The General Association say, that ‘when woman assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, our care and protection of her seem unnecessary; we put ourselves in self-defence against her, and her character becomes unnatural.’ Here again the unscriptural notion is held up, that there is a distinction between the duties of men and women as moral beings; that what is virtue in man, is vice in woman; and women who dare to obey the command of Jehovah, ‘Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression,’ are threatened with having the protection of the brethren withdrawn. If this is all they do, we shall not even know the time when our chastisement is inflicted; our trust is in the Lord Jehovah, and in him is ever-lasting strength. The motto of woman, when she is engaged in the great work of public reformation should be,--‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?’ She must feel, if she feels rightly, that she is fulfilling one of the important duties laid upon her as an accountable being, and that her character, instead of being ‘unnatural,’ is in exact accordance with the will of Him to whom, and to no other, she is responsible for the talents and the gifts confided to her. As to the pretty simile, introduced into the ‘Pastoral Letter,’ ‘If the vine 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,’ &c. I shall only remark that it might well suit the poet’s fancy, who sings of sparkling eyes and coral lips, and knights in armor clad; but it seems to me utterly inconsistent with the dignity of a Christian body, to endeavor to draw such an anti-scriptural distinction between men and women. Ah! how many of my sex feel in the dominion, thus unrighteously exercised over them, under the gentle appellation of _protection_, that what they have leaned upon has proved a broken reed at best, and oft a spear. Thine in the bonds of womanhood, SARAH M. GRIMKE. LETTER IV. SOCIAL INTERCOURSE OF THE SEXES. _Andover, 7th Mo. 27th, 1837._