But when he took up in its columns the Sabbath question he ran his paper directly among the breakers of a religious controversy.

He saw how it was with him at once, saw that he had stirred up against him all that religious feeling which was crystallized around the first day of the week, and that he could not hope to escape without serious losses in one way or another.

"It is pretty certain," he writes Samuel J.May in September, 1836, "that the _Liberator_ will sustain a serious loss in its subscriptions at the close of the present volume; and all appeals for aid in its behalf will be less likely to prevail than formerly.

I am conscious that a mighty sectarian conspiracy is forming to crush me, and it will probably succeed to some extent." This controversy over the Sabbath proved the thin edge of differences and dissensions, which, as they went deeper and deeper, were finally to rend asunder the erstwhile united Abolition movement.

The period was remarkable for the variety and force of new ideas, which were coming into being, or passing into general circulation.