Pennington visited Nantucket Island in the summer of 1842 and heard the famed abolitionist and feminist Lucretia Mott speak. His subsequent letter to the Nantucket Inquirer was reprinted in William Lloyd Garrison’s journal, The Liberator, in August.
God Is No Respecter of Persons (1842)
by James W.C. Pennington
“We came together not as blacks or whites, but as human beings.”
From the Nantucket Inquirer.
‘God is no Respecter of Persons.’
Having heard that a meeting—more particularly for colored people, but to which all were invited—was to be held at the Friends’ meeting-house on Main Street, last Sunday evening, at which Mrs. Mott would speak, I took occasion to be present; and truly can I say, that seldom have I been more gratified than during the hour and a half which the meeting occupied. The very aspect of the assemblage was cheering—eminently so. More than a hundred neatly-clad people of color were present, and throughout the whole meeting they were orderly, quiet, and apparently deeply attentive. There, for the first time, I saw a practical recognition, on anything like a large scale, of that which the christian church regards as a truth, viz: that ‘God is no respecter of persons.’ True, I am informed that in Catholic countries, whatever diversities of condition may obtain in society, none are known within the precincts of the church: there black and white, high and low, all bow themselves before the common Father of their souls, for ‘God is no respecter of persons.’ But Protestantism, in shaking off the corruptions of papacy, and returning to the pristine purity and simplicity of christianity, has set up a negro pew, and stamped unclean on the brow of those for whom Jesus Christ was not ashamed to die. Would he who associated with Lazarus and Mary Magdelene have shunned the society of the kind-hearted negro?
In the meeting to which I allude, last Sunday evening, we came together not as blacks and whites, but as human beings. There was not, ‘Sit thou here in a good place,’ nor ‘Stand thou there at my footstool.’ It was pleasant to me to know that the proprietors of a christian church were not ashamed to recognise as equal brethren, the children of their common Father—to give practical evidence of their belief that ‘God is no respecter of persons.’
And then Mrs. Mott’s remarks—so earnest, so touching, so imbued with the deep, all-embracing, Christian love, with which her soul seems to be filled to overflowing! Admonition, warning, encouragement, advice—uttered in language eloquent yet simple, glowing yet chaste—and uttered too in the sincerity if real affection; every word of it must have sunk deep into the spirit of everyone present—and I doubt not that the meeting was to all, whites as well as blacks, a season of copious refreshing from God. I know that I went away from it, for the time at least, a better man.
At the conclusion of the services, notice was given that Mrs. Mott desired a parting meeting with the inhabitants of her native town on Tuesday evening next, at the Main-street meeting house. Reader, would you have your heart warmed by genuine Christian eloquence—fail not to be there.
PENNINGTON.