Church and Religion
Stone was expelled in 1851 from the West Brookfield congregation she had long attended for being "engaged in a course of life evidently inconsistent with her covenant engagements to this church." Her lectures were seen as anti-clerical since nearly all of the Congregationalist churches in the North continued to refuse to take a stand on the question of slavery. Some were calling Stone an atheist but it was her absolute faith that the Bible held better things for women that drove her to learn Greek and Hebrew. As a schoolgirl, she had been moved by hearing Unitarian clergyman Robert Collyer lecture. Cast out now by the Congregationalists, Stone joined a Unitarian church.
Read more about this topic: Lucy Stone
Famous quotes containing the words church and, church and/or religion:
“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her...”
—Bible: New Testament, Ephesians 5:21-25.
“A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists! Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. Invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonised, the religion cannot be healthy?”
—Harriet Martineau (1802–1876)