about. He knows that you can have freedom about life only where every
man has a say."

Then we began to talk of the religious revival. Periodicals were noting
the great turn of the public mind to religion. "Fruits of the spirit"
were extolled. Great and glorious works of divine grace were wrought in
Maine. A village in Massachusetts had enjoyed "a heavenly refreshing
from the presence of the Lord." In Cincinnati there was "an outpouring
of the spirit." In the woods of Michigan men rode into a village to
obtain mercy, having heard that the Lord was there. In New York City
noon prayer meetings were held. A conductor found salvation suddenly
while operating his horse car in Sixth Avenue. A sailor saw Christ at
the wheel. Christ was met in parlors, in places of worldly gayety. An
actor had been rescued from his wicked calling. Harriet Beecher Stowe
wrote: "We trust since prayer has once entered the counting rooms it
will never leave it; and that the ledger, sandbox, the blotting book and
the pen and ink will all be consecrated by heavenly presence." Her
brother, the pastor of Plymouth church, had converted one hundred and
ninety souls. A theater was used for a place of worship. Actors were
called upon to repent: You who have portrayed human nature before the
footlights, fall on your knees and acknowledge God! Rum had been driven
from a saloon near this theater. "Thank God," said Beecher, "let us pray
silently for the space of two minutes. What a history has been here. A
place of fictitious joys but of real sorrows has been reformed. It is
open for God's people to sing and pray in. God be thanked that Heaven's
gates have been opened in this place of hell."

Garrison saw the point. Of the revival he wrote that it had "spread like
an epidemic in all directions, over a wide extent of country. Prayer
meetings, morning, noon and night; prayer meetings in town, village, and
hamlet, North and South. The whole thing is an emotional contagion
without principle. This revival, judging from the past, will promote
meanness, not manliness; delusion, not intelligence; the growth of
bigotry, not of humanity; a spurious religion, not genuine piety."

Theodore Parker denounced the mania too, and was attacked for it by
Methodists and others. He sew that the North had its rain gods, its
prosperity gods, its bread and butter gods, its rituals and devotions
for these gods; and that the South had the same number of gods.

What then of the law