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Updated: May 6, 2025
The author of The Patience of Hope, whose authority in devotional literature is unquestioned, says of him: 'John Woolman's gift was love, a charity of which it does not enter into the natural heart of man to conceive, and of which the more ordinary experiences, even of renewed nature, give but a faint shadow.
In the dark and evil time in which he lived, amidst the untold horrors of the "Black Plague," he illustrated by deeds of charity and mercy his doctrine of disinterested benevolence. Woolman's whole life was a nobler Imitation of Christ than that fervid rhapsody of monastic piety which bears the name.
Looking back to the humble workshop at Mount Holly from the stand-point of the Proclamation of President Lincoln, how has the seed sown in weakness been raised up in power! The larger portion of Woolman's writings is devoted to the subjects of slavery, uncompensated labor, and the excessive toil and suffering of the many to support the luxury of the few.
"The secret of Woolman's purity of style," said Dr. Channing, "is that his eye was single, and that conscience dictated his words." Of course we are not to look to the writings of such a man for tricks of rhetoric, the free play of imagination, or the unscrupulousness of epigram and antithesis. He wrote as he lived, conscious of "the great Task-master's eye."
Angelina also mentions reading carefully Woolman's works, which she found very helpful. But it is evident that neither she nor Sarah looked forward at all to any identification of themselves with the active opponents of slavery.
Some idea of the lively interest which the fine literary circle gathered around the hearth of Lamb felt in the beautiful simplicity of Woolman's pages may be had from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, one of their number, himself a man of wide and varied culture, the intimate friend of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
In John Woolman's day it was almost entirely a settlement of Friends. A very few of the old houses with their quaint stoops or porches are left. That occupied by John Woolman was a small, plain, two-story structure, with two windows in each story in front, a four-barred fence inclosing the grounds, with the trees he planted and loved to cultivate. The house was not painted, but whitewashed.
On the vessel which carried her from Philadelphia to Charleston, after her father's death, was a party of Friends; and in the seven days which it then required to make the voyage, an intimacy sprang up between them and Sarah which influenced her whole after-life. From one of them she had accepted a copy of Woolman's works, evidence that there must have been religious discussions between them.
This aged man stated that he was at Woolman's little farm in the season of harvest when it was customary among farmers to kill a calf or sheep for the laborers.
One may easily understand that this objection might have been forcibly felt by the slave-holding religious professors of Woolman's day, and that it may still be entertained by a class of persons who, like the Cabalists, attach a certain mystical significance to words, names, and titles, and who in consequence question the piety which hesitates to flatter the Divine ear by "vain repetitions" and formal enumeration of sacred attributes, dignities, and offices.
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