Excerpts from the Sermons & Speeches of a Famous Nineteenth Century Quaker Minister & Reformer

COMPILED BY Margaret Hope Bacon

Pendle Hill Pamphlet #234, 1980

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"Lucretia Mott is remembered today as an abolitionist and a pioneer of the woman's rights movement. Less well known, but perhaps in the long run more important, was her role as a nineteenth century Quaker minister, blessed with a deep spiritual insight, and a keen analytic mind. More perhaps than any other single nineteenth century Friend, she preached a social gospel, urging Friends into positive action in the peace movement and other humanitarian concerns as well as against racial and sexual discrimination. Many Friends today who believe in translating beliefs into action have been touched, perhaps unknowingly, by her lengthening shadow.

"True to Quaker tradition, Lucretia Mott spoke only as the spirit moved. She never wrote a speech or sermon, and she disliked formal writing of any sort. Except for her journal, kept while she was in England, a labored biographical memoir, and her breezy, domestic-centered correspondence, we might have no record of her thought. However, it was fortunately the custom of the day for someone to take down the sermons of noted Quaker ministers, and for newspaper reporters to drop in on meetings when a speaker of the stature of Lucretia Mott was in town." As you will discover in this pamphlet, Margaret Hope Bacon has been a faithful compiler of the thoughts and words of Lucretia Mott.