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Key Bible Verse: To show partiality is not good—yet a man will do wrong for a piece of bread (Proverbs 28:21). Bonus Reading: James 2:8-9

"John, I've sold Nancy to this gentleman. Draw up a bill of sale for her." It was 1743, and John Woolman's employer was conferring with another Quaker.

But the young clerk blurted out, "More and more, I begin to think that slave-keeping is inconsistent with the Christian religion."

The astonished buyer and seller told Woolman that this "light" hadn't reached them. Would he please write the bill of sale? John reluctantly complied. But asked to do the same thing a few months later, Woolman refused.

Then John went with a friend on a preaching tour in Virginia and the Carolinas, where thousands of slaves worked huge plantations. Whenever they stayed with people who "lived in ease on the hard labor of their slaves," Woolman felt compelled to "have conversation with them in private concerning it."

Becoming a tailor, Wool man devoted part of every year to anti-slavery speaking tours. Printer Benjamin Franklin published his Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. After he addressed the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the Quakers named a committee to work toward abolishing slavery.

—Thomas Fleming in Lights Along the Way

• Pray for God to teach you one way to grow in love for people of other races.

Thought to Apply: The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

— FREDERICK DOUGLASS (anti-slavery activist, 19th century)

Credits: Adapted from— Monday: Lights Along the Way (Morehouse, 1999)

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity. For reprint information click here.

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