Even the liberty-loving Quakers of Philadelphia were not above the use of the "negro seat" in their meetings. Somehow they discerned that there was a great gulf separating in this life at least the white from the black believer. That God had made of one blood all nations of men, St. Paul had taught, but the American church had with one accord in practice drawn the line at the poor despised colored man. He was excluded from ecclesiastical equality, for he was different from other men for whom Christ died. The Bible declared that man was made but a little lower than the angels; the American people in their State and Church supplemented this sentiment by acts which plainly said that the negro was made but a little above the brute creation. Here are instances of the length to which the prejudice against color carried the churches in those early years of the anti-slavery movement: In 1830, a colored man, through a business transaction with a lessee of one of the pews in Park Street Church, came into possession of it. Thinking to make the best use of his opportunity to obtain religious instruction for himself and family from this fountain of orthodoxy, the black pew-holder betook him, one Sunday, to "Brimstone Corner." But he was never permitted to repeat the visit. "Brimstone Corner" could not stand him another Lord's day, and thereupon promptly expelled him and his family out of its midst. The good deacons displayed their capacity for shielding their flock from consorting with "niggers," by availing themselves of a technicality to relet the pew to a member who was not cursed with a dark skin. On another Lord's day, in another stronghold of Boston Christianity, Oliver Johnson ran the battery of "indignant frowns of a large number of the congregation" for daring to take a fellow-Christian with a skin not colored like his own into his pew, to listen to Dr. Beecher. The good people of the old Baptist meeting-house, at Hartford, Conn., had evidently no intention of disturbing the heavenly calm of their religious devotions by so much as a thought of believers with black faces; for by boarding up the "negro pews" in front and leaving only peep-holes for their occupants, they secured themselves from a sight of the obnoxious creatures, while Jehovah, who is no respecter of persons, was in His holy place. Incredible as it may seem, a church in the town of Stoughton, Mass., to rid itself of even a semblance of Christian fellowship and equality with a colored member, did actually cut the floor from under the colored member's pew! These cruel and anti-Christian distinctions in the churches affected Garrison in the most painful manner. He says: "I never can look up to these wretched retreats for my colored brethren without feeling my soul overwhelmed with emotions of shame, indignation, and sorrow."