show the degree of authority felt and exercised by the clergy at that time.  It maintained that, as ministers were ordained by God, it was their place and duty to judge what food was best to feed to the flock over which they had been made overseers by the Holy Ghost; and that, if they did not preach on certain topics, as the flock desired, the flock had no right to put strangers in their place to do it; that deference and subordination were necessary to the happiness of every society, and peculiarly so to the relation of a people to their pastor; and that the sacred rights of ministers had been violated by having their pulpits opened without their consent to lecturers on various subjects of reform.

All this might pass without much criticism:  but it was followed by a tirade against woman-preachers, aimed at the Grimke sisters especially, which was as narrow as it was shallow.  The dangers which threatened the female character and the permanent injury likely to result to society, if the example of these women should be followed, were vigorously portrayed.  Women were reminded that their power was in their dependence; that God had given them their weakness for their protection; and that when they assumed the tone and place of man, as public reformers, they made the care and protection of man seem unnecessary.  “If the vine,” this letter fancifully said, “whose strength and beauty is to lean upon the trellis-work, and half conceal its clusters, thinks to assume the independence and the overshadowing nature of the elm, it will not only cease to bear fruit, but will fall in shame and dishonor into the dust.”

Sarah Grimke had just begun a series of letters on the “Province of Woman” for the N.E.  Spectator, when this pastoral effusion came out.  Her third letter was devoted to it.  She showed in the clearest manner the unsoundness of its assertions, and the unscriptural and unchristian spirit in which they were made.  The delicate irony with which she also exposed the ignorance and the shallowness of its author must have caused him to blush for very shame.

Whittier’s muse, too, found the Pastoral Letter a fitting theme for its vigorous, sympathetic utterances.  The poem thus inspired is perhaps one of the very best among his many songs of freedom.  It will be remembered as beginning thus:—­

    “So this is all! the utmost reach
      Of priestly power the mind to fetter,
    When laymen think, when women preach,
      A war of words, a ‘Pastoral Letter!’”

Up to this time nothing had been said by either of the sisters in their lectures concerning their views about women.  They had carefully confined themselves to the subject of slavery, and the attendant topics of immediate emancipation, abstinence from the use of slave products, the errors of the Colonization Society, and the sin of prejudice on account of color.  But now that they found their own rights invaded, they began to feel it was time to look out for the rights of their whole sex.