ny of whom he visited in their respective schools. He applied also to
several of the governors for interviews, with whom he held conferences
on the subject. Benjamin Lay was a man of strong understanding and of
great integrity, but of warm and irritable feelings, and more
particularly so when he was called forth on any occasion in which the
oppressed Africans were concerned; for he had lived in the island of
Barbados, and he had witnessed there scenes of cruelty towards them
which had greatly disturbed his mind, and which unhinged it, as it were,
whenever the subject of their sufferings was brought before him. Hence,
if others did not think precisely as he did, when he conversed with them
on the subject, he was apt to go out of due bounds. In bearing what he
believed to be his testimony against this system of oppression, he
adopted sometimes a singularity of manner, by which, as conveying
demonstration of a certain eccentricity of character, he diminished in
some degree his usefulness to the cause which he had undertaken; as far,
indeed, as this eccentricity might have the effect of preventing others
from joining him in his pursuit, lest they should be thought singular
also, so far it must be allowed that he ceased to become beneficial. But
there can be no question, on the other hand, that his warm and
enthusiastic manners awakened the attention of many to the cause, and
gave them first impressions concerning it, which they never afterwards
forgot, and 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 ap