The indignant audience did not cry “shame!”--they were too deeply moved for utterance. They were silent in breathless astonishment. Was this _Massachusetts_? Was it at a meeting of _her_ free-souled sons and daughters, from a platform of toleration so broad that every human being, laboring for immediate emancipation, might stand upon it, that a man presented a creed-measure to his brethren, with the threat to brand every brow as unworthy, that overtopped that little span? Was it in prophetic fear of this disgraceful scene that Massachusetts abolitionists had so early renounced the doctrine of racks and thumb-screws--the idea of reproach for opinion? The same indignant thoughts thronged up for utterance in every heart. Quakers, Calvinists, Unitarians;--Whigs, Democrats, and Non-Resistants;--men of every religious opinion and every political theory--this question insulted them all. Might the believer in the religious duty of voting claim authority to summon to the confessional, all whom he chose to mark for exclusion from the cause, and enter into discussion and condemnation of their belief? Then might every other sectary do the same. The Baptist might banish the Friend--the Methodist might proscribe the Independent--the white man reject the man of color--the women vote that men were disqualified--or men assert the same absurdity with respect to women. If the precious time of a thousand friends of the slave, met to devise measures for making every voter an abolitionist, was to be consumed in making every abolitionist a voter, men felt that a change in their point of agreement--a change in the constitution and the principles that made the constitution, must be effected. The common pass-word must no longer be “immediate emancipation” alone, but every sectarian or partizan must shout his _own_, and draw his weapon upon every abolitionist who heeded it not. Hatred, wrong, and bondage, unmasked their hideous faces to love, right, and freedom, in the question that so roused every soul in that assembly. Mr. Garrison promptly answered it, so as not to deny his principles, nor yet to take up the gauge of the non-resistance conflict, which Mr. Stanton had thrown down:--“Sin for _me_!” “I ask you again,” persisted the infatuated questioner, “do you or do you not believe it a sin to go to the polls?” “Sin for me”--was the same imperturbable reply. This treacherous interrogatory,[5] fit act of a familiar of the holy office to a heretic, but ineffably disgraceful from the Secretary of the National Anti-Slavery Society to the man on whose motion the National Anti-Slavery Society came into existence, stirred the souls of the abolitionists as if they had seen the slave-driver stand suddenly forth with his scourge and manacles, in visible embodyment of the spiritual tyranny they now felt.