A Quaker Woman’s Sermon
It seems quite warrantable to say that John Wright was originally one of the Camden colony [in South Carolina], for he appears as witness on a deed of Mary and Robert English, dated May, 1760, and proven by him before Samuel Wyly, at Pine Tree Hill. He became, however, a resident of Bush River, Newberry. He lived to be aged, and, before his death, gathered around him his descendants, their husbands, wives and progeny to the number of one hundred and forty. His two daughters, Charity Cook and Susannah Hollingsworth, were gifted with speech, Charity especially. She became a notable preacher, although mother of a large family, and in her mission work traveled through the States extensively and twice visited England. Her husband was not unlikely of the Camden family of Cooks; and to her with much probability may be attributed the following unique example of eloquence from the sermon of a Quakeress, extracted from the Charleston Courier of 1807:
“A Quaker Woman’s Sermon.
“Dear Friends: There are three things I very much wonder. The first is, that children should be so foolish as to throw up stones, brickbats and clubs into fruit trees to knock down the fruit; if they would let it alone, it would fall of itself.
“The second is, that men should be so foolish and even wicked as to go to war and kill one another; if they would only let one another alone, they would die of themselves.
“And the third and last thing, which I wonder at most of all, is that young men should be so unwise as to go after the young women; if they would only stay at home, the young women would come after them.”
From page 85 of Historic Camden, Part One: Colonial and Revolutionary, by Thomas J. Kirkland and Robert M. Kennedy, Camden, S.C. Columbia, S.C.: The State Company, 1905.
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