Moreover, we do not
want a novel of society from Mrs. Stowe; she is quite too good to be
wasted in that way, and her tread is much more firm on the turf of the
"door-yard" or the pasture, and the sanded floor of the farmhouse,
than on the velvet of the _sal?n_. We have no notion how she is
to develop her plot, but we think we foresee chances for her best
power in the struggle which seems foreshadowed between Mary's
conscientious admiration of the doctor and her half-conscious passion
for James, before she discovers that one of these conflicting feelings
means simply moral liking and approval, and the other that she is a
woman and that she loves. And is not the value of dogmatic theology as
a rule of life to be thoroughly tested for the doctor by his slave-
trading parishioners? Is he not to learn the bitter difference between
intellectual acceptance of a creed and that true partaking of the
sacrament of love and faith and sorrow that makes Christ the very
life-blood of our being and doing? And has not James Marvyn also his
lesson to be taught? We foresee him drawn gradually back by Mary from
his recoil against Puritan formalism to a perception of how every
creed is pliant and plastic to a beautiful nature, of how much charm
there may be in an hereditary faith, even if it have become almost
conventional.
"In the materials of character already present in the story, there is
scope for Mrs.
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