E449 ■ 1 ^H ■ 1 ■ ■ ■ 1 ^^^^1 1 ■ ^^^H ^^1 S|^H I^^^H 1 ■ ■ 1 ■ ■^ ■ V ^^^^^k ■ 1 1 ^^H n ■ 1 1 ^M 1 H ■ 1 ^^H .ft^Hgsg^p^?'tg^?;{SBS!.^.■i.';;i!l!I; ■ ; ; s ,;!■■■• LIBRARY OF CONGRESS DQDDli744t,m : :♦ ^-(^ ^ .«^ .0 .-^^ c.*^ •• o ^♦^ •• /\ l^K^' ^^'^-^^^ '"^^•' /X --^K-' *^' WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON A CENTENARY ADDRESS STEPHEN S. WISE BETH ISRAEL PULPIT Volume 11. JANUARY, 1906 No. 1 - PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY CONGREGATION BETH ISRAEL PORTLAND, OREGON Yearly, $1.00 Single Copy, 10c Vol. II. January. 1900 No. I Published Monthly, except July and August, by Congregation Beth Israel, Portland, Oregon. Yearly, $i.oo; Single Copy, lo Cents. Subscriptions to be sent to Hon. Joseph Simon, Chairman of Publication Committee, Mohawk Building, Portland, Oregon. 3rXhn^ lEhentng AJilnriffiaw for tl|^ Montl^ cf 3lan«arg January 5—" The Coming Social Economy," Rev. G. C. Cressey, D.D. January 12 — " Another Word on the Freedom of the Pulpit." January 19—" Is the Moral Supremacy of the Churches Endangered?" January 26 — "The Service of the Preacher to his Age." TEMPLE SERVICE Friday Evening, 8:00 o'clock. Saturday Morning, 10:30 o'clock. ur'Qd CO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON A CENTENARY ADDRESS BY STEPHEN S. WISE The Oregon country has within the past days brought to a close a centenary celebration of national character and ex- tent, commemorative of a splendid pioneering feat, the achieve- ment of Lewis and Clark, who one hundred years ago under the inspiration of Thomas Jefferson fared forth into the wilderness, and, beating their way through the trackless wastes, added to the territory of the nation an area imperial in value and almost continental in scope. It does the American people little honor that while the Louisiana purchase of Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark journey of exploration and conquest have found ample commemoration, the citizenship of the land knows not or little cares that December tenth, 1905, is the centenary of the birth of one of the noblest of Americans, one of the hardiest pioneers of the spirit, one of the greatest benefactors of a race, and therefore of the race, — William Lloyd Garrison. Like Lewis and Clark, Garrison was a pioneer, an explorer, a hero, a benefactor. While the exploration of Lewis and Clark lasted two years. Garrison's was the quest of a lifetime, a longer than thirty years' warfare with the terrible forces of slavery. The undertaking of Garrison was fraught with greater peril, for while Lewis and Clark set forth to face the dangers of forest and plain, after having equipped themselves with every weapon which foresight and means could command. ♦Delivered at the People's Church, Cooper Union, New York, Sunday evening, November 26, 1905. 2 WII.LIAM I.LOYD GARRISON Garrison unarmed faced a world of foes, scorning to arm himself save with the weapons of the spirit — Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Love. Greater than that of Lewis and Clark was Garrison's benefaction, for they gave us territory, and he wrought mightier results who resurrected a race from the death of slavery to the life of liberty. Ours has been an age of emancipation. Earth has not known a nobler band of emancipators than they whose labors have enriched and blessed the last century. What a company of immortals ! Kossuth and Mazzini, liberators of nations; Darwin and Huxley, lib- erators of the intellect; Parker, Emerson, Channing, Brooks, liberators of religion ; Tolstoi, Ruskin, Carlyle, Morris, Marx, liberators of the social body; Wilberforce, Clarkson, Garrison, Lincoln, liberators of a race ! Garrison and his peers alone toiled and suffered that others might be free, an alien and despised race, while the national, intellectual, social, religious liberators labored to free themselves and others. Garrison liberated others because he himself was free. A prophet of our own day, Tolstoi, fathoming, as it were, the secret of Garrison's great work, rightly admeasures the grandeur of the man in emphasizing Garrison's life-long resolution to occupy the highest possible ground. Throughout his life Garrison occupied the highest possible ground. Occu- pying the highest possible ground, immediatism, as we shall see, became his aim, and non-resistance his method. Immediat- ism, not gradualism, was the expression of his uncompromising conscience, immediate and unconditional emancipation his de- mand. Occupying the highest possible ground, "best possible," "expediency," "compromise," "opportunism," were not in his vocabulary, who flamed forth in the winged, Luther-like words, {J>1 am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard." His WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 6 demand that the black slave go free was heard because he was in earnest, because he would not equivocate, excuse, retreat. No compromise or half-way measures for him who was for laying the axe to the root, who feared "to perpetuate by prun- ing an overgrown system of oppression," who rightly under- stood that "gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice," "the question of expediency has nothing to do with that of right," "expediency and policy are convertible terms, full of dishonesty and oppression." The high expediency of immedi- atism was the only expediency to which he would give himself, hence amelioration, mitigation, alleviation were not for him whom immediate and unconditional liberation alone could satisfy. His abhorrence for compromise, his scorn of expediency, his passion for immediatism led him to the point at which it be- came possible for him, as early as 1831, to counsel the seeming treason of dissolution in the words, "If the bodies and souls of millions of rational beings must be sacrificed as the price of the Union, better, far better, that a separation should take place." In view of the prospect of the annexation of Texas in 1841, he had said, "Sooner let the Union be dashed to pieces than that the Northern States should submit to this infamy." "The American Union is such only in form, but not in substance, a hollow mockery instead of a glorious reality. The time is rap- idly approaching when the American Union will be dissolved in form as it is now in fact." In reiteration of what Webster termed "those words of delusion and folly," "Liberty first, and Union afterwards," Garrison said, "nothing can prevent the dissolution of the American Union but the abolition of slav- ery." Beginning in 1842, he attached first importance to the duty of making the repeal of the Union between the North and the South a grand rallying-point until it be accomplished or 4 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON slavery cease to pollute our soil. As early as 1844, Garrison took the revolutionary position, that the watchword in the ranks of the abolitionist should be ''No Union with slave- holders." This was prophecy. The Union with slaveholders ceased to be, and became a Union of free men. The Union must be dissolved, — he proclaimed in 1854. Either abolition or dissolution was his demand, and abolition was the outcome, disunion for a time, followed by what gives promise of being / reunion for all time. ) Highest of courage was his who dared to be stigmatized as a traitor, who was willing to say and do such things as would call forth the terms, "traitor," ''treason," from the unthinking and the passionate. Truest of patriots was he who so loved his deeply sinning country that he loathed her shame, "attached to his country by the dearest ties, but loathing her follies and abhorring her crimes." So loved he his country that he would rather that his country perish than forever remain unjust. Radical and revolutionary as these words sounded when first spoken, he believed in a higher law than the consti- tution, the law of right, and something above the Union, the will of God. He abhorred the superstition of the many that the Union bore or bears a charmed life. The words of O'Con- nell, "Let God care for Ireland ; I will never shut my mouth on the slavery question to save her," echoed Garrison's atti- tude to the Union. Like Lessing, he would not lie for truth's sake: He would not covenant with wrong for the sake of the Union. Occupying the highest possible ground. Garrison set out to effect a moral agitation, and not a forcible revolution. The American Anti-Slavery Society platform, which he drafted, made clear "This Society will never, in any way, countenance the oppressed in vindicating their rights by resorting to physical WIIylvIAM LLOYD GARRISON O force." Tolstoi finds that he alone of all the great American anti-slavery leaders took the highest possible ground in oppos- ing "the right of coercion on the part of certain people in regard to certain others", denying it to be possible "to eradi- cate or diminish evil by brute force, i. e., also by evil." "Gar- rison understood . . . the only irrefutable argument against slavery is the denial of the right of any man over the liberty of another under any condition whatsoever. Under no pretext has any man the right to dominate, i. e., to use coercion over his fellows." It is the verdict of Tolstoi that Garrison will forever remain one of the greatest reformers and promoters of true human progress. The supreme trial of his faith in non-resistance came in the form of the attack made upon him by the Boston mob. On the eveof the mob, which he foresaw, he said, "To the obedient, death is no calamity. If we perish, our loss will but hasten the destruc- tion of slavery more certainly. My mind is full of peace." When urged to defend himself, he replied "I will perish sooner than raise my hand against any man, even in self-defense, and let none of my friends resort to violence for my protection. If my life be taken, the cause of emancipation will not suffer." And, again, according to another witness, he calmly said, "It is needless to make such extra effort of violence. I shall go down to the mob unresistingly." "Throughout the whole of this trying scene I felt perfectly calm, nay, very happy." With the problem of non-resistance in all its moral bearings and implications, I cannot hope to deal tonight. Suffice it to say that Garrison's unswerving allegiance to the method of non- resistance gives an air of serenity and God-likeness to the most heroic figure of an heroic epoch. Garrison was a truth-speaker. As Veridix Magnus he ought to be known. Truth-telling, plain dealing with men 6 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON and measures, was the passion of his days, who spoke not to give offense nor for victory, but for truth's sake. "I mean to be only as severe as truth and justice require." "Personal or political offense we shall studiously try to avoid — truth never." "I shall use great plainness of speech, — believing that truth can never conduce to mischief and is best discovered by plain words." There are those who ever seek to persuade us in the face of wrong and injustice that agitation tends to prolong and perpetuate rather than to exterminate the evil, that the battle with the forces of wrong must ever be fought with caution and prudence and circumspectness, and that one must be ever careful to distinguish between evil and the wrong-doer, between falsehood and the liar, between corruption and thieves. He heard these counsels of overnice and superfine discrimination, and went his way unmoved, wisely foreknowing that if unmo- lested by agitation, slavery would flourish forever. He agitated all the time and in every season, from the early twenties until the first of January, 1865, and the agitated defenders of wrong alone deprecated his agitation as unwise and harmful. Cassius M. Clay, noting the lament that the abolitionists had set back the cause of emancipation by agitation, said in 1853, "Nothing is more false, because the cause of emancipation advances only with agitation; let that cease, and despotism is complete." As for waging the war of extermination equably and calmly, Garrison came to hate the words, caution, prudence, judicious- ness, and the one thing he dreaded more than another was that he might "dilute or modify his language against slavery." "To give offence I am loath, but more to hide or to modify Truth." As if fearing that he might be tempted to moderation and temperateness in a cause calculated to rouse men to a frenzy of passion at wrongdoing, inhumanity, cruelty, he de- WII.I.IAM LLOYD GARRISON 7 Glared in the words of Fox, ^On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation." And when he was taxed with severity and vehemence of speech, he repHed "Many have censured me for my severitv— but, thank God! none have stigmatized me with lukewarmness.'' "In correcting pubHc vices and aggravated crimes, deHcacv is not to be consulted." "Slavery is a monster and must be treated as such." Many friends of the slave, who, as an abstraction favored the liberation of the slave, and yet were unwilling to rouse the nation to blot out its shame, felt as did Channing with respect to the abolitionists, "Their writings have been blemished by a spirit of intolerance, sweeping censure and rash injurious judgment." He, not they, freed the slaves. Nothing less than the compulsion of an inexorable conscience could have moved Garrison, who was both just and loving, to apply severe epithets to individuals rather than to bodies' of men and principles. If, as was once said, Garrison's language, like Martin Luther's, was rough and sometimes violent, it is also true that nothing less than the trumpet tones, the clarion call, of a Garrison could have stirred the torpid, moribund conscience of a sinfully acquiescent nation. He would not as he himself said, separate the subject from personalities,' shoot at nothing and hit it. He refused, Channing like, to view the slaveholder as an abstraction, for, as he said in scathing rebuke, "Channing is safe from the thumbscrew the cart-whip and the branding-iron. ... To the slave, the slaveholder is very much a reality, a dreadful reality." Are we to deal with political corruption, with civic tyranny, with the shamefully unscrupulous and conscienceless methods of hjoh finance, of recent disclosure, with the silence of non-agitatio^n, or shall we agitate, and, agitating, smite and overthrow? William Lloyd Garrison was a man of supreme courage. 8 WILIvIAM LLOYD GARRISON At the age of twenty-one, he wrote "Nor wealth shall awe my soul, Nor might, nor power." "I cannot know fear. I feel that it is impossible for danger to awe me." He never did know fear, and danger never awed him, who was storm-proof, who was possessed of pine and faggot virtue, the unstooping firmness of whose upright soul peril could not shake, not even the peril of the Boston mob, which found him cheerful and confident, and left his poise and serenity unbroken. His was not merely the courage which peril, imprisonment, privation, persecution, vainly seek to break or bend, but that almost higher heroism which steels a man to misunderstanding, slander, ridicule, defamation, often harder to endure than actual danger to life or limb. Branded as an agitator, incendiary, deluded fanatic, moral pestilence, calumniator, enemy of his country, he replied with the forti- tude of the stoic and the equanimity of the saint, "I solicit no man's praise, I fear no man's censure." Threats of assassina- tion could not affright him, nor could he be dismayed by the cries of slander which oftimes came from those who had been, or would fain have been, his friends. The threat of foe could not deter him ; the dispraise of friend could not move him, who feared only to do wrong, to countenance injustice. "Fear God — then disregard all other fears ; Be in his truth erect, majestic, free ; Abhor oppression, cling to liberty." Almost might one say that he feared not God nor man, — nor the devil. God he loved, not feared. Man he loved and served and liberated. The devil, if he could not sweetly persuade, he would defy and overcome. WII.I.IAM LLOYD GARRISON 9 "I am for Revolution, were I utterly alone. T am there because I must be there. I must cleave to the right." It is true that he was all but utterly alone. None the less true were his words of a later day, ''The man who stands alone in a moral cause, though all the world be against him, if God be for him, stands in a majority and is conqueror." For decades he stood almost alone, as if to prove how true it is that an individual pitted against a vast public opinion, one man against the many, is divine. Two mighty forces should have stood and battled by his side, but they failed him, the Press and Church, as, alas! they still often fail the great needs and causes of humanity. To read how church after church, pulpit after pul- pit, arrayed itself against the cause of abolition, is unutterably saddening to one who would have the Church greatly serve the State. Noble exceptions there were, and not a few, such as Parker and Beecher and May, but the ignobly craven atti- tude of the churches is typed by the church minister of Boston, who, in 1828, after an address by Benjamin Lundy, declared that slavery was too delicate a matter to be meddled with by the people of the Northern States, again, by twenty of the rioters at Farmington who were men of cloth, and, lastly, by the founder of an American church, who proclaimed the divine right of slavery and deprecated the impiety of interfer- ence with it! Alas and alas! that Garrison might speak with truth of the deep, unbroken, tomb-like silence of the Church. Then, as now, some of the American journals served the cause of right with zeal and power, but in the main the press was satisfied to follow and to reflect public opinion which, rightlv directed, might have abolished the curse of slavery without resorting to crudest war. The strongest forces arra\ ed against him were those of wealth and respectability. Even the Boston mob was made up largely of the so-called wealthy and respec- 10 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON table, the moral worth, influence, and standing of Boston. It is not too much to say to-day, forty years after the close of the civil war, that abolition would have come to pass much sooner but for the self-seeking and fearfulness of Northern tradesmen. It was men of property and standing, who defended slavery and most bitterly opposed the abolitionists. Commerce is ever timid. Northern cupidity and cowardice stood behind Southern slavery as truly before '61 as New England com- merce and New York capital to-day profit by grinding into dividends the bones of little children in the mills and factories of the South. If only men of affairs throughout the land could be brought to realize that commerce must yield when the interests of right and commerce clash, that the man who lessens dividends for a time becomes oftimes the richest asset of the nation. Alone he fought for the alone, and yet not alone, for two noble women fought by his side, his mother, the sacredest memory of his life, and his wife. These helped to make Gar- rison the man he was. While he was a mere youth his mother wrote to him of a colored woman who had served her in illness, "although a slave to man, yet a free-born soul, by the grace of God." Never once, wrote Garrison of his wife, did she ever counsel a less personal exposure or a more moderate course of action on my part. Ten days after the Boston mob, the wife of Garrison wrote to a friend, "Inexpressibly dear as he is to me, I had rather see him sacrifice his life in this blessed cause than swerve from a single right principle." Alone he stood save for these, and a small number of electest souls who stood with him, the women as nobly and unweariedly as the men, — Mrs. Chapman, while the Boston mob raged without, saying, "If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere." Honor and immortality to the memory of the WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 11 heroic fellow-liberators of Garrison, few in number yet an imperial company. Garrison the dreamer was also the doer. His head was in the clouds of hope and promise ; his feet he planted upon the solid earth of realization and achievement. The native ideal- ism of his soul was almost matched by his purposeful, resource- ful efficiency. First to have sounded the tocsin of abolition were enough to give him deathless glory ; for more than a generation, he was first and greatest among those who labored that the race of slaves go free. Blow after blow he struck, each more terrible than the one before. He proclaimed the doctrine of immediate emancipation, he organized anti-slavery societies, local, state and national, he did much to develop a right public opinion in England by his several journeys, his addresses, and personal contact with English leaders of thought, he founded and conducted the Liberator, he led nearly every reformatory movement of his time. Garrison was the liber- ator of the enslaved, and when emancipation was become a fact, no one quicker or more zealous than Garrison to help the millions of freedmen in need of all that men, long impov- erished and degraded, can need. ''Liberty and humanity" might have been his watchword. 'T have loved liberty for myself, for all who are dear to me, for all who dwell on the American soil, for all mankind. Lib- erty for each, for all, and forever." In truth could he say of himself, "In short, I did what I could for the redemption of the human race." Humanity-mongers he and his fellow-abolition- ists were reproachfully styled in the course of the resolutions passed by the Rynders mob. Liberty and humanity ! Liberty for all humanity and the higher humanity through liberty ! The motto he had chosen at the commencement of his moral war- fare, "Our country is the world, our countrymen are all man- 12 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON kind," he supplemented with yet another slogan, "Universal Emancipation." Of all things else, William Lloyd Garrison was the liberator, emancipator, breaker of chains, looser of the bonds of men, restorer of liberty. His was a genius of universal emancipation^ for no truer, greater liberator of men has walked upon earth. "A nobler strife the world ne'er saw The enslaved to disenthrall." Wendell Phillips said in 1865 that he had never met the anti- slavery man or woman, who had struck any effectual blow/ at the slave-system in this country, whose action was not born out of the heart and conscience of William Lloyd Garrison. The givers of the national testimonial said of him in words as honoring to themselves as to him, "He was the conspicuous, the acknowledged, the prophetic leader of the movement in behalf of the American slave — now consummated by the edict of universal emancipation." The vanguard of the anti-slavery hosts acclaimed Garrison as the leader and inspirer of the movement against American slavery, which has resulted in one of the greatest moral triumphs the world has ever witnessed. No more impressive testimony to the far-reaching and, in truth, immeasurable influence of Garrison for human rights and human liberties was ever borne than by the address of the North Shields workingmen in 18G7, "The eager joy with which the enemies of liberty in Europe, and their allies among the aristocracy of Britain, hailed that infamous attempt to solve all questions affecting capital and labor by making the laborer capital, aroused our countrymen from that political apathy which is fatal to a free state, and so encouraged the advocates of popular liberty in this country again to raise the standard of reform." The Duke of Argyle, at a breakfast tendered Gar- WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 13 rison in 18GT, declared, "The cause of negro emancipation in America has been the greatest cause, which, in ancient or in modern times, has been pleaded at the bar of the moral judg- ment of mankind." The address presented to him upon this occasion rightly set forth that his labor for the redemption of the negro slave had achieved a higher object than the redemption of any similar race, the vindication of the universal principles of humanity and justice. Garrison was the liber- ator above all else, and above all other men. Liberator, — high- est of offices, noblest of crowns ! He could not have become the liberator had he not liber- ated his own soul. Not alone was he the greatest of liberators ; no man had ever so liberated his soul and enfranchised his spirit as Garrison, who could say of himself, as he did, that he was bound by no denominational trammels, that he was no political partisan, that he took upon his lips no human creed, that he was guided by no human authority, and that he could not consent to wear the livery of any fallible body. He ab- horred bonds and fetters, gyves and chains, whether physical or intellectual, moral or racial, political or religious. In his twenty-fourth year, he founded the "Journal of the Times" at Bennington, Vermont, which, he announced, should be "inde- pendent, trammeled by no interest, biased by no sect, awed by no power." No man ever liberated himself more entirely from every prejudice, and partisanship, and prepossession, save for truth and justice and righteousness. Liberator and self-liber- ated was he in the highest, in the vocabulary of whose soul, foreigner, alien, inferior, were not, who had so freed himself that to him man was man. Citizen of the world was this most American of Americans, who was withal a fellow-citizen of the world of men. "My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind," was the 14 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON expression of his soul; it was no more truly ''cosmopolitan vagueness and extravagance," as styled it Professor Von Hoist, than is the Declaration of Independence, which the self-elect in our land are pleased to regard as a series of glittering and meaningless generalities. Cosmopolite, universalist, was he, who drew his own portrait in the apostrophe to a fellow liber- ator. ''Friend of Mankind! .... Thy country is the world — thou knowest no other — And every man, in every clime, thy brother," who aroused the international, the interracial, the world-con- science in the words, "Enslave but a single human being and the liberty of the world is put in peril," to whom the chained and kneeling negro seemed to plead in the words, "Am I not a man and a brother?" What earnest, unbreaking resolution — to the end! He harped not on one string, but on one string at a time, this "monomaniac on every subject." In dead earnest, the hardship and self-sacrifice, which were his, were as nothing to him, who made good his word, to sustain the Liberator as long as he could live on bread and water. Unwearied toil and unstinted sacrifice were the bread of life to this man with an ideal, this man with never a thought of self. In all his character nothing is more admirable than his undeviating consistency. He was a Christian, hence a non-resistant. A resistant Christian is not a Christian. Hence, too, he abhorred insincerity and hypoc- risy. He had no words to express his horror when the self- evident truths of the Declaration of Independence were declared to be mere rhetorical flourishes. Hence, too, he was terror- stricken in the presence of sabbath formalism, and held that every day was a sabbath and that every man might be his own WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 15 minister. The assailants of insincerity, the unmaskers of hypoc- risy, are too few in any age. Nearly seventy years ago, in January 1837, at a meeting held in a Boston stable, because, as Garrison said, not a single meet- ing-house could be obtained on any terms, in which abolitionists might plead the cause of the trampled slave, Ellis Gray Loring said prophetically, "The individual who started this mighty movement is rejected and scorned by the great and little vulgar of our day. No matter. Posterity will do justice to the name of William Lloyd Garrison." Are not we, who are almost contemporaneous with Garrison, beginning to anticipate the ver- dict of the ages, which is fame? In the thirties, the city of New York, the headquarters of the American Anti-Slavery Society, had not a place for Garrison to lay his head except the cotton-loft in the third or fourth story of a Wall street storehouse, the hospitality of which was offered by a negro. In 1833, Clinton Hall was closed to an anti-slavery meeting, which was compelled to adjourn to Chatham Street Chapel by a Tam- many Hall mob. Seventeen years later, another Tammany Hall mob, led by a typical Tammany Hall leader, Isaiah Rynders, interrupted and finally broke up an anti-slavery meet- ing, in the Broadway Tabernacle. How well Tammany sus- tains its character for zeal in ill-doing, its inspiration being ever the pious hope breathed by Bluecher as he looked upon London, ''Was fuer Plunder," with the difference that Tam- many's works have been uniformly consistent with Bluecher's faith ! In 1862, Garrison speaking from this platform on "The Abolitionists and their Relations to the War," showed very clearly that a battler for human rights is ever a statesman of the highest order. "Emancipation is to destroy nothing but evil ; it is to establish good; it is to transform human beings from things to men ; it is to make freedom, and education, and inven- 16 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON tion, and enterprise, and prosperity, and peace, and a true union, possible and sure." To-night, the first of a series of centenary meetings in honor of Garrison is held within a stone's throw of the Broadway church whence fifty years ago he was driven by a mob, and a fortnight from to-night, on the tenth day of December, the white race and the black, the South and the North, will unite in paying homage, inadequate though it were ungrudging, and ungrudging it will not be, to the memory of him who is beyond and above the reach of men's homage and men's praise. The recollection and emulation of his supreme example we owe our- selves rather than him, who is one of the greatest of Americans, one of the mightiest figures of the nineteenth century, of high rank among the men of all times, one of those characters, who, as said Savonarola of St. Antoine, are the true glories of the human race. What St. Beuve said of Bossuet ought to be true of us touching our attitude to Garrison, — He is to us not a memory but a religion. Do my words savor of hero-worship? I am not afraid of hero-worship. I am afraid of the mistaken kind of hero-worship, the worship of the unheroic heroes, of the heroes not worth while. Infinite worthship in him who could truly say, 'T have flattered no man, feared no man, bribed no man. Having sought that honor which comes from God, I am not left without honor among my countrymen." Fitting it is, indeed, that the earliest of the Garrison cen- tenary addresses be spoken in this hall, which will forever be luminous with the radiance of the twin-stars in the heavens of liberation, Lincoln and Garrison. This is holy ground, for upon it they have stood. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January, ISO 3, was the echo of the salutatory of the Liber- ator, of January first, 1831, and of the Declaration of Senti- ments of 1833, by him drafted at the founding of the American WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 17 Anti-Slavery Society. Behind Lincoln as he framed and signed the Proclamation stood Garrison. It was Lincoln's war- measure ; it was the hope and faith and aim of Garrison's life- time of toil and daring. Upon the election of Lincoln, Wendell Phillips said, "For the first time in our history, the slave has chosen a President of the United States. Lincoln is in place, Garrison in power." Ex-Governor Chamberlain of South Caro- lina related in 1883 that when on April the sixth, 1865, he spoke to Lincoln of the country's gratitude for the great deliverance of the slave, Lincoln answered, "I have been only an instru- ment. The logic and the moral power of Garrison and the anti-slavery people . . . have done all." Garrison's battle is not won. The war he waged is barely begun. The battle for freedom is eternal. Alas ! that not even Garrison's struggle for the ftiegro is ended. I am not thinking of the mouthings and the ravings of a Dixon, but of the thought soberly put forth by a Southern gentleman, Thomas Nelson Page, in his book on "The Negro : The Southerner's Problem," "Slavery, whatever its demerits, was not in its time the unmiti- gated evil it is fancied to have been. Its time has passed. No power could compel the South to have it back. But to the negro it was salvation." We hear again of colonization in Liberia, of the negro not being a man but an animal. The negro is disfranchised in the South, and the fifteenth amend- ment to the constitution of the United States is disavowed in theory and repudiated in practice. Oh for the voice of a Gar- rison to smite these traitors to the spirit of '76, these undoers of the blood-bought victories of '61 to '65 ! The truest, and visually the most searching, test of any man is that he be true to his ideals, that he live by his faith. In 1851, George Thompson, the English Garrison, showed how Garrison had more than fulfilled the prophecy of every word of 18 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON his immortal utterance, "I am in earnest ... I will be heard," and predicted that these would become household words over the vast continent of America, through coming years and ages. Garrison defined the duty of the abolitionists, "to be as inexorable as justice, as contumacious as truth, as unbending as the pillars of the universe; to put on the whole armor of God, and, having done all, to stand." He had the intellect to com- prehend and the character to fulfill this duty, and, because he stood erect upon the highest possible ground, he will forever be remembered as one, who, in his own words, "compromised not with the wrong, who spoke the truth, and applied it boldly to the conscience of the people." Let us strive to make our own lives worthy of the memory of William Lloyd Garrison, liberator of a race, uncompromis- ing foe to wrong, unterrifiable defender of the right, champion of the world's oppressed and down-trodden, prophet of peace, gospeller of love, apostle of the glorious liberty of the sons of God, our fellowman and our fellow-American — what poten- tial nobleness of peerage! — William Lloyd Garrison. "Praised and beloved that none Of all thy great things done Flies higher than thy most equal spirit's flight; Praised, that nor doubt nor hope could bend Earth's loftiest head, found upright to the end." 303 4 ^ IBrtly Sfarapl Notf a Addresses are given from time to time to the pupils of the Religious School, Sunday morning, at 11:30 o'clock. Parents are especially invited to be present, January 14, 1906. — "The Juvenile Court, Judge A. L. Frazer. The class for the study of the Jewish Sects, under the aus- pices of the Council of Jewish Women, meets on the third (and fifth) Wednesday afternoon of the month, Selling-Hirsch Hall, 2:30 o'clock, under the direction of Dr. Wise. January 17. — 'The Essenes," Mrs. Sig. Sichel. January 31. — "The Pharisees," Mrs. M. Hirsch. The combined Confirmation and Post-Graduate Classes meet with Dr. Wise, Saturday morning at 9:30, the subject of this year's study being "The Origin and Content of Religion." The Study Circle of the Altar Guild meets on the last Sunday of the month at 10:30; this year's subject of study is "Five Centuries of Jewish History, 1400-1900." A special meeting of the Congregation was held January 15, 1906, at which the Board of Trustees were empowered to make arrangements looking to the election of a successor to Dr. Wise. % \,^^^ : rr.-* ^0 .*' /^i^\ ^*^.<.* ■ .-is^-, \,^- .'^1^\ *^^,^* /• % ••^♦' /\ '.W-* ^'^'""^ '™*' /%. ■A^ :^^mM-' ^^^^'5' .'^■s*. '^^^♦'' ; / .*^"*. ": .• j>'%. '. r. "*^.^^* ;. "o^ .0 M ^'^'-^ °^