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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, always 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 World's idea?
Have not the “stern old Calvinists of Charles's time,” despised as they were, given their character to nations?
Who 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 your 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 otherwise, 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.
1 To Elizabeth Heyrick, of England, a member of the Society of Friends, 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, declared it to be the only impregnable position to assume in agitating for the abolition of slavery everywhere.
Boston, Hougton Mifflin, 1884.
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