Afflicted as he was, the leader was nevertheless cheered by the extraordinary progress of the movement started by him.  The growth and activity of Abolitionism were indeed altogether phenomenal.  In February, 1837, Ellis Gray Loring estimated that there were then eight hundred anti-slavery societies in the United States, that an anti-slavery society had been formed in the North every day for the last two years, and that in the single State of Ohio there were three hundred societies, one of which had a membership of four thousand names.  The moral agitation was at its height.  The National Society had hit upon a capital device for increasing the effectiveness of its agents and lecturers.  This was to bring them together in New York for a few weeks’ study of the slavery question under the direction of such masters as Theodore D. Weld, Beriah Green, Charles Stuart, and others.  All possible phases of the great subject, such as, What is slavery?  What is immediate emancipation?  The consequences of emancipation to the South, etc., etc., pro-slavery objections and arguments were stated and answered.  The agents and lecturers went forth from the convention bristling with facts, and glowing with enthusiasm to renew the crusade against slavery.  Garrison, broken in health as he was, went on from Boston to attend this school of his disciples.  He spoke briefly but repeatedly to them upon the all-absorbing topic which had brought them together.  “It was a happy circumstance, too,” he wrote, “that I was present with them, and that they had an opportunity to become personally acquainted with me; for, as I am a great stumbling-block in the way of the people, or, rather, of some people, it would be somewhat disastrous to our cause if any of our agents, through the influence of popular sentiment, should be led to cherish prejudices against me.”

In February, 1837, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society came to the rescue of the Liberator from its financial embarrassments and hand-to-mouth existence by assuming the responsibility of its publication.  The arrangement did not in any respect compromise Mr. Garrison’s editorial independence, but lifted from him and his friend Knapp in his own language, “a heavy burden, which has long crushed us to the earth.”  The arrangement, nevertheless, continued but a year when it was voluntarily set aside by Mr. Garrison for causes of which we must now give an account.

In the letter from which we have quoted above, touching his visit to the Convention of Anti-Slavery Agents, Garrison alludes to one of these causes.  He says:  “I was most kindly received by all, and treated as a brother, notwithstanding the wide difference of opinion between us on some religious points, especially the Sabbath question.”  The italics are our own.  Until within a few years he had been one of the strictest of Sabbath observers.  Although never formally connected with any church, he had been