previous next
[144] Life of Theodore Parker, ‘all institutions and all ideas1 went into the furnace of reason, and were tried by fire. Church and state were put to the proof, and the wood, hay, stubble—everything combustible—were consumed.’ The beginning of this period may be sought as far back2 as 1825,3 in the millennial ardor of the missionary, tract, and Bible societies for evangelizing the world, the kindred labors and hopes of the peace and temperance societies, the ‘revivals of religion’—more particularly the great so-called Finney revival of 1831, coincident4 with the founding of the Liberator. This religious awakening took an especial hold on John Humphrey Noyes, a native of Brattleboroa, Vermont, who was six years Mr. Garrison's junior. In February, 1834, it had ‘landed him in a new experience and new views of the5 way of salvation, which took the name of Perfectionism’ —a doctrine at first socialistic neither in form nor in theory. In the spring of 1837,6 he called at the Anti-Slavery Office in Boston, and ‘found Garrison, Stanton, Whittier, and other leading abolitionists warmly engaged in a dispute about political matters.’ ‘I heard them quietly,’ he continues, ‘and when the meeting7 broke up I introduced myself to Garrison. He spoke with interest of the Perfectionist [a monthly paper, published ’

1 P. 125.

2 Goodell's Slavery and Anti-Slavery, p. 387.

3 R. W. Emerson refers this ‘era of activity,’ this schism between ‘the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement,’ to 1820 and the twenty years following. ‘It seemed a war between intellect and affection: a crack in nature which split every church in Christendom into Papal and Protestant, Calvinism into Old and New schools, Quakerism into Old and New; brought new divisions in politics, as the new conscience touched temperance and slavery. The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness’ (Atlantic Monthly, October, 1883, p. 529; and see the whole of this acute observer's ‘Lecture on the Times,’ Dec. 2, 1841). There was a corresponding activity in England, manifested in the Reform Bill of 1832, the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, the Tractarian movement, Catholic Emancipation, and a hundred other ways.

4 Noyes's American Socialisms, p. 614.

5 Ibid., p. 615.

6 March 30, by Noyes's own account in the American Socialist, June 12, 1879; but pretty certainly either March 20 or an earlier date. See the date of the letter presently to be quoted, which was received early in April (Lib. 7.123).

7 Am. Socialist, June 12, 1879.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
West Indies (1)
Brattleboro (Vermont, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
June 12th, 1879 AD (2)
October, 1883 AD (1)
December 2nd, 1841 AD (1)
1837 AD (1)
February, 1834 AD (1)
1832 AD (1)
1831 AD (1)
1825 AD (1)
1820 AD (1)
April (1)
March 30th (1)
March 20th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: