Sentence:  Incurably optimistic , dogmatic , and utterly fearless , in his youth a devout Baptist , in spite of his friendship for the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier ( 1807 - 1892 ) he eventually <WSD>attacked</WSD> the orthodox churches for what he deemed their cowardly compromising on the slavery issue and in his invariably ardent manner was emphatically unorthodox and denied the plenary inspiration of the Bible . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  attack in speech or writing