"A Christian, according to the teaching of God himself, can act
only peaceably toward all men, and therefore there can be no
authority able to force the Christian to act in opposition to the
teaching of God and to the principal virtue of the Christian in
his relation with his neighbors."

"The law of state necessity," they say, "can force only those to
change the law of God who, for the sake of earthly gains, try to
reconcile the irreconcilable; but for a Christian who sincerely
believes that following Christ's teaching will give him salvation,
such considerations of state can have no force."

Further acquaintance with the labors of the Quakers and their
works--with Fox, Penn, and especially the work of Dymond
(published in 1827)--showed me not only that the impossibility of
reconciling Christianity with force and war had been recognized
long, long ago, but that this irreconcilability had been long ago
proved so clearly and so indubitably that one could only wonder
how this impossible reconciliation of Christian teaching with the
use of force, which has been, and is still, preached in the
churches, could have been maintained in spite of it.

In addition to what I learned from the Quakers I received about
the same time, also from America, some information on the subject
from a source perfectly distinct and previously unknown to me.

The son of William Lloyd Garrison, the famous champion of the
emancipation of the negroes, wrote to me that he had read my book,
in which he found ideas similar to those expressed by his father
in the year 1838, and that, thinking it would be interesting to me