The next day I perceived, on his return from his place of business in State Street, that my revered father was much disturbed by the reports he had heard of my preaching. Some of the “gentlemen of property and standing” who had been my auditors said it was fanatical, others that it was incendiary, others that it was treasonable, and begged him to “arrest me in my mad career.” The only one, as he soon afterwards informed me, who had spoken in any other than terms of censure was the great and good Dr. Bowditch, who said, “Depend upon it, the young man is more than half right.” My father tried to dissuade me from engaging in the attempt to overthrow the system of slavery which Mr. Garrison proposed. He had come, with most others, to regard it as an unavoidable evil, one that the fathers of our Republic had not ventured to suppress, but had rather given to its protection something like a guaranty. He thought, with most others at that day, that slavery must be left to be gradually removed by the progress of civilization, the growth of higher ideas of human nature, and the manifest superiority and hotter economy of free labor. He admonished me that, in assailing the institution of American slavery, I should only be “kicking against the pricks,” that I should lose my standing in the ministry and my usefulness in the church. I need not add that he failed to convince me that “the foolishness of preaching” would not yet be “mighty to the pulling down of the stronghold of Satan.” In less than ten years he was reconciled to my course. A few days afterwards I gave my sermon on Prejudice to my most excellent friend, Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., who was then the purveyor of tracts for the American Unitarian Association. He accepted the discourse as originally written, but insisted that the interlineations and the additions respecting slavery should be omitted. He would not have done this, nor should I have consented to it, a few years later. But we were all in bondage then. Unconsciously to ourselves, the hand of the slaveholding power lay _heavily_ upon the mind and heart of the people in our Northern as well as Southern States. What a pity that my words in that sermon, respecting slavery, were not published in the tract! They might have helped a little to commit our Unitarian denomination much earlier to the cause of impartial liberty, in earnest protest against the great oppression, the unparalleled iniquity of our land. Of whom should opposition to slavery of every kind have been expected so soon as from Unitarian Christians?