"This debate between religious conservatives and religious liberals over the relative gravity of sins was no abstract matter; it was being played out at exactly the same time between orthodox ministers and radical abolitionists over the evil of slavery. In 1836, the Reverend Lyman Beecher made a major speech in which he described the Sabbath as the “sun of the moral world” and lax Sabbath observance as the major moral issue in American society. The abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, in the July 1836 and August 1836 editions of The Liberator, mocked Beecher for dwelling on Sabbath observance while at the same time “giving his protecting influence to a system of slavery, which, at a single blow, annihilates not only the fourth commandment but The Whole DECALOGUE! and which effectively excludes from the benefits of the Sabbath, two millions and a half of his fellow countrymen!!”"
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Age_of_American_Unreason
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The Age of American Unreason
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