new estate, “a very pious person, and that a large proportion of the Abolitionists were religious persons....  I have thought of you as another Wilberforce—­but would Wilberforce have spoken thus of the day on which the Son of God rose from the dead?” Garrison’s query in reply—­“Would Wilberforce have denied the identity of Christ with the Father?”—­was a palpable hit.  But as he himself justly remarked, “Such questions are not arguments, but fallacies unworthy of a liberal mind.”  Nevertheless, so long as men are attached to the leading strings of sentiment rather than to those of reason, such questions will possess tremendous destructive force, as Mr. Garrison, in his own case, presently perceived.  He understood the importance of not arousing against him “denominational feelings or peculiarities,” and so had steered the Liberator clear of the rocks of sectarianism.  But when he took up in its columns the Sabbath question he ran his paper directly among the breakers of a religious controversy.  He saw how it was with him at once, saw that he had stirred up against him all that religious feeling which was crystallized around the first day of the week, and that he could not hope to escape without serious losses in one way or another.  “It is pretty certain,” he writes Samuel J. May in September, 1836, “that the Liberator will sustain a serious loss in its subscriptions at the close of the present volume; and all appeals for aid in its behalf will be less likely to prevail than formerly.  I am conscious that a mighty sectarian conspiracy is forming to crush me, and it will probably succeed to some extent.”

This controversy over the Sabbath proved the thin edge of differences and dissensions, which, as they went deeper and deeper, were finally to rend asunder the erstwhile united Abolition movement.  The period was remarkable for the variety and force of new ideas, which were coming into being, or passing into general circulation.  And to all of them it seems that Garrison was peculiarly receptive.  He took them all in and planted them in soil of extraordinary fertility.  It was immediately observed that it was not only one unpopular notion which he had adopted, but a whole headful of them.  And every one of these new ideas was a sort of rebel-reformer, a genuine man of war.  They had come as a protest against the then existing beliefs and order of things, come as their enemies and destroyers.  Each one of them was in a sense a stirrer-up of sedition against old and regnant relations and facts, political, moral, and religious.  Whoever espoused them as his own, espoused as his own also the antagonisms, political, moral, and religious which they would excite in the public mind.  All of which was directly illustrated in the experience of the editor of the Liberator.  Each of these new notions presently appeared in the paper along with Abolitionism.  What was his intention timid people began to inquire?  Did he design to carry