In these verses, as in others of a similar nature, Lowell seems almost to have followed the lead of Whittier, who employed the same stanza in several of his anti-slavery poems written before this time. In his eager, impulsive desire to right wrongs, and his impatience at compromise, he chafed under the restraints laid upon him. The rebuff he received when he undertook to scarify the conscience of Congress in the pages of _The Broadway Journal_ irritated him. He had hoped that the _Journal_ would be a “powerful weapon in the hands of reform,” and was disheartened. “The reason I have written no prose for him (Briggs),” he wrote his friend Carter, “has been because I knew not what to write about. The _Journal_ shut its doors in the face of every subject in which I was mainly interested, and I could not bring myself (in writing for a friend especially) to undertake subjects in which, feeling no interest, I could not possibly write well.” He had engaged to write regularly for the _Pennsylvania Freeman_, but even here he did not, in his own mind, have a clear field. “I do not feel entirely free,” he says in a letter to Carter, “in what I write for the paper, as its conductors are rather timid.” That is the complaint of most young reformers, and yet the constraint which appears in his articles is due rather to the caution with which he feels his way along a path where he is likely to be misjudged than to any outside repressive influence. At least this may be inferred from a reading of two articles which he contributed to the _Freeman_ and which were no doubt looked upon as very radical utterances. They had for their heading “The Church and Clergy,” and were deliberate inquiries into the nature of the religious bodies in America as tested by the attitude which they took, organically, toward the great question of political reform, especially as regarded the subject of slavery. In a letter to Longfellow written a few weeks after this date, Lowell puts his belief into two or three pregnant sentences. “Christ,” he says, “has declared war against the Christianity of the world, and it must down. There is no help for it. The Church, that great bulwark of our practical Paganism, must be reformed from foundation to weathercock. Shall we not wield a trowel, nay, even carry the heavy bricks and mortar for such an enterprise? But I will not ride over you with my hard-mouthed hobby.”