Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

This is the second time I have walked out in stormy weather without a cloak. My “Appeal” in favor of anti-slavery, and attacking colonization, marched into the enemy's camp alone. It brought Dr. Channing to see me, for the first time; and he told me it had stirred up his mind to the conviction that he ought not to remain silent on the subject. Then came Dr. Palfrey, who, years afterward, said that the emancipation of his slaves might be traced to the impulse that book had given him. Charles Sumner writes me that the influence of my anti-slavery writings years ago has had an important effect on his course in Congress. . . . Who can tell how many young minds may be so influenced by the “Progress of Religious Ideas” as to materially change their career? I trust I have never impelled any one in the wrong direction. In the simplest things I write, whether for children or grown people, I always try to sow some seeds for freedom, truth, and humanity. S. J. May writes to me very warmly about the big book. He says he has commended it from his pulpit, as “the most valuable contribution to an enlarged, charitable, and true theology that has been made by any one in our country.” Of course, you will not understand him as meaning to compare me with such minds as Theodore Parker; but he considers my book more valuable than those written by many abler pens, because it is not written in the spirit of an opponent to prevailing false theologies.

You are right in supposing that while engaged on that work I “felt like an inhabitant of the second and third centuries.” Everything around me seemed foreign, as it did when I came out of Athens into Boston, after writing “Philothea.” That was a pleasant