prehension
of there being less steadiness and firmness among people of this age,
than in past ages, often troubled me while I was a child." An anxious
desire to do away, as far as himself was concerned, this merited
reproach, operated as one among other causes to induce him to be
particularly watchful over his thoughts and actions, and to endeavour to
attain that purity of heart, without which he conceived there could be
no perfection of the Christian character. Accordingly, in the
twenty-second year of his age, he had given such proof of the integrity
of his life, and of his religious qualifications, that he became an
acknowledged minister of the Gospel in his own society.

[Footnote A: This short sketch of the life and labours of John Woolman,
is made up from his Journal.]

At a time prior to his entering upon the ministry, being in low
circumstances, he agreed for wages to "attend shop for a person at Mount
Holly, and to keep his books." In this situation we discover, by an
occurrence that happened, that he had thought seriously on the subject,
and that he had conceived proper views of the Christian unlawfulness of
slavery. "My employer," says he, "having a Negro woman, sold her, and
desired me to write a bill of sale, the man being waiting who bought
her. The thing was sudden, and though the thought of writing an
instrument of slavery for one of my fellow-creatures made me feel
uneasy, yet I remembered I was hired by the year, that it was my master
who directed me to do it, and that it was an elderly man, a member of
our society, who bought her. So through weakness I gave way and wrote,
but, at executing it, I was so afflicted in my mind, that I said before
my master and the friend, that I believed slave-keeping to be a practice
inconsistent with the Christian religion. This in some degree abated my
uneasiness; yet, as often as I reflected seriously upon it, I thought I
should have been clearer, if I had desired to have been excused from it,
as a thing against my conscience; for such it was. And some time after
this, a young man of our society spoke to me to write a conveyance of a
slave to him, he having lately taken a Negro into his house. I told him
I was not easy to write it; for though many of our meeting, and in other
places, kept slaves, I still believed the practice was not right, and
desired to be excused from the writing. I spoke to him in good-will; and
he told me that keeping slaves was not altogether a