Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[89] extinction of slavery, leaving him to settle the propriety of the means with his own conscience; that it would be as much a breach of faith to appropriate time or money bestowed by persons believing in the divinity of those things, for the agitation of the slavery question, to an attack upon them, as it would be to apply funds given by one believing them to be mischievous impostures, to their defence and maintenance; that there is nothing the pro-slavery clergy desire so much as to have the issue shifted from their hypocrisy, and faithlessness to their own acknowledged standard of duty, to the authority of that standard.

Rogers replied, making the points you would suppose from¹ reading the Herald, and made the assertion that slavery could not be abolished until the order of the ministry had been! I know the ministry, like all falsehoods, must miserably perish, but I believe it will survive negro slavery many a long year. The substitute which I moved, denying the Christian character² to pro-slavery churches and ministers, and denouncing the inconsistency of abolitionists who sustained them, passed by an almost unanimous vote.

The Non-Resistance question, the Property question (on which Collins is horsed just at present, and galloping away at a great³ rate), as well as the Temperance question and multitudes of others, might just as reasonably be made test questions as the Ministry question. The short of the argument you will find in the Annual Report, which I wrote in consequence of Garrison's illness. In fact, this question which Garrison thus proposed bringing upon the A. S. platform, is the very one which New Organization made the false pretence of the secession, and which we most strenuously denied. I think, however, that he will see the utter incompatibility of making such test questions with associated action, and do not apprehend that this false policy will be pushed in Massachusetts.⁴

Church and state were united in the disunion resolution⁵ which Wendell Phillips offered at the anniversary of the⁶ American Society at New York, and which read as follows: ‘That anti-slavery is only to be advanced by trampling under foot the political and ecclesiastical links which bind slavery to the institutions of this country.’ Mr. Garrison reported, from the business committee, ‘That we ’