e was excluded from
ecclesiastical equality, for he was different from other men for whom
Christ died. The Bible declared that man was made but a little lower
than the angels; the American people in their State and Church
supplemented this sentiment by acts which plainly said that the negro
was made but a little above the brute creation.

Here are instances of the length to which the prejudice against color
carried the churches in those early years of the anti-slavery movement:

In 1830, a colored man, through a business transaction with a lessee of
one of the pews in Park Street Church, came into possession of it.
Thinking to make the best use of his opportunity to obtain religious
instruction for himself and family from this fountain of orthodoxy, the
black pew-holder betook him, one Sunday, to "Brimstone Corner." But he
was never permitted to repeat the visit. "Brimstone Corner" could not
stand him another Lord's day, and thereupon promptly expelled him and
his family out of its midst. The good deacons displayed their capacity
for shielding their flock from consorting with "niggers," by availing
themselves of a technicality to relet the pew to a member who was not
cursed with a dark skin. On another Lord's day, in another stronghold of
Boston Christianity, Oliver Johnson ran the battery of "indignant frowns
of a large number of the congregation" for daring to take a
fellow-Christian with a skin not colored like his own into his pew, to
listen to Dr. Beecher. The good people of the old Baptist meeting-house,
at Hartford, Conn., had evidently no intention of disturbing the
heavenly calm of their religious devotions by so much as a thought of
believers with black faces; for by boarding up the "negro pews" in front
and leaving only peep-holes for their occupants, they secured themselves
from a sight of the obnoxious creatures, while Jehovah, who is no
respecter of persons, was in His holy place. Incredible as it may seem,
a church in the town of Stoughton, Mass., to rid itself of even a
semblance of Christian fellowship and equality with a colored member,
did actually cut the floor from under the colored member's pew!

These cruel and anti-Christian distinctions in the churches affected
Garrison in the most painful manner. He says:

"I never can look up to these wretched retreats for my colored brethren
without feeling my soul overwhelmed with emotions of shame, indignation,
and sorrow."

He had such an intimate acq