Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

Almost in the same words, but after an interval of seven years (March 3, 1844), Emerson, in a discourse criticising the ‘New England Reformers,’ held up an ideal which was like nothing so much as Mr. Garrison's ‘Perfectionism’:

The criticism and attack on institutions which we have witnessed has made one thing plain, that society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.

At a date (December 2, 1841) still nearer the one which now engages us, Mr. Emerson, again in a critical mood, offered this unconscious justification of Mr. Garrison's course—this echo of his prospectus—in a ‘Lecture on the Times’: ‘There is,’ he said, ‘a perfect chain—see it, or see it not—of reforms emerging from the surrounding darkness, each cherishing some part of the general idea; and all must be seen in order to do justice to any one. . . . How trivial seem the contests of the abolitionist whilst he aims merely at the circumstance of the slave.’

It remains to observe that Noyes's anti-government notions, though accepted by Mr. Garrison, had a very different origin and development.¹ The latter connected them with his views of Peace (already derived from the New Testament), in a way which Noyes never did or cared to do. The logical extension of the doctrine of non-resistance must have come, in a mind like Mr. Garrison's, sooner or later. Noyes probably hastened the process, having reached the same goal by Scriptural