William Lloyd Garrison eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 394 pages of information about William Lloyd Garrison.

William Lloyd Garrison eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 394 pages of information about William Lloyd Garrison.
and to which he was devoting himself so energetically.  To Elizabeth Pease, one of the noblest of the English Abolitionists, and one of his stanchest transatlantic friends, he defended himself against the false and cruel statements touching his religious beliefs.  “I esteem the Holy Scriptures,” he wrote her, “above all other books in the universe, and always appeal to ’the law and the testimony’ to prove all my peculiar doctrines.”  His religious sentiments and Sabbatical views are almost if not quite identical with those held by the Quakers.  “I believe in an indwelling Christ,” he goes on to furnish a summary of his confession of faith, “and in His righteousness alone; I glory in nothing here below, save in Christ and in Him crucified; I believe all the works of the devil are to be destroyed, and Our Lord is to reign from sea to sea, even to the ends of the earth; and I profess to have passed from death unto life, and know by happy experience, that there is no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.”  These were the pioneer’s articles of faith.  Their extreme simplicity and theological conservatism it would seem ought to have satisfied the evangelicals of all denominations.  They were in essentials thoroughly orthodox.  But in the composition of the shibboleths of beliefs non-essentials as well as essentials enter, the former to the latter in the proportion of two to one.  It is not surprising, therefore, that Garrison’s essentials proved unequal to the test set up by sectarianism, inasmuch as his spiritual life dropped the aspirate of the non-essentials of religious forms and observances.

But the good man had his compensation as well as his trials.  Such of a very noble kind was the great Irish address brought over from Ireland by Remond in December 1841.  It was signed by Daniel O’Connell, Father Mathew, and sixty thousand Roman Catholics of Ireland, who called upon the Irish Roman Catholics of America to make the cause of the slaves of the United States their cause.  Large expectations of Irish assistance in the anti-slavery agitation were excited in the bosoms of Abolitionists by this imposing appeal.  Garrison shared the high hopes of its beneficent influence upon the Ireland of America, with many others.  Alas! for the “best laid schemes of mice and men,” for the new Ireland was not populated with saints, but a fiercely human race who had come to their new home to better their own condition, not that of the negro.  Hardly had they touched these shores before they were Americanized in the colorphobia sense, out-Heroded Herod in hatred of the colored people and their anti-slavery friends.  Indeed, it was quite one thing to preach Abolitionism with three thousand miles of sea-wall between one and his audience, and quite another to rise and do the preaching with no sea-wall to guard the preacher from the popular consequences of his preaching, as Father Mathew quickly perceived and reduced to practice eight

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William Lloyd Garrison from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.