' Religion ... is nothing but
love--perfect love toward God and toward man--without formality, without
hypocrisy, without partiality--depending upon no outward form to
preserve its vitality or prove its existence."
This important change in Mr. Garrison's religious convictions became
widely known in the summer of 1836 through certain editorial strictures
of his upon a speech of Dr. Lyman Beecher, at Pittsburgh, on the subject
of the Sabbath. The good doctor was cold enough on the question of
slavery, which involved not only the desecration of the Sabbath, but of
the souls and bodies of millions of human beings. If Christianity was
truly of divine origin, and Garrison devoutly believed that it was, it
would approve its divinity by its manner of dealing with the vices and
evils which were dragging and chaining the feet of men to the gates of
hell. If it parleyed with iniquity, if it passed its victims by on the
other side, if it did not war incessantly and energetically to put down
sin, to destroy wickedness, it was of the earth, earthy, and its
expounders were dumb dogs where they should bark the loudest and bite
the hardest; and Dr. Beecher appeared to him one of these dumb dogs,
who, when he opened his mouth at all, was almost sure to open it at the
men who were trying through evil report and good to express in their
lives the spirit of Him who so loved the world that He gave His Son to
die to redeem it.
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