All of the new ideas thawed and melted into each other, dissolved into one vague and grand solidarity of reforms.

The voice of the whole was urging him amid the gathering moral confusion to declare himself for all truth, and he hearkened irresolute, with divided mind.

"I feel somewhat at a loss to know what to do"-- he confesses at this juncture to George W.Benson, "whether to go into all the principles of holy reform and make the Abolition cause subordinate, or whether still to persevere in the _one_ beaten track as hitherto.
Circumstances hereafter must determine this matter." That was written in August, 1837; a couple of months later circumstances had not determined the matter, it would seem, from the following extract from a letter to his brother-in-law: "It is not my intention at present to alter either the general character or course of the _Liberator_.

My work in the anti-slavery cause is not wholly done; as soon as it is, I shall know it, and shall be prepared, I trust, to enter upon a mightier work of reform." Meanwhile the relations between the editor of the _Liberator_ and the managers of the national organization were becoming decidedly strained.
For it seemed to them that Garrison had changed the anti-slavery character of his paper by the course which he had taken in regard to the new ideas which were finding their way into its columns to the manifest harm of the main principle of immediate emancipation.

This incipient estrangement between the pioneer and the executive committee of the national society was greatly aggravated by an occurrence, which, at the time, was elevated to an importance that it did not deserve.