hymns,
and Reginald Heber went as a missionary bishop to India. Forty years
afterwards the French Revolution was bearing fruit. France herself had a
new revolution in 1830, and in this same year the kingdom of Belgium was
born. In England there was the remarkable reign of William IV, which
within the short space of seven years summed up in legislation reforms
that had been agitated for decades. In 1832 came the great Reform Bill,
in 1833 the abolition of slavery in English dominions, and in 1834 a
revision of factory legislation and the poor law. Charles Dickens and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning began to be heard, and in 1834 came to
America George Thompson, a powerful and refined speaker who had had much
to do with the English agitation against slavery. The young republic
of the United States, lusty and self-confident, was seething with new
thought. In New England the humanitarian movement that so largely began
with the Unitarianism of Channing "ran through its later phase in
transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the anti-slavery
agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War."[1] The movement was
contemporary with the preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in
sociology, in science, education, and medicine. New sects were formed,
like the Universalists, the Spiritualists, the Second Adventists,
the Mormons, and the Shakers, some of which believed in trances and
miracles, others in the quick coming of Christ, and still others in the
reorganization of society; and the pseudo-sciences, like mesmerism and
phrenology, had numerous followers. The ferment has long since subsided,
and much that was then seething has since gone off in vapor; but when
all that was spurious has been rejected, we find that the
general impulse was but a new baptism of the old Puritan spirit.
Transcendentalism appealed to the private consciousness as the sole
standard of truth and right. With kindred movements it served to quicken
the ethical sense of a nation that was fast becoming materialistic and
to nerve it for the conflict that sooner or later had to come.

[Footnote 1: Henry A. Beers: _Initial Studies in American Letters_,
95-98 passim.]

In his salutatory editorial Garrison said with reference to his
position: "In Park Street Church, on the Fourth of July, 1829, in
an address on slavery, I unreflectingly assented to the popular but
pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to
make a full and unequivo