I am very glad to learn from you Dr. Boott's opinion upon2 the slavery question. In the infallibility of Mr. Garrison's judgment I certainly do not place full confidence, but unlimited in his singleness of purpose, his noble disinterestedness, and his indefatigable zeal in the anti-slavery cause. I am, however, compelled to confess that, as regards judgment on his subject, what he has effected by his fifteen years of labor ought to plead for his wisdom; and those friends who have longest and most minutely watched his course, are very accordant in their decision that his views have evidenced a prophetic sagacity.
My father's theological evolution has been already sufficiently indicated. It would not be easy to name the exact dates of his relinquishing his belief in the3 supernatural sanction of the Bible or in the divine nature and atoning mission of Jesus. This radical change made no difference in his regard for the Scriptures, or in his use of them, as a moral engine, and he never failed to urge the reading of them upon his children. We were encouraged also to go to Sunday-school, at the Warren-Street Chapel and afterwards with Theodore Parker's congregation; and Sunday (in the forties, at least) had a certain staidness, not to call it solemnity, in our home that did not wholly proceed from a civil respect for the scruples of neighbors. Long before my father had quite freed himself from the trammels of orthodoxy, he was loosening the fetters of others. At the twenty-seventh anniversary of4 the American Anti-Slavery Society, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton remarked: ‘My own experience is, no doubt,5 that of many others. In the darkness and gloom of a false theology, I was slowly sawing off the chains of my spiritual bondage when, for the first time, I met6 Garrison in London. A few bold strokes from the hammer of his truth, I was free! . . . To Garrison we owe, ’
