taken from our purse had been put in our hearts, for we loved each other more than ever before, if such a love were possible; and, though we received but little sympathy from without, we had a fund of sympathy within, that made us forget our seeming sorrows, and rejoice in bliss unspeakable.