It is to be reflected,
however, that those unhappy creatures who attempted to receive
Calvinism literally and absolutely paid for their mistake with madness;
and that it did not enter into the minds of generations of Puritans,
who lived and died in the error that they believed with their
understanding what they really received only with the imagination, to
take this view, in no way affects its truth.
Helen's position differed from that of her Puritan grandmothers from
the fact of her having turned her imagination back to art; but she
shared with them the temperament which made Puritanism possible. The
aesthetic sense, which is as universal in mankind as the passions,
clung in her case to sensuous beauty, while that of Mr. Candish clung
to what he considered beauty moral and spiritual; but the controlling
force in the life of both was the stinging inspiration of a fixed idea
of duty. They were thus able, although rather as a matter of
unconscious sympathy than of deliberate understanding, to comprehend
each other; and if Helen had the broader sight, Mr. Candish possessed
the greater power of ignoring self.
Edith stood on a middle ground between the two. At the time of her
marriage she had been much nearer to the position occupied by the
clergyman; and she would have been startled and shocked had she
realized how much her views had been modified during the six years of
her life with Fenton.
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