Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 4

It is small wonder that the clergy were reluctant even¹ to baptize any namesake of my fathers. Nor was there anything peculiar in their ferocious attacks on him for the heresies he ventilated while still in full accord with them as to the authority of the Scriptures–attacks parallel at all points with those of the Slave Power on political abolitionists who acknowledged the binding force of the Constitutional compromises, while proposing nothing unconstitutional. On the other hand, it took him some time to recover from the shock which he sustained on being repelled or neglected by the clergy² in his first ingenuous appeals to them; and if he never ceased to hold them rigidly accountable as moral teachers and professors, he came to see that neither they nor the body of our church members were separable from the average morality of the age. There was something ludicrous in the contrast between his simple and childlike character, his absolute blamelessness as a citizen, with the clergy's holy horror and denunciation of him as, in one aspect, an arch-conspirator against the very frame-work of society; in another, a wretch for whom the penitentiary was too good. The more he used the Scriptures in his agitation, the more he appeared to them a poacher on their preserves; and his secular movement was a standing irritation to them as an obvious work of Christian charity conducted without the aid and direction of the cloth. But they never could succeed in organizing a clerical anti-slavery society having any vitality, whereas,³ in our war time, we saw the U. S. Sanitary Commission call a U. S. Christian Commission into existence. His identifying his peace doctrine with the Saviour capped the climax of his audacity and their indignation. Probably they will never forgive his succeeding without their patronage or permission (as an organized body), nor allow that slavery went under in any but ‘God's good time’ and way.