which rendered them useful to it in the subsequent part of
their lives.

[Footnote A: Benjamin Lay attended the meetings for worship, or associated
himself with the religious society of the Quakers. His wife too was an
approved minister of the gospel in that Society. But I believe he was not
long an acknowledged member of it himself.]

The person, who laboured next in the Society, in behalf of the oppressed
Africans, was John Woolman.

John Woolman was born at Northampton, in the county of Burlington and
province of Western New Jersey, in the year 1720. In his very early youth
he attended, in an extraordinary manner, to the religious impressions which
he perceived upon his mind, and began to have an earnest solicitude about
treading in the right path. "From what I had read and heard," says he, in
his Journal[A], "I believed there had been in past ages people, who walked
in uprightness before God in a degree exceeding any, that I knew or heard
of, now living. And the apprehension of there being less steadiness and
firmness among people of this age, than in past ages, often troubled me
while I was a child." An anxious desire to do away, as far as he himself
was concerned, this merited reproach, operated as one among other causes to
induce him to be particularly watchful over his thoughts and actions, and
to endeavour to attain that purity of heart, without which he conceived
there could be no perfection of the Christian character. Accordingly, in
the twenty-second year of his age, he had given such proof of the integrity
of his life, and of his religious qualifications, that he became an
acknowledged minister of the gospel in his own Society.

[Footnote A: This short sketch of the life and labours of John Woolman, is
made up from his Journal.]

At a time prior to his entering upon the ministry, being in low
circumstances, he agreed for wages to "attend shop for a person at Mount
Holly, and to keep his books." In this situation we discover, by an
occurrence that happened, that he had thought seriously on the subject, and
that he had conceived proper views of the Christian unlawfulness of
slavery. "My employer," says he, "having a Negro woman, sold her, and
desired me to write a bill of sale, the man being waiting, who bought her.
The thing was sudden, and though the thought of writing an instrument of
slavery for one of my fellow-creatures made me feel uneasy, yet I
remembered I was hired by the year, that it was my m