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Yet there have been critics, souls even, one rejoices not to say priests, disturbed by her irreverence. It has also been said that her letters and conversation were salted with the Bible and its characters with a spontaneous directness that would have delighted St. Francis of Assisi as much as it would have desolated Cotton Mather. But the religious naïveté of her environment must be suggested in extenuation,—the Calvinistic rigidity of precise definition so antagonistic to her intuition of the unknown.
It is in this mood of exasperation that she asks:
If she appeared to take liberties with her own relation to her religious training it was probably because she often felt nearer of kin to her Father in Heaven than her New England father on earth. Her spirit approached the Unseen with more assurance in the range of the immaterial and boundless by some subtle bond that saved her from fear, until she was snatched back again by the force of instilled temerity.
She says she often felt "God must be lonesome in dreary highness, up above flower or cloud or star"; and when in one rebellious outburst she cries:
