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“Her family members and their friends and associates were, for the most part, rigorous Unitarians and well-known Transcendentalists. But for all their liberalism in religion, in terms of their public and private behavior they were still old-fashioned, upright Puritans. 'In other words, they are good people,' she said. 'Morally upright.' Their generation had abandoned the Calvinist theology in their youth, but had kept the morality. She, on the other hand, having been encouraged by her elders since her nursery days to forsake the old Puritan forms of religion, had retained none of the Puritans' moral uprightness and rigor. She was a sinner, she said. A sinner without the comfort of prayer and with no possibility of redemption.” — Russell Banks