of humiliation for the splendid vestments of pride! a religion which has no courage, no faithfulness, no self-denial, deeming it better to give heed unto men than unto God!” This was in the autumn of 1829, but though he was thus violently denunciatory of contemporary religion, the severity of his judgment against the skepticism of the times had not been materially modified.  He still regarded the unbeliever with narrow distrust and dislike.  When, after his discharge from Baltimore jail, he was engaged in delivering his message on the subject of slavery, and was seeking an opportunity to make what he knew known to the people of Boston, he was forced, after vainly advertising for a hall or meeting-house in which to give his three lectures, to accept the offer of Abner Kneeland’s Society of Infidels of the use of their hall for that purpose.  The spirit of these people, branded by the community as blasphemers, and by himself, too, in all probability, Garrison saw to be as admirable as the spirit displayed by the churches of the city toward him and his cause was unworthy and sinful.  But, grateful as he was for the hospitality of the infidels, he, nevertheless, rather bluntly informed them that he had no sympathy with their religious notions, and that he looked for the abolition of slavery to evangelicism, and to it alone.

A few years in the university of experience, where he learned that conduct is better than creeds, and living more than believing, served to emancipate him from illiberal prejudices and narrow sectarianism.  He came to see, “that in Christ Jesus all stated observances are so many self-imposed and unnecessary yokes; and that prayer and worship are all embodied in that pure, meek, child-like state of heart which affectionately and reverently breathes but one petition—­’Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’  Religion ... is nothing but love—­perfect love toward God and toward man—­without formality, without hypocrisy, without partiality—­depending upon no outward form to preserve its vitality or prove its existence.”

This important change in Mr. Garrison’s religious convictions became widely known in the summer of 1836 through certain editorial strictures of his upon a speech of Dr. Lyman Beecher, at Pittsburgh, on the subject of the Sabbath.  The good doctor was cold enough on the question of slavery, which involved not only the desecration of the Sabbath, but of the souls and bodies of millions of human beings.  If Christianity was truly of divine origin, and Garrison devoutly believed that it was, it would approve its divinity by its manner of dealing with the vices and evils which were dragging and chaining the feet of men to the gates of hell.  If it parleyed with iniquity, if it passed its victims by on the other side, if it did not war incessantly and energetically to put down sin, to destroy wickedness, it was of the earth, earthy, and its expounders were dumb dogs where they should bark the loudest and bite the hardest;