So through weakness I gave way and wrote, but, at executing it, I was so afflicted in my mind, that I said before my master and the friend, that I believed slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion.

This in some degree abated my uneasiness; yet, as often as I reflected seriously upon it, I thought I should have been clearer, if I had desired to have been excused from it, as a thing against my conscience; for such it was.

And some time after this, a young man of our Society spoke to me to write a conveyance of a slave to him, he having lately taken a Negro into his house.

I told him I was not easy to write it; for though many of our meeting, and in other places, kept slaves, I still believed the practice was not right, and desired to be excused from the writing.

I spoke to him in good-will; and he told me that keeping slaves was not altogether agreeable to his mind, but that the slave being a gift to his wife he had accepted of her." We may easily conceive that a person so scrupulous and tender on this subject (as indeed John Woolman was on all others) was in the way of becoming in time more eminently serviceable to his oppressed fellow-creatures.