While duty and personal identity often pull individual characters and the entire community in different directions, the forces of religion, transcendence, and virtue are less clearly opposed. Instead, they are forces that should be unified, but forces that Kit must negotiate on her own. The intensity of Puritan religious conviction cannot be denied, and it is so omnipresent that Kit finds it overwhelming. At the same time, it is so rigid that she finds little or no emotional connection to their worship. Puritans accent rules, punishment, and duty so heavily that there seems little room for joy. Even though Kit takes pleasure in pretty clothes, her soul really sings in response to the wonders of nature. Her purest religious responses in the novel come in moments of nearly wordless transcendence, as happens when she sees the Great Meadows for the first time or experiences the leaves changing in New England.

While Kit would not call those moments “religious experiences,” it is clear to readers that they tap into the same spiritual wellsprings. That’s what makes it so sad when Kit sees her uncle caresses the soil. She recognizes a kinship with him that goes beyond family and that, tragically, there is no way to praise or acknowledge in the Puritan world. In a similar fashion, the Puritans are very concerned with virtue and, specifically, with the relatively sinful or pure status of their own souls. However, they attempt to live this way by rules and regulations—witness the deacons knocking boys who are inattentive during worship services on the head with poles. This requires continual vigilance, leaving them forever on guard against temptation and with no place for the gentler virtues that Hannah Tupper embodies. Elizabeth George Speare’s descriptions of the welcoming warmth of Hannah’s kitchen make it clear how crucial she considers these virtues, and indeed they are essential in the lives of Prudence, Kit, and Nat. While this might be considered an endorsement of Quakers over Puritans, it is better to take it as a more generalized call for the gentler virtues that should be part of any religion, especially one like Christianity, which emphasizes the power of love.