a
fundamental Quaker doctrine, announced at the middle of the seventeenth
century, to the erect that God reveals Himself to mankind, not through
any priesthood or specially chosen agents; not through any ordinance,
form, or ceremony; not through any church or institution; not through
any book or written record of any sort; but directly, through His
Spirit, to each person. This direct enlightening agency they deemed
coextensive with humanity; no race and no individual is left without the
ever-present illuminating Spirit. If men of old spoke as they were moved
by the Holy Spirit, what they spoke or wrote can furnish no reliable
guidance to the men of a later generation, except as their minds also
are enlightened by the same Spirit in the same way. "The letter killeth;
it is the Spirit that giveth life."

This doctrine in its purity and simplicity places all men and all races
on an equality; all are alike ignorant and imperfect; all are alike in
their need of the more perfect revelation yet to be made. Master and
slave are equal before God; there can be no such relation, therefore,
except by doing violence to a personality, to a spiritual being. In
harmony with this fundamental principle, the Society of Friends early
rid itself of all connection with slavery. The Friends' Meeting became
a refuge for those who were moved by the Spirit to testify against
slavery.

Born in 1789 in a State which was then undergoing the process of
emancipating its slaves, Benjamin Lundy moved at the age of nineteen
to Wheeling, West Virginia, which had already become the center of an
active domestic slave-trade. The pious young Quaker, now apprenticed to
a saddler, was brought into personal contact with this traffic in human
flesh. He felt keenly the national disgrace of the iniquity. So deep did
the iron enter into his soul that never again did he find peace of mind
except in efforts to relieve the oppressed. Like hundreds and thousands
of others, Lundy was led on to active opposition to the trade by an
actual knowledge of the inhumanity of the business as prosecuted before
his eyes and by his sympathy for human suffering.

His apprenticeship ended, Lundy was soon established in a prosperous
business in an Ohio village not far from Wheeling. Though he now lived
in a free State, the call of the oppressed was ever in his ears and he
could not rest. He drew together a few of his neighbors, and together
they organized the Union Humane Society,