Unitarian Universalism affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It recognizes all of us as special, each of us in our own way. Every person of every age who has gathered of a Sunday morning since the congregation was gathered in 1640, since this fifth meetinghouse was erected in 1814, since this second-floor sanctuary was created in 1850, has been cherished as someone precious.

But someone in the role I have as minister of this church can’t but admit that a couple of the members of the larger congregation that includes all who have worshipped here, are of unusual note in the history of the world, as well as in the story of our town and congregation.

One is a predecessor of mine, Edmund Hamilton Sears, who among his accomplishments authored  hymn words that have become hugely popular at Christmas time, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” The other, of even greater note, is Lydia Maria Francis Child, our subject this morning.

Why, you might wonder; what did she do? No one in her own generation would have shared that wonder, though they would have been of widely differing views about the correctness of her outlooks. But no one from 1824 until she died in 1880 would not have known her name.

True, by 1880 her star had started to go into eclipse, as the country began to renege on the cause to which she had most devoted her incredible energies, that of the freedom and equality of people once held as slaves. By then, the fervor of the anti-slavery, Union cause was losing out. The reaction against Reconstruction had begun, as white rule was re-established in the former Confederate states. The fame of people like Maria Child went into decline for many years.

And yet in 1980, we here at First Parish and in Wayland could organize a weekend to honor the centenary of her death, with events at the Library, at her former home on Old Sudbury Road, at her grave site in North Cemetery, and here at First Parish. In the years since, several biographies have appeared, including one by Carolyn Karcher that runs to 772 pages, including the notes and the list of all of the works of Ms. Child. My internet search engine turned up 414 references to Child; there were 22 to Sears.

So she is coming back into her own, and in a big way. People are discovering her as someone of accomplishments much more significant than the one for which she is probably still best known, the authorship of the children’s poem that begins, “Over the river and through the woods to grandfather’s house we go.”

Her accomplishments were in fact so extraordinary, so many, and so diverse that I will pass over many of them much too briefly. But let me see how much I can fit in, along with a bit of her biography.

Lydia Francis was born in 1802 in Medford, Mass., the youngest of five children who survived. Her grandfather had fought in the Battle of Concord in the Revolutionary War. He lived in Cambridge as Lydia was growing up, so maybe the river in her children’s poem is the Mystic. Her brother Convers recalled his childhood fondly, but Lydia would later write, “Cold, shaded, and uncongenial was my childhood and youth. Whenever reminiscences of them rise up before me, I turn my back on them as soon as possible.” So maybe it wasn’t the Mystic.

Lydia’s father was a successful baker. But Lydia’s mother’s health was never good after Lydia’s birth, perhaps resulting from early stages of the tuberculosis of which she died when Lydia was twelve.

Lydia went off to live with a married sister in Norridgewock, Maine, which was still part of Massachusetts. At eighteen, she began teaching school in Gardiner, Maine, but after a year moved in with the family of her brother, Convers Francis, minister of the First Parish in Watertown, Mass. Though the Congregational Church in which he and Lydia had been brought up had a minister of Calvinist outlook (as did their father), Convers Francis was at the start of an important career as a Unitarian minister, writer, and teacher.

Lydia, in the other hand, joined a Swedenborgian Church. She kept a private school, socialized with her brother’s circle of distinguished thinkers, read a lot (as always), and went back to the church in Medford to have herself re-baptized as Lydia Maria Francis, requesting that she thenceforth be called Maria (the “i” is long), and she was.

And she wrote a novel, Hobomok, a romance about a native American man and a Euro-American woman, a bold topic indeed. This was in 1824, when there barely was an American literature. James Fennimore Cooper’s first successful novel, The Spy, had only come out three years before; Hawthorne’s first novel was five years away.

But there was Maria Child with Hobomok, and it was a great success. So was her next novel the following year, The Rebels. She was awarded reading privileges at the Boston Atheneum, only the second woman to be so honored. She was among the best-known writers in the country. She was twenty-two years old.

At twenty-three she began publishing Juvenile Miscellany, the first children’s magazine in the country. She would go on to compile several books of poems and stories, including her own, written for children. It was in one of these books, published in 1861, that her famous lyrics apeared, entitled "A New England Boy's Song About Thanksgiving.” In 1872, one reviewer ranked her second in the field of children’s literature only to Hans Christian Anderson. Tastes having changed since then, however.

At twenty-six she married the lawyer, politician, and abolitionist David Child. They settled in Boston, and David edited a journal for Massachusetts Whigs and practiced law. But after Jackson won the presidency, the journal folded. Plus, David had “an altruistic preference for serving clients who could not afford to pay fees….” [Deborah Clifford, Crusader for Freedom 85] And then he served six months in jail for libel. Thus began what would be a troubling, life-long series of economic problems that put a serious strain on their relationship.

Maria, though, was going from success to success, publishing a book for mothers, another for girls, a startlingly early History of the Condition of Women In All Ages, and in 1829 her biggest hit of all, The Frugal Housewife. It is a wonderful little book, by the way, full of helpful household hints; and it is still in print. It went through many editions and translations.

So as she turned thirty, Maria Child was probably the best-known female writer in the United States. But something else had happened. The African-American abolitionist from Newburyport, William Lloyd Garrison, had come to Boston, and Child had heard him.

Child would later write, “It is wonderful how one mortal may affect the destiny of a multitude. I remember very distinctly the first time I ever saw Garrison. I little thought then that the whole pattern of my life-web would be changed by the introduction…. He got hold of the strings of my conscience and pulled me into reforms. It is of no use to imagine what might have been, if I had never met him. Old dreams vanished, old associates departed, and all things became new.”

Garrison’s first Boston appearance was in 1829. Two years later, the New England Anti-Slavery Society was founded; it published Garrison’s magazine, The Liberator. David Child was one of the two counselors of the Society.

Maria had always been part of her husband’s circle of opponents of slavery, but not conspicuously so. In that world, she was the famous writer David was married to. And then came 1833, and the publication of the first popular book to attack slavery head-on, calling for its abolition, the immediate emancipation without compensation, racial equality, and the end to all forms of racism north and south. It was called, An Appeal On Behalf of That Class of Americans Called African, it was a cultural bombshell, and it was written by Maria Child.

She knew what she was getting into – “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken,” she wrote; “but though I expect ridicule and censure, I do not fear them.”

Ridicule and censure she received. Subscriptions to Juvenile Miscellany plummeted and the magazine folded. The Boston Atheneum rescinded her reading rights. But looking back, she later observed that “With regard to society I was a gainer decidedly; for though the respectables, who had condescended to patronize me, forthwith sent me to Coventry, anti-slavery introduced me to the noblest and best of the land, intellectually and morally, and knit us together in that firm friendship that grows out of sympathy in a good but unpopular cause. Besides, it is impossible to estimate how much one’s character gains by a warfare which keeps the intellect wide awake, and compels one to reflect on moral principles.”

In the decades that followed, much of Child’s life was devoted to the cause of abolition. She wrote more books. She wrote pamphlets. In the divisiveness that plagued the cause, she always took the cause of inclusiveness, siding with the anti-slavery societies that included women as well as men, and she sought the broadest audience. “Anti-slavery might have made ten times the progress it has,” she wrote, “if plain-speaking had been mixed with kindness, and zeal tempered with discretion.”

 She kept believing in the potential goodness in people, despite the examples of the opposite she observed so acutely. When an escaped slave named Sims was captured and returned to his owner, she bought his freedom by soliciting money from slave-owners.

When John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry failed, she wrote to the governor, offering to come nurse to Brown, even as she acknowledged her disapproval of his means. She was turned down. Her ensuing correspondence with the governor’s wife was published as one of the best-selling pamphlets of its time.

Once the war started, she was one of a few women who accompanied speakers like Garrison and Wendell Phillips to serve as bodyguards of a sort at their public appearances, since their surrounding female presence seemed to deter the mob from attack (although on occasion Child was provoked into physical action).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back in the 1840s, she and David grew sugar beets. It was one of his grand schemes. The idea was to undermine the southern sugar cane economy that employed so many slaves. The ultimate goal was to end support for slavery by making it unprofitable. So David went off to England for a year to study the idea, and Maria moved in with her father in South Natick.

Upon David’s return, he and Maria moved to a farm in Northhampton. The venture was arduous, and not a success. To bring in income, Maria moved to New York to edit an anti-slavery journal. After two years, with the farm nearing bankruptcy, David came to New York and took over as editor, then returned to Northhampton.

Maria moved in with a Quaker family and wrote letters from New York to a Boston newspaper. Many consider these letters, subsequently published as a book, to be her best writing, and Child to be among the finest journalists of her time, as well as one of the first women in that job.

She separated her finances from David’s, and developed a close relationship with the son in Quaker family, some years younger than she. But then, surprisingly, the son married. Child moved to New Rochelle and devoted all her efforts to a new project, one to which she would devote the next eight years, one that she thought to be her most important work, a history of world religions.

This was a rocky time for the Childs. The relationship was remote. Maria’s father had moved to Wayland, and she came for a visit, then went to New York to see off her friend Margaret Fuller, leaving for Italy. She was increasingly depressed. David finally left Northhampton again to work with a brother, a civil engineer, who was laying out a railroad line in Tennessee. The hope was the brother might proffer a permanent job, but he didn’t, and David joined Maria in New York in the fall of 1849.

That winter she wrote to a friend, “It is now settled that Mr. Child will remain with me till Spring. What will then open for him, I know not. He is as good as he can be – a nobler, better heart man never had – but it seems to me ‘his fingers are all thumbs’ more than ever; so mal-adroit is he in all practical matters. In resigning myself to this inevitable destiny, and conforming my own tastes and inclinations to his, I find peace of mind; but it takes all the electricity out of me.”

You will be glad to know that things ended up surprisingly well. But along the way, David’s “habits of carelessness, unreliability, and ‘procrastination,’ to which she attributed his checkered career” [Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic 361], did take a toll, which is one of the reasons they so often lived apart.

Indeed, Karchur says Maria wasn’t sure the marriage was worth reassembling for this reason above all others. As Mrs. Lyman, a friend of hers had noted, ever since the sugar beet experiment had collapsed, “David had gone ‘from one failure to another with unbounded enthusiasm….’ One year he had contracted to cart stones for the railroad. ‘He verily believes that he shall realize (a profit of) $2000 … for stone that will cost an outlay of only $150. I might try to convince him that the contractors must be crazy to make such a bargain; but it is of no use to argufy,’ Child reported in exasperation…. Predictably, he had lost ten cents on every load – to which Mrs. Lyman had responded, ‘if he has got hold of anything by which he only loses ten cents a load, do encourage him in it!’” After another such venture, Maria told Mrs. Lyman’s daughter, “Sometimes these things make me laugh, and sometimes they make me cry.” [Karchur 361]

Having decided to stay together, the Childs moved to West Newton in 1850, and two years later they move in with her aging father at 91 Old Sudbury Road here in Wayland. Using the Wayland Library, Maria finished her book, The Progress of Religious Ideas, which was published in 1855. To contemporary eyes, it suffers from an outlook now known as progressive revelation, a tendency to see older religions as inferior steps on an evolutionary ladder. But her version of that perspective was very open-minded and liberal in spirit.

As to her own religion, she is not easy to pigeon-hole except as a progressive. Raised an old-style Congregationalist; confirmed an Episcopalian; an early convert to Swedenborgianism (a religion she forsook when it proved unfriendly to anti-slavery); the brother of a Unitarian hot shot and a regular attendee in this room, when the minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, was an ardent abolitionist, too; a dabbler in spiritualism -- she was basically bound to no sect. This made her a natural member of a post-Civil-War group called the Free Religious Association (the FRA), composed of some Unitarians, Universalists, Reform Jews, Quakers, and others who wanted a religion that united all.

As Maria Child said in her will, leaving money to the FRA, “I do this to express my cordial sympathy with those who are trying to melt away sectarian barriers which so balefully divide the human family, whether they exist between the different sects of Christians, or between the different religions of the world.”

In her final decades, Child continued to write book after book until her death in 1880, six years after David’s. As I said, in their Wayland years together they were deeply affectionate.

Maria Child’s memorial service took place in her home, as was the custom of the day. It was conducted by the preacher at First Parish that year, with the eulogy was given by Wendell Phillips himself. Pall bearers carried her simple casket to Old North Cemetery here in Wayland, only a few hundred yards from her house. She had specified that her casket be the plainest, that there be no flowers, and that she either be buried where she dropped, or if there were one nearby (as there was not), in a cemetery for the colored.

I mentioned the money that she left to the Free Religious Association. The rest of her will is equally revealing. She had always been generous in supporting her causes, as frugal and as often poor as she was. Wendell Phillips said he once asked her for a donation to support the cause of freed slaves. She said she’d give a hundred dollars. That was quite a lot, and knowing her situation, Phillips asked if she was sure she wanted to give that much. She thought a minute and answered that, no, she would give two hundred. She donated all the royalties from her collection of pieces on aging, called Looking Toward Sunset, $4,000, to the Sanitation Commission, the predecessor to the Red Cross that provided care for wounded soldiers during the war.

Her largest bequests, $2000 each, were to a Boston Hospital and to the Hampton Agricultural College in Virginia, a school for blacks, with the explicit directions that “said sum is never to be used for any species of theological teaching.” She gave a thousand dollars for the elevation of the character of women and the enlargement of their sphere of action.  A like amount went to the SPCA, to Quaker schools for the education of Indians, for the education of destitute Protestant children, to the Myrtle Street Home for Old Colored Women, and to the Consumptives’ Home. There was also a smaller bequest to the Wayland Town Library.

For her whole adult life she was devoted to benefiting needy people and causes. She maintained the simplest possible style of life and of dress, and used whatever means she could earn by her writing to aid freed black men and women and others.

To complete the picture of Maria Child, I have to cite some other aspects of her character, like her love of statuary and her love of music. In fact, she had a love of beauty that was profound and lived side-by-side with her passion for justice and action.

Her love of nature was like that, too, a persistent and major part of a life that can in retrospect too easily seem consumed in the social struggle she championed. Child herself once said that for all her passion for justice, she would give up the battle if the cost were a loss of the blessings of nature’s beauty in her life. It was said, “I think Mrs. Child took as much pleasure in covering her flowers for winter as some people do in making their children comfortable for the night.”

Her community, her neighbors, her flowers, her study, and her husband David, all were parts of her life that she cherished and devoted herself to, all the while she maintained her devotion to the larger cause of freedom forever.

She was not one to mellow with age, and her continuing passion and social concern are evident in her personal papers and letters from her years here in Wayland. A former member of this church, the late Yvonne Meigs, had a letter that Child had written to a relative of hers (of Yvonne’s) in 1867. This woman [Mrs. Chapman] had apparently decided that with the war won, things were fine. In the letter, Mrs. Child congratulates her friend on the betrothal of the friend’s daughter and shares bits of news before launching forth:

“It is curious, but the only bond of relationship that I feel is with those who are heart and soul opposed to Slavery. All who approve of it, or are indifferent to it, are to me as aliens. The fact is, such a state of mind indicates moral disease, independent of the question of slavery or serfdom. They say people tend to conservatism as they grow old; but I grow more and more rabidly democratic.

“I do not take your rose-colored view concerning the state of the country. It seems to me there never was a time when the watchers on the tower needed to be so wide awake as now. I have never been really afarid that the Republic might be wrecked, till since Andy Johnson’s administration. The passiveness with which the people submit to his evil doings, and the base selfishness of Congress in selling themselves and the country, for the sake of the offices he has to bestow, fill me with anxiety….

“With Congress I have no patience. They ought long ago to have confiscated the lands of rich rebels, and given every freed man a homestead. As things go, there seems to be a premium on disloyalty…. So far from rejoicing over the condition of the country, I am in a state of chronic rage….

“My respects to your mother, and love to your sisters.

“Ever your friend, L. M. Child”

“Life has been rather dreary to me since I lost my kind, good companion; for I have no children. The friends of old times have nearly all gone hence; and with the present generation I meet only as marbles touch each other: here and there a point comes in contact, but the spheres roll apart. Nevertheless, I have much to be thankful for; and I am thankful. I have a sane mind in a healthy body; and neither of these precious gifts is universal at the present day. I have a few friends who are very kind. And in my views of things I grow more and more unshackled.”

In another letter she speaks of spending Sundays seeking out the most radical preaching to be heard.

She was a remarkable person to the end, and well deserving of a remarkable tribute, with which I shall close. It was written by her friend and comrade, John Greenleaf Whittier, I suppose with Longfellow and Whitman one of the greatest American poets of the century. Whittier’s thoughts on death are in a poem called “Within the Gate.” The poem is about Lydia Maria Child and is dedicated to her. It plays upon notions of an afterlife more common to the 1870s than they are today, but the tribute he expresses with them is grand and deserved, and in its final conclusion, true:

“Within the Gate”
L. M. C.

We sat together, last May-day, and talked
Of the dear friends who walked
Beside us, sharers of the hopes and fears
Of five and forty years

Since first we met in Freedom’s hope forlorn,
And heard her battle-horn
Sound through the valleys of the sleeping North,
Calling her children forth,

And youth pressed forward with hope-lighted eyes,
And age, with forecast wise
Of the long strife before the triumph won,
Girded his armor on.

Sadly, as name by name we called the roll,
We heard the dead-bells toll
For the unanswering many, and we knew
The living were the few.

And we, who waited our own call before
The inevitable door,
Listened and looked, as all have done, to win
Some token from within.

No sign we saw, we heard no voices call;
The impenetrable wall
Cast down its shadow, like an awful doubt,
On all who sat without….

And, hushed to silence by a reverent awe,
Methought, O friend, I saw
In thy true life of word, and work, and thought
The proof we all sought.

Did we not witness in the life of thee
Immortal prophesy?
And feel, when with thee, that thy footsteps trod
An everlasting road?

Not for brief days thy generous sympathies,
Thy scorn of selfish ease;
Not for the poor prize of an earthly goal
Thy strong uplift of soul.

Than thine was never turned a fonder heart
To nature and to art….

Yet, loving beauty, thou couldst pass it by,
And for the poor den y
Thyself, and see thy fresh, sweet flower of fame
Wither in blight and blame.

Sharing His love who holds in His embrace
The lowliest of our race,
Sure the Divine economy must be
Conservative of thee!

For truth must live with truth, self-sacrifice
Seek out its great allies;
Good must find good by gravitation sure,
And love with love endure.

And so, since thou hast passed within the gate
Whereby awhile  wait,
I give blind grief and blinder sense the lie:
Thou hast not lived to die!

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