In their progress through the country on anti-slavery missions, the agents of the Massachusetts Society never failed, from the beginning, to learn how hard it is to be reproached for a righteous man’s name’s sake. To appreciate the force of their temptation, let the beholder, for a moment, place himself in their situation. It is in the power of the minister in almost every parish, to procure them a hearing,--but he is in combination with his brethren to “put down Garrison.” Is it wonderful that, instead of silencing the bigot or the slanderer with the assertion “he is a good man and a faithful abolitionist, and his opinions on other subjects are no more our business than your own,” they should have striven to repel their assailants by endeavoring to draw a line of distinction between him and themselves? Parallel to this was the course of Peter; unrepented of, it deepens into the darker dye that marks a Judas. When men who sought a pretence to avoid the consideration of the cause, were told that the Massachusetts Board of Managers differed as widely as themselves from Mr. Garrison’s opinions on other subjects, their intolerance forbade them to credit the statement. If the Agents ventured to cast freely off, in the name of the Society, all responsibility for Mr. Garrison’s individual opinions, and to vindicate the rectitude and energy of his abolition course from the beginning, they were obliged to endure the reproach of being “tools of Garrison,” and singing his praises, when they should rather be employed in removing such a stumbling-block out of the path of “good men.” A truly noble soul, thus spurred up to the encounter, would have exclaimed in the spirit of Bürger:-- “Thank Heaven for song and praise, that I _can_ Thus sing the song of the faithful man!” The enemy, thus met, would have ceased to play so ineffectual a string; but, perceiving the weakness of the agents of this year, he never ceased to have recourse to it. Let not those who have never been tried in such a furnace, condemn, without pardon and pity, those whose nobility of spirit was not equal to pass the assay. There appears to have been, on the part of Mr. Phelps, and the other agents of this period, an inability to comprehend or appreciate the just and straight-forward course of the Massachusetts Board, with whom they were associated, as well as a consciousness that it would never permit its sanction to be used for their purposes. They therefore carefully kept their operations secret from the Board, while they were using its funds and sanction to carry them on, in conjunction with Mr. Torrey, and Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of the Executive Committee at New York. All the Summer and Autumn of 1838, the scheme for a new paper was thus secretly carried on. Mr. Torrey wrote afterwards to a friend, “the clergymen throughout the State have been sounded; and they are for it, to a man.”