“1st business of life, to love the Lord our God with heart and soul, and our neighbor as our self…
These two great commandments, and upon which rest all the Law and the prophets, cannot be narrowed down to suit us but we must go up and conform to them. They proscribe neither nation nor sex—our neighbor may be either the oriental heathen, the degraded European, or the enslaved colored American.
Neither must we prefer sex – the slave mother as well as the slave father. The oppressed, or nominally free woman of every nation or clime, in whose Soul is as evident by the image of God as in her more fortunate contemporary of the male sex, has a claim upon us by virtue of that irrevocable command equally as urgent. We cannot successfully evade duty because the suffering fellow woman be only a woman! She too is a neighbor.
The good Samaritan of this generation must not take for their exemplars the priest and the Levite when a fellow woman is among thieves—neither will they find their excuse in the custom.. they may be only females. The spirit of true philanthropy knows no sex.
The true christian will not seek to exhume from the grave of the past its half developed customs and insist upon them as a substitute for the plain teachings of Jesus Christ, and the evident deductions of a more enlightened humanity.”
From a sermon given in Canada in 1858 by Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823 – 1893), abolitionist, suffragist and first black woman to publish a newspaper in North America, born on this day
King Edward Street Chapel 