We shall know it by the unceasing protest made against it in the name of the Lord.

The arguments of John Woolman and Anthony Benezet were sustained by the yearly meetings of the Friends.

At Newport, the chief center of the African slave-trade, the two Congregational pastors, Samuel Hopkins, the theologian, and the erudite Ezra Stiles, afterward president of Yale College, mutually opposed in theology and contrasted at every point of natural character, were at one in boldly opposing the business by which their parishioners had been enriched.[204:1] The deepening of the conflict for political liberty pointed the application of the golden rule in the case of the slaves.

The antislavery literature of the period includes a printed sermon that had been preached by the distinguished Dr.Levi Hart "to the corporation of freemen" of his native town of Farmington, Conn., at their autumnal town-meeting in 1774; and the poem on "Slavery," published in 1775 by that fine character, Aaron Cleveland,[204:2] of Norwich, hatter, poet, legislator, and minister of the gospel.

Among the Presbyterians of New Jersey, the father of Dr.
Ashbel Green took the extreme ground which was taken by Dr.Hopkins's church in 1784, that no person holding a slave should be permitted to remain in the communion of the church.[204:3] In 1774 the first society in the world for the abolition of slavery was organized among the Friends in Pennsylvania, to be followed by others, making a continuous series of abolition societies from New England to Maryland and Virginia.
But the great antislavery society of the period in question was the Methodist Society.