I have felt all along that we ought to give a chance for the expression of the highest and deepest religious thought of those not ordained of men. Your wish to give the result of your research opens the way for us to make the last day--Easter Sunday--voice the new, the purer, the better worship of the living God. We'll have a real symposium of woman's gospel. It is not fair to give only the church-ordained women an opportunity to present their religious thoughts, and now it shall be fixed so that the laity may have the same. I don't want a controversy or a lot of negations, but shall tell each one to give her strongest affirmation. This forever saying a thing is false and failing to present the truth, is to me a foolish waste of time, when almost everybody feels the old forms, creeds and rituals to be only the mint, anise and cumin. So, my dear, I am very, very glad that you and Lucy are both to be on our platform, and we are to stand together again after these twenty years. But none of the past! Let us rejoice in the good of the present, and hope for more and more in the future. In response to her letter asking him to take part on Pioneer Day, Frederick Douglass wrote: I certainly shall, if I live and am well. The cause of woman suffrage has under it a truth as eternal as the universe of thought, and must triumph if this planet endures. I have been calling up to my mind's eye that first convention in the small Wesleyan Methodist church at Seneca Falls, where Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Mott and those other brave souls began a systematic and determined agitation for a larger measure of liberty for woman, and how great that little meeting now appears! It seems only yesterday since it took place, and yet forty years have passed away and what a revolution on this subject have we seen in the sentiment of the American people and, in fact, of the civilized world! Who could have thought that humble, modest, maiden convention, holding its little white apron up to its face and wiping away the tear of sympathy with woman in her hardships and the sigh of her soul for a larger measure of freedom, would have become the mother of an International Council of Women, right here in the capital of this nation? Maria Mitchell, who was in feeble health (and died the next year) in expressing her regrets said: "I am taking a rest. I have worked more than a half-century and, like stronger people, have become tired. I am meaning to build my small observatory and keep up a sort of apology for study--because I am too old to dare do nothing. I wish I felt able to take the journey and hear what others have to say and are ready to do. The world moves, and I have full faith it will continue to move and to move, for better and better, even when we have put aside the armor."