My readers may smile when I confess to them that at first I was myself not a little disturbed in my sense of propriety. But I took the matter into serious consideration. I looked the facts fully in the face. Here were millions of our countrymen held in the most abject, cruel bondage. More than half of them were females, whose condition in some respects was more horrible than that of the males. The people of the North had consented to this gigantic wrong with those of the South, and those who had risen up to oppose it were denounced as enemies of their country, were persecuted, their property and their persons violated. The pulpit for the most part was dumb, the press was everywhere, with small exceptions, wielded in the service of the oppressors, the political parties were vying with each other in obsequiousness to the slaveholding oligarchy, and the petitions of the slaves and their advocates were contemptuously and angrily spurned from the legislature of the Republic. Surely, the condition of our country was wretched and most perilous. I remembered that in the greatest emergencies of nations women had again and again come forth from the retirement to which they were consigned, or in which they preferred to dwell, and had spoken the word or done the deed which the crises demanded. Surely, the friends of humanity, of the right and the true, never needed help more than we needed it. And here had come two well-informed persons of exalted character from the midst of slavedom to testify to the correctness of our allegations against slavery, and tell of more of its horrors than we knew. And shall they not be heard because they are women? I saw, I felt it was a miserable prejudice that would forbid woman to speak or to act in behalf of the suffering, the outraged, just as her heart may prompt and as God has given her power. So I sat me down and penned as earnest a letter as I could write to the Misses Grimké, inviting them to come to my house, then in South Scituate, to stay with us as long as their engagements would permit, to speak to the people from my pulpit, from the pulpit of my excellent cousin, Rev. E. Q. Sewall, Scituate, and from as many other pulpits in the county of Plymouth as might be opened to them. They came to us the last week of October, 1837, and tarried eight days. It was a week of highest, purest enjoyment to me and my precious wife, and most profitable to the community. On Sunday evening Angelina addressed a full house from my pulpit for two hours in strains of wise remark and eloquent appeal, which settled the question of the propriety of her “speaking in meeting.”