It was not an ordinary personal occurrence for it served to reveal in its lightning-like flash the glow and glare of a conscience taking fire.

The fire slumbered until a few weeks before Lundy entered Boston, when there were again the glow and glare of a moral sense in the first stages of ignition on the enormity of slave institutions.

The act of South Carolina in making it illegal to teach a colored person to read and write struck this spark from his pen: "There is something unspeakably pitiable and alarming," he writes in the _Philanthropist_, "in the state of that society where it is deemed necessary, for self-preservation, to seal up the mind and debase the intellect of man to brutal incapacity....

Truly the alternatives of oppression are terrible.

But this state of things cannot always last, nor ignorance alone shield us from destruction." His interest in the question was clearly growing.