them along with the Abolition movement?  Suspicious minds fancied they saw “in Mr. Garrison, a decided wish, nay, a firm resolve, in laboring to overthrow slavery, to overthrow the Christian Sabbath and the Christian ministry.  His doctrine is that every day is a Sabbath, and every man his own minister.  There are no Christian ordinances, there is no visible church.”  His no-government and non-resistant ideas excited yet further the apprehensions of some of his associates for the safety of that portion of the present order to which they clung.  As developed by Garrison they seemed to deny the right of the people “to frame a government of laws to protect themselves against those who would injure them, and that man can apply physical force to man rightfully under no circumstances, and not even the parent can apply the rod to the child, and not be, in the sight of God, a trespasser and a tyrant.”

Garrison embraced besides Perfectionism, a sort of political, moral, and religious Come-outerism, and faith in “universal emancipation from sin.”  His description of himself about this time as “an Ishmaelitish editor” is not bad, nor his quotation of “Woe is me my mother! for I was born a man of strife” as applicable to the growing belligerency of his relations with the anti-slavery brethren in consequence of the new ideas and isms, which were taking possession of his mind and occupying the columns of the Liberator.

Among the strife-producers during this period of the anti-slavery agitation, the woman’s question played a principal part.  Upon this as upon the Sabbath question, Garrison’s early position was one of extreme conservatism.  As late as 1830, he shared the common opinions in regard to woman’s sphere, and was strongly opposed to her stepping outside of it into that occupied by man.  A petition of seven hundred women of Pittsburgh, Pa., to Congress in behalf of the Indians gave his masculine prejudices a great shock.  “This is, in our opinion,” he declared, “an uncalled for interference, though made with holiest intentions.  We should be sorry to have this practice become general.  There would then be no question agitated in Congress without eliciting the informal and contrariant opinions of the softer sex.”  This top-lofty sentiment accorded well with the customary assumption and swagger of one of the lords of creation.  For the young reformer was evidently a firm believer in the divine right of his sex to rule in the world of politics.  But as he grew taller and broader the horizon of woman widened, and her sphere embraced every duty, responsibility, and right for which her gifts and education fitted her.  The hard and fast lines of sex disappeared from his geography of the soul.  He perceived for a truth that in humanity there was neither male nor female, but that man and woman were one in work and destiny—­equals in bearing the world’s burden, equals in building the world’s glory.  He heard in his heart the injunction of the eternal