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

[9] We may perhaps detect in this sonnet a squint at a movement made, during a pause in the last session at Chardon Street, to hold a convention “to consider the authority of the Scriptures, and the extent of their obligation on men,” Lib. 11.178; 12.3, 51. in which the Transcendentalists Emerson and Alcott were united as a committee with Edmund Quincy and Mrs. Chapman. That Mr. Garrison was not in sympathy with it seems likely from his disclaimer of¹ responsibility for Quincy's justification of it, which was allowed to be copied from the Non-Resistant into the Lib² erator, and in which one remarks not only Mr. Quincy's emancipation from the supernatural sanction of the Bible, but his exposition of the way in which the question of its authority was forced on thoughtful minds by clerical³ opposition to reform.

The sonnet on ‘Holy Time’ is a reflection of the poem,⁴ ‘True Rest.’ We cite the close of it:

From ‘Worship’ let us take the first half:

They who, as worshippers, some mountain climb,⁵
     Or to some temple made with hands repair,
As though the godhead specially dwelt there,
     And absence, in Heaven's eye, would be a crime,
Have yet to comprehend this truth sublime:—
     The freeman of the Lord no chain can bear—
His soul is free to worship everywhere,
     Nor limited to any place or time. . . .

In lieu of Mr. Garrison's metrical apostrophe to “The true Church,” Lib. 11.191; Writings of W. L. G., p. 115. we shall do better to seek a prose definition of that entity in the following profession of faith, which was calculated for private circulation by the friend to whom it was addressed: