Letters of Lydia Maria Child, with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier and an appendix by Wendell Phillips.

LETTERS. 23
narrow, and the influence limited; for every word
and act that a human being sends forth lives forever.
It is a spiritual seed cast into the wide field of opinion.
Its results are too infinite for human calculation. It
will appear and reappear through all time, alwvays influencing the destiny of the human race for good or
for evil. Has not the one idea that rose silently in
Elizabeth Heyrick's 1 mind spread, until it has almost become a WVorld's idea? Have not the " stern
old Calvinists of Charles's time," despised as they
were, given their character to nations? W'oho can
predict the whole effect on habit and opinion in New
Rochelle, fifty years hence, of the spiritual warfare
now,going on in half of a small meeting-house, in that
secluded village? To a philosophical mind, nothing
that concerns the soul of man can be small or limited.
However humble its form, it is linked with infinity.
Tell -vour good father my "prayers " he shall have;
but not my "tears." Could he have wept for Luther when he stood before principalities and powers,
at the Diet of Worms, and calmly declared, "It is
neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I. I cannot othervise, God
assist me. Amen." It is odd enough that while the
plain Quakers of New Rochelle are making such a
fuss about colored people sitting on the same floor
with them, the King of France makes no objection to
having sons in the same school with black boys.
I To Elizabeth Heyyrick, of England, a member of the Society of
Frienls, belongs the honor of having been the first to promulgate, in
a pamphlet published by her in 1825, the doctrine of "Immediate,
not Gradual Emancipation." The abolitionists of Great Britain, then
struggling for the overthrow of slavery in the West Indies, speedily
adopted it as their key-note and cry, and -Mr. Garrison, in establishing
the Liberator, declaredt it to be the only impregnable position to assume in agitating for the abolition of slavery everywhere.