Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/444

422. Mrs. Mott did not manifest the slightest restraint or embarrassment during that marked social occasion. No fictitious superiority ever oppressed her, neither did she descend in familiar surroundings from her natural dignity, but always maintained the perfect equilibrium of respect for herself and others.

I found in this new friend a woman emancipated from all faith in man-made creeds, from all fear of his denunciations. Nothing was too sacred for her to question, as to its rightfulness in principle and practice. "Truth for authority, not authority for truth," was not only the motto of her life, but it was the fixed mental habit in which she most rigidly held herself. It seemed to me like meeting a being from some larger planet, to find a woman who dared to question the opinions of Popes, Kings, Synods, Parliaments, with the same freedom that she would criticise an editorial in the London Times, recognizing no higher authority than the judgment of a pure-minded, educated woman. When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom; it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the earth. When I confessed to her my great enjoyment in works of fiction, dramatic performances, and dancing, and feared from underneath that Quaker bonnet (I now loved so well) would come some platitudes on the demoralizing influence of such frivolities, she smiled, and said, "I regard dancing a very harmless amusement"; and added, "the Evangelical Alliance that so readily passed a resolution declaring dancing a sin for a church member, tabled a resolution declaring slavery a sin for a bishop."

Sitting alone one day, as we were about to separate in London, I expressed to her my great satisfaction in her acquaintance, and thanked her for the many religious doubts and fears she had banished from my mind. She said, "There is a broad distinction between religion and theology. The one is a natural, human experience common to all well-organized minds. The other is a system of speculations about the unseen and the unknowable, which the human mind has no power to grasp or explain, and these speculations vary with every sect, age, and type of civilization. Noone knows any more of what lies beyond our sphere of action than thou and I, and we know nothing." Everything she said seemed to me so true and rational, that I accepted her words of wisdom with the same confiding satisfaction