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/or religion:
“A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favoured and cherished.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)