The society was their dangerous and determined enemy; it was the bulwark of the slave-holding classes.

With the instinct of a great purpose he resolved to carry this powerful bulwark of slavery by assault.

To the attack he returned week after week in the _Liberator_, during a year and a half.
Then he hurled himself upon it with all his guns, facts, arguments, denunciations, blowing away and burning up every shred of false covering from the doctrines, principles, and purposes of the society, revealing it to mankind in its base and monstrous character.
The society's one motive "to get rid of the free people of color," was outrageous enough, but this was not its only sin.

There was another phase to the mischief it was working, which lifted it to the rank of a great sinner.

It was not only harmful in its principles and purposes.
"It imperatively and effectually seals up the lips," so Garrison accused it, "of a vast number of influential and pious men, who, for fear of giving offence to those slaveholders with whom they associate, and thereby leading to a dissolution of the compact, dare not expose the flagrant enormities of the system of slavery, nor denounce the crime of holding human beings in bondage.