It is very commonly the case that minds for the first time awakened to the real power of religion, feel that the only true faith is to be found under the forms and ideas which have so moved them, and that to confess Christ means a visible union with any particular body of Christians who have made real to them the Christian idea. Such was the call felt by this young girl to join herself with this despised body of Christians.
Her parents were greatly shocked and annoyed when they found that instead of ridiculing the Ranters, she was going again and again to their services, with an undissembled earnestness: and when finally she announced to them her purpose to unite herself to them in the public ordinance of baptism, their indignation knew no bounds, and they threatened her that if she did she should never enter their doors again, or be to them more than a stranger.
Then was the crisis in which the woman stood between two worlds—two kinds of life—on one side, the most earnest and whole-hearted excitement of the higher moral feelings, on the other side, the material good things of this world.
The mother of Lloyd Garrison hesitated not a moment between the convictions of her conscience and a worldly good. Like the primitive Christians, she went down into the waters of baptism feeling that she was leaving father, mother, and home, and casting herself on God alone.
Her parents, with true John Bull obstinacy, made good their word, and shut their doors upon her; but an uncle, struck perhaps with her courage and constancy, opened to her an asylum where she remained till her marriage. In later years her parents became reconciled to her.
The religious life thus begun was carried on with a marked and triumphant fullness. She was a woman of enthusiastic convictions, of strong mind, and of great natural eloquence, and during the infancy and childhood of William Lloyd he was often with her in the prayer-meetings, which were vivified by the electric eloquence of her prayers and exhortations—for the Baptist as well as Methodist denominations, allowed to women as well as men, a Christian equality in the use of the gifts of instruction.
The father of Garrison, a man possessed of some genius and many fascinating and interesting traits, was one of the victims of intemperance in those days when so many families were saddened by its blight; and at quite an early age Mrs. Garrison was left with a family of helpless little ones, with no other heritage but her faith in God, and her own undaunted and courageous spirit. She was obliged to put her boys out at a very tender age, to struggle for themselves, while she followed the laborious profession of a sick nurse.
William Lloyd, her second son, was by temperament fitted to be impressed by a woman like his mother. He had listened to the burning recital of her experience, and his heart, even in early infancy, learned to thrill in sympathy with the solemn grandeur of religious devotion and absolute self-sacrifice. All his mother's religious ideas became his own; and even as a boy he was a strict and well versed Baptist, having at his tongue's end every argument which supported the peculiar faith which his mother's enthusiasm had taught him to regard as the only true one.
The necessities of life, however, early separated him from her society. When only nine years of age he was placed in the shop of a shoemaker to learn the trade, but the confinement and employment were unfavorable to his health and uncongenial to his feelings. He was longing for educational advantages, and bent on a career in the world of ideas.
He was taken from this situation and sent to school at Newburyport, paying for his board and schooling by sawing wood, doing errands, and performing other labors out of school hours.