on 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 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
agit