John Woolman

Although I think Fox would not have said that because he was aware of reawakening the kind of primitive Christianity that he saw in the book of Acts.

So if we're looking for historical examples of traveling ministers, We might look at people like Lucretia Mott and George Fox and John Woolman, but we could also be looking at Paul or Barnabas or Timothy.

You mentioned people in the first century like Paul and Timothy, and I think of them more like evangelists, like bringing the message of Jesus to people who have not heard it.

But that wasn't true for Quaker traveling ministers, right? I'm thinking of, like you mentioned, Lucretia Mott.

Your notable birthdays for October 19th.

John Woolman, 1720, Quaker preacher and journalist who wrote about spiritual life.

Cassius Marcellus Clay.

Cassius Marcellus Clay.

The present age has also produced some zealous and able opposers of the colonial slavery.

For about the middle of the present century, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, two respectable members of the religious society called Quakers, devoted much of their time to the subject.

The former travelled through most parts of North America on foot to hold conversations with the members of his own sect on the impiety of retaining those in a state of involuntary servitude who had never given them offence.

The latter kept a free school at Philadelphia for the education of black people.

The Germantown Friends Protest, issued in 1688, Sewell's Selling of Joseph in 1701, and the utterances of James Otis, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other founders of the Republic are well known.

The writings of Ralph Sandiford, Benjamin Lay, Anthony Benazet, and John Woolman are familiar, at least in name, and the dialogue concerning slavery by Dr. Samuel Hopkins is eminent among the early efforts for emancipation.

Other writers of the period preceding the Revolution who deserve special notice are George Keith, who protested against slavery in 1693, John Hepburn, whose American Defense of the Christian Golden Rule was published in 1714, William Burling, 1718, and Elihu Coleman, 1729.

In the Revolutionary period were important pamphlets by Nathaniel Appleton, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and James Swan, an interesting forensic dispute at Harvard in 1773, and a remarkably vigorous address to the rulers of America, supposed to have been written by John Dickinson.

With the approach of the American Revolution, the doctrine of natural rights appears among the Quakers as well as elsewhere.

Anthony Benezet, for instance, writes in 1762, Upon the whole, it must appear to every honest, unprejudiced reader that the negroes are equally entitled to the common privileges of mankind with the whites, that they have the same rational powers, the same natural affections, and are as susceptible of pain and grief as they, that therefore the bringing and keeping them in bondage is an instance of oppression and injustice of the most grievous nature, such as is scarcely to be paralleled by any example in the present or former ages.

John Woolman also believed that liberty was the natural right of all men equally, and that the color of a man avails nothing in matters of right and equity.

In this later period, Benezet and Woolman stand foremost, outranking predecessors and contemporaries as representatives of the ideals of their sect.

Well, you know, what I think caused me to decide I had to get involved was my Quaker upbringing.

And I read the journal of John Woolman, who was a Quaker abolitionist, And it gave me the idea that when you're standing for truth, you may go to jail, you're going up against the majority.

I think that had something to do with why I am who I am.

The other thing is a little book by Lyndon LaRouche called There Are No Limits to Growth, where he takes on the environmentalist outlook that everything has to be less.

Your support helps us continue creating and freely sharing these stories around the world.

Will you join the 500 People Challenge? To become a ministry partner, simply visit 365christianstories.com September 29th, John Woolman

Welcome to 365 Christian Men, where every day we aim to inspire and encourage with real-life stories about men.

As a young man living in colonial America, John Woolman was a Christian who worked as a scribe, an employee who copied documents by hand.

When his boss told him to write out a bill of sale, of course John did it.

But it was a bill of sale for a slave, a human being.

If you want a clear conscience, start by listening to it.

Thomas Woodward's servants hurried to get things ready for the arrival of their guest.

Newman's Apologia, largely occupied in the vain endeavor to transfuse the warm blood of the emotions into the hardened arteries of theological dogmas, stands at the other extreme in this class of confessions.

Contrast with it John Woolman's journal, the austerely sincere record of a soul that does not spend its time in casuistical interpretations of the quibbles propounded by medieval theologians, but dwells consciously in the immediate presence of the living God.

Our only quarrel with Woolman is that, owing to his complete otherworldliness, he disdains to tell us facts about himself and about his time that we would gladly hear.

In other fields there is equal abundance.

Many soldiers have written memoirs, enough to cite General Grant's to parallel, which we must go back to Caesar's commentaries.

With practice, you will learn how to recover some of the true features of the victims of such distortions.

Comparison, the mother of criticism, will help you to ampler pleasures.

I have already suggested comparing Woolman's, Franklin's, and Mill's autobiographies, but the process can be carried forward in many directions.

The present age has also produced some zealous and able opposers of the colonial slavery.

For about the middle of the present century, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, two respectable members of the religious society called Quakers, devoted much of their time to the subject.

The former traveled through most parts of North America on foot to hold conversations with the members of his own sect on the impiety of retaining those in a state of involuntary servitude who had never given them offense.

The latter kept a free school at Philadelphia for the education of black people.

"How cursed a crime is it," exclaimed O. Sewall in seventeen hundred, "to equal men to beasts! These Ethiopians, black as they are, are sons and daughters of the first Adam, brethren and sisters of the last Adam, and the offspring of God." On second month, eighteen, sixteen eighty-eight, the Germantown Friends presented the first petition against slavery recorded in American history.

By seventeen fifty, professional anti-slavery agitators like John Woolman and Benezet were at work in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and many wealthy Quakers had set free their slaves.

The wedge which was eventually to divide the North from the South was already driven in seventeen fifty.

In his great speech on the Writs of Assistance in seventeen sixty-one, James Otis so spoke that John Adams said, "Not a Quaker in Philadelphia or Mr. Jefferson of Virginia ever asserted the rights of Negroes in stronger terms." End of chapter one.