Excerpt from An Address Delivered Before the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society: At Its Annual Meeting, 25 Dec, 1837

This anniversary of your Association, formed to aid in the overthrow of Slavery, and the disenthralment of your fettered countrymen, seems happily to fall on the birth-day of Him who came "to preach deliverance to the captives - and to set at liberty them that are bruised."

And think it not strange, my respected friends, that with objects and purposes such as engaged the preacher at Nazareth, you should encounter persecution - that the wealth and the standing, the loftiness and the fashion should cast you out of the pale of its regard and acknowledgment, that you should be regarded as vulgar enthusiasts - that the judicious and prudent ones, with whom principle is abstraction - whose path of duty is what they term "expediency" - a reputable thrifty conformity with the world - that these should toss the head and curl the lip of impatient scorn at your low enterprise, and give you place even down among those outcast ones, whose cause you are nobly espousing. Think it scarcely strange that you should be literally mobbed in this day, women as you are, although the Marys and the Marthas, who "left their sphere" to follow the "emissary" at Nazareth, who attended him at the crucifixion, amid scenes that made the manly heart of Peter quail in denial of his Lord - who mingled unattended in the throngs of the soldiery, amid the tramping of the horsemen and the terrors of the centurions, to sustain by their affectionate and sympathetic presence, their suffering Saviour - these women were never mobbed or molested, even by those rude and callous-hearted men who could crucify the Son of God. But our age is in advance of theirs. "Public sentiment" now stoops to no distinction of sex - men are not now its exclusive objects - and its movements are not confined to the rough and ruffian classes of community. Women are its legitimate subjects, and gentlemen obey its high impulses.

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