Garrison considered it the duty of the Executive Committee to disapprove officially of the action of the Massachusetts recalcitrants, and also the duty of its organ, the _Emancipator_, to rebuke the authors of the "appeals." Not so, replied Lewis Tappan and Elizur Wright, your request is unreasonable. If you choose to make a mountain out of a molehill, you choose to make a mistake which the Executive Committee will not repeat. Your troubles are wholly local, of no general importance whatever. "What! Shall a whole army stop its aggressive movements into the territories of its enemies to charge bayonets on five soldiers, subalterns, company, or even staff officers, because they stray into a field to pick berries, throw stones or write an 'appeal?' To be frank with you we shall make bold to say that we do not approve of the appeal, it is very censurable, its spirit is bad, but neither do we approve of your action in the premises, it is also very censurable and its spirit is bad. What then? shall the Executive Committee condemn the authors of the appeal and not condemn the editor of the _Liberator_ also? If strict military justice were done should not both parties be cashiered? Let the Sabbath and the theoretic theology of the priesthood alone for the present." "I could have wished, yes, I have wished from the bottom of my soul," it is Wright who now holds the pen, "that you could conduct that dear paper, the _Liberator_, in the singleness of purpose of its first years, without traveling off from the ground of our true, noble, heart-stirring Declaration of Sentiments--without breathing sentiments which are novel and shocking to the community, and which seem to me to have no logical sequence from the principles on which we are associated as Abolitionists. I cannot but regard the taking hold of one great moral enterprise while another is in hand and but half achieved, as an outrage upon commonsense, somewhat like that of the dog crossing the river with his meat. But you have seen fit to introduce to the public some novel views--I refer especially to your sentiments on government and religious perfection--and they have produced the effect which was to have been expected. And now considering what stuff human nature is made of, is it to be wondered at that some honest-hearted, thorough-going Abolitionists should have lost their equanimity? As you well know I am comparatively no bigot to any creed, political or theological, yet to tell the plain truth, I look upon your notions of government and religious perfection as downright fanaticism--as harmless as they are absurd. I would not care a pin's head if they were preached to all Christendom; for it is not in the human mind (except in a peculiar and, as I think, diseased state) to believe them."