e for it served to
reveal in its lightning-like flash the glow and glare of a conscience
taking fire. The fire slumbered until a few weeks before Lundy entered
Boston, when there were again the glow and glare of a moral sense in the
first stages of ignition on the enormity of slave institutions. The act
of South Carolina in making it illegal to teach a colored person to read
and write struck this spark from his pen: "There is something
unspeakably pitiable and alarming," he writes in the _Philanthropist_,
"in the state of that society where it is deemed necessary, for
self-preservation, to seal up the mind and debase the intellect of man
to brutal incapacity.... Truly the alternatives of oppression are
terrible. But this state of things cannot always last, nor ignorance
alone shield us from destruction." His interest in the question was
clearly growing. But it was still in the gristle of sentiment waiting to
be transmuted into the bone and muscle of a definite and determined
purpose, when first he met Lundy. This meeting of the two men, was to
Garrison what the fourth call of God was to Samuel, the Hebrew lad, who
afterward became a prophet. As the three previous calls of God and the
conversations with Eli had prepared the Jewish boy to receive and
understand the next summons of Jehovah, so had Garrison's former
experience and education made him ready for the divine message when
uttered in his ears by Lundy. All the sense of truth and the passion for
righteousness of the young man replied to the voice, "Here am I." The
hardening process of growth became immediately manifest in him. Whereas
before there was sentimental opposition to slavery, there began then an
opposition, active and practical. When Lundy convened many of the
ministers of the city to expose to them the barbarism of slavery,
Garrison sat in the room, and as Lundy himself records, "expressed his
approbation of my doctrines." The young reformer must needs stand up and
make public profession of his new faith and of his agreement with the
anti-slavery principles of the older. But it was altogether different
with the assembled ministers. Lundy, as was his wont on such occasions,
desired and urged the formation of an anti-slavery society, but these
sons of Eli of that generation were not willing to offend their
slave-holding brethren in the South. Eyes they had, but they refused to
see; ears, which they stopped to the cry of the slave breaking in
anguish and app