loss we have sustained in the death of one so well qualified by study and experience to defend the Liberal cause, and we would express our tenderest sympathy for his wife and daughter, and for his parents and their surviving children, in their sore bereavement.

CHANDLER DARLINGTON.

With a saddened, but at the same time with a hopeful and exultant spirit, we would pay our tribute of respect and love to the memory of Chandler Darlington, who, from the very beginning, was an active and earnest member of this Society, and who passed away on the 28th of Third month last, at the ripe age of 78 years, lamented by the whole community in which his life had been passed. A more shining example of integrity, courage, and devotion to truth as he apprehended it, we have never known. Not attempting to formulate any dogmatic faith in the existence of God, and feeling no positive or express assurance of a life beyond the grave, he yet reposed in unbroken trust in the presence and rule everywhere of the infinite Truth, Wisdom and Beneficence. He was responsive to every claim of humanity upon his sympathy, and an example of those virtues which are generally supposed to constitute the Christian character. He was a man of principle, rather than of impulse, but his conscience was quick to accept the right and reject the wrong in all human affairs and relations. He was a successful ruler of his own spirit, calm in judgment, deliberate in action, and inflexibly true to his convictions. He was a good citizen, a kind neighbor, and efficient in the support of those institutions and resources which he thought adapted to promote the welfare of his country. His life was to us a perpetual benediction, and remains an inspiring memory.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

A COMMEMORATIVE SERMON,

Preached at Longwood Yearly Meeting, on Sixth-month 5th, 1879.

By JOSEPH MAY.

William Lloyd Garrison belonged to the class of men who, as a class, have hardly been possible in any country except our own, and the possibility of whose uprising is one of its greatest glories-the class to which belonged Franklin, Webster, Lincoln, Parker, and many others who have achieved among us the highest eminence as leaders in thought or action. Perhaps neither of those I have named, except Lincoln, began in narrower conditions, with fewer adventitious helps. The son of a mother saddened and impoverished by worse than natural widowhood, he was set to earn his own living from the age of ten. A year or two only In common schools, and these secured by his own boyish exertions, gove him all the opportunity of education which he thenceforth had. But he had a deep thirst for learning, a good intellect inherited, it would seem, from both his parents, with a strain of genius from his father, and a moral nature of intense clearness and strength from his able and nobl· mother. It was she who put him at school with duty, and gave him the germs of his unwavering loyalty to God and humanity-to truth, justice and righteousness. Both she and he were the natural product of Puritanism-that great religious and political system which has made New England what it has been, and has been, on the whole, the most powerful single fore in shaping the character and institutions of our whole people. N communion eve; so reverenced and obeyed what they saw as the abstract right, exept perhaps that body of the Friends, by whom this Community Was founded and its character shaped. Puritanism his not produd in the days of its decadence, as a visible system, a more characteristic fruit than Garrison. For his parallel you must go back to the era of Cromwell and Hampden, of Bradford and Carver and Stan lisa. Tae spirit which steered the Mayflower to the wintry shores of New England was the spirit, and the only one, which could have sufficed to nerve the heart of this great reformer to take up arms against an institution s powerful, so thoroughly entrenched North and South, as was human slavery fifty years ago. He was only a boy when this mission came to him. There is something truly Hebraic and thoroughly Paritan in the spectacle of the lad, with that Bible which his mother had made his library and his vade mecum open before him, accepting on his knees the call and answering it like Samuel, with an "Here am I?" But it was not a mission merely to this particular reform. His later modo was: "My country is the world-my countrymen are all mankind." In the abolition of slavery his energies were thenceforth peculiarly engrossed. But earlier still and always the rights and interests of all humanity held possession of his heart. His earlies. nom de plume was "Aristides "--and he who, like the Greek sage, became a weariness to his people in his unflinching demand for

justice to a down-crushed race, saw his first vision of duty in the miseries of the Grecian patriot's outraged posterity. Before he concentrated his energies on the task which became the work of his life he had pleaded the cause of Temperance and Peace with the same youthful zeal and energy. But in these essays he was only girding on his armor. It was like a providence of God which took him to the heart of a slave State, and gave him both a personal acquaintance with the actual workings of slavery and that powerful impulse which decided the peculiar direction of his energies. By the time he was twenty-five years old he was fully devoted to the extirpation of the system as the principal work of his life. At an age when our young men are generally looking about them for something to do, he was fulfilling his vow by public addresses on the subject and in his practical Puritan way organizing appeals to Congress and similar measures for the suppression of the institution. Garrison was not, indeed, the first Abolitionist of our country. Opposition to slavery appeared at the very beginning of national history, and enlisted the sympathies or some of the ablest of the founders of our Government. The first recorded anti-slavery society was presided over by that other New England printer's boy, Franklin. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Jay had uttered their condenination of the system. But all these had been hampered by side considerations and by concern about the means of undoing the wrong. Garrison was the first to cast aside all anxieties and cut through all sophistries and proclaim that the first step in the direction of the right was to cease doing wrong. At Baltimore, in 1830, he began to demand that the inalienable right of all men to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," on which our Declaration of Independence was based, should be-not conferred upon the blacks-but recognized as eternally and immediately theirs. He was not long in becoming a martyr to the hostility which such a doctrine at once excited. Men can tolerate distant views of duty, but it is hard to have them brought home thus instantly to our doors and see in them the loss of wealth and ease and social consideration which a reform so prompt was sure to bring to the dominant race. So they who had listened with indifference or approval to appeals for gradual emancipation and the deportation of the unoffending blacks to the land of their ancestors, now as strange to them as the birth-place of our raco in Central Asia to the whites, were kindied into rage by the proclamation of immedate emancipation. But they only unveiled the quality of the new apostle by easting him into their jail; from prison depths came forth, like a pæ in of victory foreseen, his immortal sonnet:

"High walls and huge the body may confine,
And iron gates obstruct the prisoner's gaze,

And massive bolts may baffle his design,

And vigilant keepers watch his devious ways;
Yet scorns the immortal mind this base control!
No chains can bind it, and no cell enclose;
Switter than light it flies from pole to pole,

And in a flash from earth to heaven it goes!
It leaps from mount to mount; from vale to vale
It wanders, plucking honeyed fruit and flowers.
It visits home, to hear the fireside tale,

Or in sweet converse pass the joyous hours:
"Tis up before the sun, roaming afar,

And in its watches wearies every star!"

Doub: not the greatness of one who still, as it were, but a stripling, his first attack in all seeming so completely foiled, could utter words so dauntless as these. That sonnet was to Slavery like the cry of "Pan is dead!" amid the shrines of ancient Paganism.

Henceforth he was fully dedicated to his mission in form as in fact. Visited in prison by a few Quaker friends, he was released by the interposition of a good Northern merchant. That the battle between Liberty and Slavery was not yet fully joined, the fact would show that both Daniel Webster and Henry Clay intervened to nave his tine remitted. But it was joined without delay. Returning North to begin his crusade, he applied first to the clergy of New England, for whom and the churches, as a true child of Puritanism, he cherished the deepest reverence, and

whom he confidently expected to find ready to aid him. His deep religious sentiments suffered in this quest their first shock, but his apprehension of the profundity of his task received a hardly needed quickening, as he saw in their indifference and subserviency an indication of the demoralization which Slavery had been silently working upon the Northern communities. Almost without exception the ministers of Christ's Gospel received him coldly; some rudely repulsed him. In Boston, not a church nor even a hall would unbar its doors to the discussion of a great moral question, of which the least that could be said was that it was an open one. Alas! for the good name of Christianity that it should have been a band of professed infidels who alone would give a chance to speak to him who wished to plead, as he saw it, the cause of these least of Christ's brethren. If Christ was thus crucined afresh, He arose again in one who rebuffed by his proposed followers, was so true to himself and to his Master that he could not utter a word, even for the slave, until he had assured his entertainers that he himself was a Christian. But he won for himself a hearing, and followers, who were also followers of the Master. If I have any pride in the stock of which I come, it shall be that the heart of one of its members then and there responded to the word of a great truth, and had wisdom and courage to avow his confidence that "here is a providential man! he is our prophet; he will shake our nation to its centre, but he will shake slavery out of it."

And now Garrison's work was fully begun. Resolved to raise the standard of immediate emancipation within sight of Bunker Hill be founded the Liberator, a paper published, in the clegant language of the then Mayor of Boston, who, with the prompt servility of the day,"ferreced it out" at the bidding or a Southern official, "in an obscure hole, his only auxiliary a negro boy, his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors." Of the paper it is enough to say,—and no more can be said, -it was destined to be as remarkable a phenomenon as himself,--it was himself, the perfect reflection of his mind and heart. In the opening number he laid down his programme, emphatically declaring that purpose from which he never varied in the least-to work with moral weapons only. He addressed the slaves, urging them to patiene and to waiting on God's good time. He uttered the strongest expressions of horror at murderous insurrections. The "few persons of all colors" soon included, by the grace of God, a remarkable representation of the best historic families of Massachusetts, as well as of her humblest citizens, The attitude of Garrisonian abolitionism was distinctly marked for all time. Under his ever-modest, but influential, leadership, it continued strictly and undeviatingly, without lapses or retreats, or wanderings right or left, a moral movement for the conviction of the minds and hearts of the people.

They were a wonderful handful of men! No more remarkable group ever came together! In private they were as a band of brothers; dfectionate, genial, often jovial, full of story, jest and song in their idle hours; but always holding each other up to a rigid ideal standard on every subject of duty. Courage among them went without saying, Logic was a drug. "Eloquence was dirt-cheap among them," said Emerson. Their tongues wore loosened by their great cause. There was never better speaking heard in America than was heard any day from their platformi. Phillips, Thompson, Burleigh, Douglass, Goodell, Garrison himself, were well worthy to be named with the orators of any country or age. All our poets whose names will ever live were presently with them. Whittier was of them from the first. The great philosopher of Concord was on their side soon. They had noble preachers, tooyou know their names-a few grand women. Assailing the dearest institution of this free country, no moral charge was ever seriously brought against their character or purposes. Abused as men were never abused, the sum of all the charges was, they are fanatics. And even this was not true!-not true of Garrison, at least, nor of his leading disciples. They were idealists, extremists if you will; but they were not fanatics. The fanatic is he whose idea is greater than himself; who is mastered by

It, not master of it. Precisely this is what Garrison especially was not. Calm, cool, clear-headed, sagacious, self-contained, far-seeing, master of himself and a perfect master of his subject and his programme, the very characteristic of his mind was poise and balance. His career was directed by a practical wisdom and knowledge of men and foresight of history which the logic of events has proved to be almost more than human. I know of no element in the sorrows of the later days which was not predicted by these Cassandras of their age. Fanaticism would have led Garrison as it led John Brown to just those errors which his principles and his judgment alike saved him from. He had a far too broad comprehension of the task he had taken up, and saw, as the Garrison Abolitionists all saw, that it was much too great to be achieved except by the slow but certain operations of moral forces. To create public” opinion was their only aim from first to last. They never spent time or thought upon the merely practical questions which emancipation necessarily involved. Their one weapon was discussion. Agitate! Agitate! Agitate! was their only watchword. In all this, I repeat, are precisely the tokens that they were not fanatics.

There were three obvious forms which action against slavery might have taken: Conspiracy, political organization, education of public opinion. It was the great good fortune of our whole country that the most influential direct movement against it was guided by men who chose their weapons as carefully as they directed them vigorously. Either it would have been strangled like an untimely birth, or the South must have become the scene of domestic horrors which it is even still a mystery that it actually escaped. Even the war, when it came Mr. Garrison accepted only as a result inevitable among frail and passionate men. It was not a way which he would have chosen. He could not countenance the taking of life even to secure all that makes life dear. To his own son proposing to enlist he said: "Obey your own conscience. I cannot advise you to do what for myself would be wrong." I do not know that since Christ bade Peter sheathe his sword on the Crucifixion Eve, there was ever a more remarkable example of moral self-control.

But he was equally true wherever tempted to desert any other principle for the sake of his peculiar cause. From the beginning and always ne took on himself the load and obloquy of every truth, however visionary which his soul saw. He added to his unpopularity as the opponent of slavery, by his advocacy of non-resistance, of peace, of total abstinence and liquor prohibition; and of a demand then deemed (outside of the communion of Friends) as fanatical as the doctrine of Immediate Emancipation-I mean that of the equality of women with men in all Social and political affairs. Going to England as a delegate to a great Anti-Slavery gathering there,an occasion of the utmost importance to his cause at home, he declined to take the seat accorded to himself because the title of his female fellow-delegates, Lucretia Mott among them, was denied. Whatever we may think of these various ideas, the greatness of his obedience to conscience is equally conspicuous. He has been cal ed a man ofone idea; he was! but that idea was as large as humanity and as broad as righteousness. If ever to any man could be applied the greatest utterance of classic antiquity, that golden saying of Terence, it could be said of him, "Nothing which concerns humanity was indifferent to him." The last test of a balanced reformer is that he can risk bis peculiar cause by fidelity to other principles. Compare the ignoble conduct of Kossuth visiting the cities of the South to plead for liberty in Hungary, and witnessing without rebuke, nay with worse than silent approval, the slavery of millions in America, and mark the difference.

From the establishment of the Liberator the history of Garrison is the history of the country in what can hardly cease to be its profoundest political and social crises. With its outline we are all acquainted. But probably few even yet comprehend the real significance of the process of that long struggle which this young man did so much to initiate. It is difficult now to believe that such a state of things could have been as then existed among this free, enlightened and generally moral and relig