Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 36.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[334] not uncommon incident of the benevolence which is for the sake of helping others and not for the means of promoting self. They in their modesty illumine the text, which, though Jacobinical, is fine: ‘Perish our memory rather than our country.’ ‘Not unto us, not unto us,’ they said. They were doers of the word, unthinking of the praises of the world. As if they caught the purity of the sky to which their hearts were lifted, they “shed abroad a Saviour's love,” among the humble folk in whose dark plight (as from old England and New England they had been received) the ministries of these unrecorded women were as stars. The chastened sanctity of their toil rises before us as a beatitude of the discipline and duty of life. They are in the number of those great teachers who transfigure into beauty the inmost force and feeling of high calling, and by so doing, lift toward their likeness the ignorant and stumbling. Purified love of the highest shone in purified piety to the lowest. The slave had been civilized by Christianity, even if spared the curriculum of post graduate courses and aesthetical belles lettres. Never was a great trust so greatly discharged.