HKB
the fashion of the good old divines, I come to the 'Improvement';" under which head he carefully and briefly reviewed the substance of the debate. It was a masterly plea.
But the end was not yet. There was an evening meeting. Again the hall was filled, to listen to a reply to Mr. Pierpont by Wendell Phillips. The orator was in his best mood, and his silvery speech kept the audience spell-bound. It was a complete refutation of the arguments adduced in the afternoon. A clergyman sitting near to Mr. Pierpont said to him: "How can his arguments be answered?" to which the latter replied: "I should like to see the man who could tell me!" So Greek met Greek in those stirring and stormy days.
It was an up-hill movement, this anti-slavery agitation. It called out spirits of more colors than those mentioned in "Macbeth." The opposition was intense. Garrison's life was in peril in the streets of Boston in 1835, and a little company of his sympathizers, including the poet Whittier and George Thompson, the English philanthropist, were closely followed in the streets of Concord, N. H., one evening, that they might be seized by certain mobocratic ones, and subjected to an immersion in some liquid coloring of transient, if not indelible, black; but the hounded ones escaped, preserving white men's complexions. They were not to be put down by mobs nor frightened by any human opposition. They had the spirit of Luther as he went to the Diet at Worms. Though the pro-slavery "devils were thick as the tiles on the houses," they proposed to fight them in the name of God and humanity.
Politicians could do nothing with them, and the churches generally discarded them. There was no love lost, however, between them and the churches. The churches did not give them credit for the good they were seeking to do, and they had no words of approval for the humanity of the churches. Even the National Constitution was denounced as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and the churches were accused as upholders of this covenant. So they reasoned, not always, however, in that charity which the New Testament commends. There were those in the churches as strongly opposed to slavery as themselves,--but they were slow to recognize action against it outside of their own organizations,--who could say, as did Dr. Gannett of the Unitarian Church:--
"In principle I am with you. But there are those with whom you are connected, persons who seem to me so to distrust the goodness of all others who differ from them, and to look down upon all such with so great a consciousness of moral superiority, that I feel myself when in their presence to be in a situation not unlike that of a criminal before his accuser and judge."[29]
At one time they held an Anti-Sabbath Convention for a few days, in Boston, during which they said many hard things against the sanctity of this seventh-day worship-time, evidently because they could thus castigate the churches for refusing to discuss freely on this day the crying sin of American slavery. It seemed a pity to hear such harsh denunciations by the speakers who were advocating a righteous cause, against an institution that had done so much towards the world's true civilization. But this was one of their methods of carrying on the reform.