readers of the _Liberator_. For it was
enough in those days to convict the editor of rank heresy. From one and
another of his subscribers remonstrances came pouring in upon him. A
young theological student at Yale ordered his paper stopped in
consequence of the anti-Sabbatarian views of the editor. A Unitarian
minister at Harvard, Mass., was greatly cut up by reason thereof, and
suddenly saw what before he did not suspect. "I had supposed you," he
wrote in his 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 Garris