The Voice

'The Voice' is a novel about the lives of the Roberts family, set in western Pennsylvania. Henry Roberts had become enamored with the charismatic movement led by Edward Irving that advocated for speaking in tongues as evidence of the Holy Ghost. When he married, as he did when he was nearly fifty, his wife was impatient with his Faith—indeed, fearful of it, and with persistent, nagging reasonableness urged his return to the respectable paths of Presbyterianism. To his pain, when his girl Philippa grew up, she shrank from the emotion of his creed; she and her mother went to the brick church under the locust-trees of Lower Ripple; and when her mother died Philippa went there alone, for Henry Roberts, not being permitted to bear witness in the Church, did so out of it, by sitting at home on the Sabbath day. Now in his sixties, having moved his daughter to the stone house on the Perryville pike, they have both drawn the attention of the community, particularly the Christian ministers, who wonder about Henry's mysterious faith…