But
there can be no question, on the other hand, that his warm and
enthusiastic manners awakened the attention of many to the cause, and
gave them first impressions concerning it, which they never afterwards
forgot, and which rendered them useful to it in the subsequent part of
their lives.
[Footnote A: Benjamin Lay attended the meetings for worship, or
associated himself with the religious society of the Quakers. His wife,
too, was an approved minister of the Gospel in that society; but I
believe he was not long an acknowledged member of it himself.]
The person who laboured next in the society, in behalf of the oppressed
Africans, was John Woolman.
John Woolman was born at Northampton, in the county of Burlington and
province of Western New Jersey, in the year 1720. In his very early
youth he attended, in an extraordinary manner, to the religious
impressions which he perceived upon his mind, and began to have an
earnest solicitude about treading in the right path. "From what I had
read and heard," says he, in his Journal[A], "I believed there had been
in past ages, people who walked in uprightness before God in a degree
exceeding any, that I knew or heard of, now living.
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