The Appeal of Quakerism to the Non-Mystic Can you be a Quaker in the 21st century (especially a Liberal one), and not be a mystic? Yes. And that’s been true for a LONG time. A century ago, in 1916, a noted British Friend made this case (but he was not the first or the last) … Continue reading The Appeal of Quakerism to The Non-Mystic
Researching and writing about Progressive Friends took up most of my time from the autumn of 2013 through the spring of 2014. Often this was a paradoxical experience: from one angle, it was a very solitary effort: from another, very crowded. I did this research at Pendle Hill in Pennsylvania, as the Cadbury research scholar … Continue reading Dog Days Diversions: Alone Together: Living With & Writing About Progressive Friends
While she was the wife of a prosperous textile manufacturer, all her affluence and “privilege” did not save her first child, born in 1829, from an early death — or the next four after him: all five died, one after another, in infancy or shortly afterward.
As the fifth one faded, Chace penned a rhymed plea
“Oh! no, it cannot, cannot be;
My darling babe will live.
He must not go away from me,
He is the last of five. . . .
And, much and often have I prayed,
That so it might not be;
That in a little coffin laid
This one I ne’er might see.
“Oh! Father, spare him longer yet,
Our lonely home to cheer.
We’ve often said it was for this
That Thou hast sent him here.”
But it was not to be.
Among the attenders was Sojourner Truth, the rough-hewn but singularly eloquent advocate for abolition.
She is what moved me to cobble together this post. Here’s what the minutes say:
Sojourner Truth, an emancipated slave mother, after uttering few impressive sentences, expressed herself as being deeply moved to sing, and she accordingly sung the following lines:
“I pity the slave mother, careworn and weary,
Who sighs as she presses her babe to her breast;
I lament her sad fate, all so hopeless and dreary,
I lament for her woes, and her wrongs unredressed.
O who can imagine her heart’s deep emotion,
As she thinks of her children about to be sold ;
You may picture the bounds of the rock-girdled ocean,
But the grief of that mother can never be told.
The mildew of slavery has blighted each blossom,
That ever has bloomed in her pathway below;
It has froze every fountain that gushed in her bosom,
And chilled her heart’s verdure with pitiless woe:
Her parents, her kindred, all crushed by oppression,
her husband still doomed in his desert to gay;
No arm to protect from the tyrant’s aggression.
She must weep as she treads on her desolate way.
O, slave-mother, hope! see — the nation is shaking!
The arm of the Lord is awake to thy wrong!
The slaveholder’s heart now with terror is quaking,
Salvation and Mercy to Heaven belong!
Rejoice, O rejoice! for the child thou art rearing
May one day lift up its unmanacled form,
While hope, to thy heart, like the rainbow so cheering,
Is born, like the rainbow, ‘mid tempest and storm.’”
Thanks to Scott Horton and his peerless “No Comment” blog, for this quote from Plato, which struck home with me today: