 These words were not mere words for Douglass and the abolitionists; they were not just-so stories. The Christian doctrine of the unity of the human family or human brotherhood (as the sexist language that marked the idea at least since the Enlightenment), contained the world historical insight of equal human dignity, which implied—unleashed, as was seen in several revolutions in the 18th and 19th-century—the uncompromising demand for equal rights.