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by triumphantly referring to the exterminating wars recorded in the Old Testament as expressly commanded by Jehovah.
It was not conclusive for us to reply, that what was obligatory once is not necessarily so now—that Christ has superseded Moses, and now forbids all war; for the answer was: If, as you assert, war is, like slavery, idolatry, and the like, inherently wrong, a malum in se, how could it be enjoined by a sin-hating God in the days of Moses, unless his moral character is mutable?
Our answer to this is: Whoever or whatever asserts that the Creator has required, and may still require, one portion of his children to butcher another portion, for any purpose whatever, is libelling his goodness, and asserting what everything in nature contradicts.
This position we believe to be impregnable.
So, too, the controversies with the American church and clergy have all been forced upon us by those who love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.
We are not the aggressors in any of these instances.
Ought we to have abandoned our ground, and avoided the conflict?
What would have been gained by it, either to the cause of the slave in particular, or of mankind universally?
Miss Pease's essentially broad and noble nature was better appreciated by her American friend, who reasoned with it not in vain, than by herself.
On the other hand,
Wendell Phillips, becoming a party to the same controversy, stood up on strongly personal grounds for the
Liberator. ‘On the great central question of inspiration, I am myself an inquirer,’—with many misgivings and perplexities,—he confessed to her in a letter written in October, 1849, of which but a fragment remains.
The following passage the recipient was unwilling to destroy:
With these views, and feeling that I could ask for my1 children no better spirit than the pure, uncompromising, self-sacrificing, clear-sighted, Christian one breathed in the Liberator; and not knowing where I could find it so fresh and enthusiastic and impressive as in the life of Garrison, I should give them the Liberator, hoping they would be moulded like it, and guarding them myself, on those points where I think its writers wrong, against being led astray.
They have got to meet those denials of doctrines among their associates, in the common press (you
