But, grateful as he was for the hospitality of the infidels, he, nevertheless, rather bluntly informed them that he had no sympathy with their religious notions, and that he looked for the abolition of slavery to evangelicism, and to it alone.
A few years in the university of experience, where he learned that conduct is better than creeds, and living more than believing, served to emancipate him from illiberal prejudices and narrow sectarianism.

He came to see, "that in Christ Jesus all stated observances are so many self-imposed and unnecessary yokes; and that prayer and worship are all embodied in that pure, meek, child-like state of heart which affectionately and reverently breathes but one petition--'Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' Religion ...

is nothing but love--perfect love toward God and toward man--without formality, without hypocrisy, without partiality--depending upon no outward form to preserve its vitality or prove its existence." This important change in Mr.Garrison's religious convictions became widely known in the summer of 1836 through certain editorial strictures of his upon a speech of Dr.Lyman Beecher, at Pittsburgh, on the subject of the Sabbath.

The good doctor was cold enough on the question of slavery, which involved not only the desecration of the Sabbath, but of the souls and bodies of millions of human beings.

If Christianity was truly of divine origin, and Garrison devoutly believed that it was, it would approve its divinity by its manner of dealing with the vices and evils which were dragging and chaining the feet of men to the gates of hell.