METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH-S, HOPKINS, D. D. 47

places where the gospel is not proclaimed, or where it is forbidden to slaves to attend upon its institutions. The manifest violation or disregard of this injunction, ought to be considered as just ground for the discipline and censures of the Church. And if it shall ever happen that a Christian professor in our communion shall sell a slave who is also in communion with our Church, contrary to his or her will and inclination, it ought immediately to claim the particular attention of the proper Church judicature; and unless there be such peculiar circumstances attending the case as can but seldom happen, it ought to be followed without delay, by a suspension of the offender from all the privileges of the Church, till he repent and make all the reparation in his power to the injured party."-Digest of the General Assembly, page 341.

METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.

There is only one condition previously required of those who desire admission into these societies, a desire to flee from the wrath to come, and to be saved from their sins. But wherever this is really fixed in the soul, it will be shown by its fruits. It is therefore expected of all who continue therein, that they should continue to evidence their desire of salvation, by doing no harm, by avoiding evil of every kind, especially that which is most generally practised, such as "the buying and selling of men, women, or children, with an intention to enslave them."

OF SLAVERY,-Question.-What shall be done for the extirpation of the evil of slavery?

Answer 1.-We declare that we are as much as ever convinced of the great evil of slavery; therefore, no slaveholder shall be eligible to any official station in our Church hereafter; where the laws of the state in which he lives will admit of emancipation, and permit the liberated slave to enjoy freedom.

Answer 2.-When any travelling preacher becomes an owner of a slave or slaves, by any means he shall forfeit his ministerial character in our Church, unless he execute, if it be practicable, a legal emancipation of such slaves, conformably to the laws of the state in which he lives.-Doctrine and Discipline.

SAMUEL HOPKINS, D. D.

Are you sure your slaves have a sufficiency of good food, in season; and that they never want for comfortable clothing and bedding? Do you take great care to deal as well by them in these things, as you would wish others would treat your own children, were they slaves in a strange land? If your servants complain, are you ready to attend to them? Or do you in such cases frown upon them, or do something worse, so as to discourage their ever applying to you, whatever they may suffer, having learned that this would only be making bad worse? Do you never fly into a passion, and deal with them in great anger, deciding matters respecting them, and threatening them, and giving sentence concerning them, from which they have no appeal, and perhaps proceed to correct them, when to a calm bystander you appear more fit to be confined in a bedlam, than to have the sovereign, uncon

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JONATHAN EDWARDS.

trollable dominion over your brethren, as the sole lawgiver, judge, and executioner? Do not even your children domineer over your slaves? Must they not often be at the beck of an ungoverned, peevish child in the family; and if they do not run at his or her call, and are not all submission and obedience, must they not expect the frowns of their masters, if not the whip?

If none of these things, my good sir, take place in your family, have we not reason to think you a most singular instance? How common are things of this kind, or worse, taking place between masters and their slaves? In how few instances, if in any, are slaves treated, as the masters would wish to have their own children treated, in like circumstances? How few are fit to be masters? To have the sovereign dominion over a number of their fellow men, being his property, and wholly at his disposal; who must abide his sentence and orders, however unreasonable, without any possibility of relief?

But are we at the same time making slaves of many thousands of our brethren, who have as good a right to liberty as ourselves, and to whom it is as sweet as it is to us, and the contrary as dreadful! Are we holding them in the most abject, miserable state of slavery, without the least compassionate feeling towards them or their posterity, utterly refusing to take off the oppressive galling yoke! Oh, the shocking, the intolerable inconsistency! And this gross, barefaced inconsistency is an open, practical condemnation of holding these our brethren in slavery; and in these circumstances the crime of persisting in it becomes unspeakably greater and more provoking in God's sight; so that all the former unrighteousness and cruelty exercised in this practice, is innocence, compared with the awful guilt that is now contracted. And in allusion to the words of our Saviour, it may with great truth and propriety be said, "If he had not thus come in his Providence, and spoken unto us, (comparatively speaking,) we had not had sin, in making bond-slaves of our brethren; but now, we have no cloak for our sin."-Dialogue on African Slavery, 1776, republished 1785, by tho N. Y. Manumission Society, whose president was John Jay.

JONATHAN EDWARDS.

The eradication, or even the diminution of compassion, tenderness, and humanity, is certainly a great depravity of heart, and must be followed with correspondent depravity of manners. And measures which lead to such depravity of heart and manners, cannot but be extremely hurtful to the state, and consequently are extremely impolitic.

African slavery is exceedingly impolitic, as it discourages industry. Nothing is more essential to the political prosperity of any state, than industry in the citizens. But in proportion as slaves are multiplied, every kind of labor becomes ignominious; and in fact, in those of the United States, in which slaves are the most numerous, gentlemen and ladies of any fashion disdain to employ themselves in business, which in other states is consistent with the dignity of the first families and first offices. In a country filled with negro slaves, labor belongs to them only, and a white man is despised in proportion as he applies to

ELIAS HICKS-JESSE TORREY, JR.

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it. Now how destructive to industry in all of the lowest and middle classes of citizens, such a situation, and the prevalence of such ideas will be, you can easily conceive. The consequence is, that some will nearly starve, others will betake themselves to the most dishonest practices, to obtain the means of living.

As slavery produces indolence in the white people, so it produces all those vices which are naturally connected with it; such as intemperance, lewdness, and prodigality. These vices enfeeble both the body and the mind, and unfit men for any vigorous exertions and employments, either external or mental; and those who are unfit for such exertions, are already a very degenerate race; degenerate, not only in a moral, but a natural sense. They are contemptible too, and will soon be despised even by their negroes themselves.

Slavery has a most direct tendency to haughtiness also, and a domineering spirit and conduct in the proprietors of the slaves, in their children, and in all who have the control of them. A man who has been bred up in domineering over negroes, can scarcely avoid contracting such a habit of haughtiness and domination, as will express itself in his general treatment of mankind, whether in his private capacity, or in any office, civil or military, with which he may be vested. Despotism in economics naturally leads to despotism in politics, and domestic slavery in a free government is a perfect solecism in numan affairs.-The Injustice and Impolicy of the slave-trade and of the slavery of the Africans—a Sermon in New Haven, Sept. 15, 1791.

ELIAS HICKS.

We, in an enlightened age, have greatly surpassed, in brutality and injustice, the most ignorant and barbarous ages; and while we are pretending to the finest feelings of humanity, are exercising unprecedented cruelty. We have planted slavery in the rank soil of sordid avarice; and the product has been misery in the extreme.

The slavedealer, the slaveholder, and the slavedriver are virtually the agents of the consumer. Whatever we do by another, we do ourselves.

JESSE TORREY, JR.

To enumerate all the horrid and aggravating instances of manstealing, which are known to have occurred in the state of Delaware, within the recollection of many of the citizens of that state would require a volume. In many cases, whole families of free colored people have been attacked in the night, beaten nearly to death with clubs, gagged and bound, and dragged into distant and hopeless captivity; leaving no traces behind, except the blood from their wounds.

During the last winter, the house of a free black family was broken open, and its defenceless inhabitants treated in the manner just mentioned, except that the mother escaped from their merciless grasp, while on their way to the state of Maryland. The plunderers, of whom there were nearly half a dozen, conveyed their prey upon horses; and the woman being placed on one of the horses, behind, improved an

opportunity, as they were passing a house, and sprang off. Not daring to pursue her, they proceeded on, leaving her youngest child a little farther along, by the side of the road, in expectation, it is supposed, that its cries would attract the mother; but she prudently waited until morning, and recovered it again in safety.

From the best information that I have had opportunities to collect, in travelling my various routes through the states of Delaware and Maryland, I am fully convinced that there are, at this time, within the jurisdiction of the United States, several thousands of legally free people of color, toiling under the yoke of involuntary servitude, and transmitting the same fate to their posterity!-Domestic Slavery and Kidnapping.

JOHN KENRICK.

"The Horrors of Slavery."-To invite attention to this melancholy subject, and to excite sympathy for the suffering, is the object of this publication. The compiler firmly believes that his countrymen stand exposed to the righteous rebukes of Providence for this glaring inconsistency and inhumanity; that whether they shall be tried at the bar of reason, the bar of conscience, or the bar of GoD, they may justly be condemned out of their own mouths; and that all their arguments, and all their fightings for liberty, may be produced as evidence, that as a people, they do unto others as they would not that others should do unto them. The suffering and degraded sons of Africa are groaning under bondage in a land of boasted freedom,-nay, groaning under oppression from the hands of men who would probably involve a whole nation in war and bloodshed- -or even set the world on fire, rather than submit to a fiftieth part of the violation of natural rights which they inflict on the African race.

Whenever the government of the United States shall come to the righteous and consistent determination, that all the inhabitants shall be free, it is believed that no insurmountable obstacles will be found in the way of its accomplishment. Whether it would be just, and equal, and eligible, to take money from the public treasury to redeem African slaves, may possibly become a question for the consideration of congress. It may not, however, be amiss for the people to inquire whether it would be more just and equitable to continue to withhold from more than a million (now two millions) of our fellow beings those essential blessings, without which we ourselves should consider life insupportable.

If it should be pleaded that the powers of the general government are too limited to ensure the personal, civil, and religious liberties of all; can a doubt be entertained of the readiness of the people, when they fairly understand the subject, to enlarge those powers to any extent necessary for the attainment of an object of such transcendant importance? To say "they would not," would be to utter a most shameful libel against a majority of the freemen of the United States. -The Horrors of Slavery.

THE SLAVE-TRADE-EDINBURGH REVIEW.

THE SLAVE-TRADE.

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We now come to our own country, the United States. And what shall we say? What must we say? What does the truth compel us to say? Why, that of all the countries appealed to by great Britain and France on this momentous subject, the United States is the only one which has returned a decided negative. We neither do any thing ourselves to put down the accursed traffic, nor afford any facilities to enable others to put it down. Nay, rather, we stand between the slave and his deliverer. We are a drawback-a dead weight on the cause of bleeding humanity. How long shall this shameful apathy continue? How long shall we, who call ourselves the champions of freedom, close our ears to the groans, and our eyes to the tears and blood, and our hearts to the untold anguish of thousands and tens of thousands who are every year torn from home and friends and bosom companions, and sold into hopeless bondage, or perish amid the horrors of the "middle passage?" From the shores of bleeding Africa, and from the channels of the deep, from Brazil and from Cuba, Echo answers, "How long?"-N. Y. Journal of Commerce, Sept. 1835:

EDINBURGH REVIEW.

We have, however, to record one instance of positive refusal to our request of accession to these conventions, and that, we grieve to say, comes from the United States of America-the first nation that, by its statute law, branded the slave-trade with the name of piracy. The conduct, moreover, of the President, does not appear to have been perfectly candid and ingenuous. There appears to have been delay in returning any answer, and when returned, it seems to have been of an evasive character. In the month of August, 1833, the English and French ministers jointly sent in copies of the recent conventions, and requested the accession of the United States. At the end of March following, seven months afterwards, an answer is returned, which, though certainly not of a favorable character in other respects, yet brings so prominently into view, as the insuperable objection, that the mutual right of search of suspected vessels was to be extended to the shores of the United States, (though we permitted it to American cruisers off the coast of our West Indian colonies,) that Lord Palmerston was naturally led to suppose that the other objections were superable. He, therefore, though aware how much the whole efficiency of the agreement will be impaired, consents to waive that part of it, in accordance with the wishes of the President, and in the earnest hope that he will, in return, make some concessions of feeling or opinion to the wishes of England and France, and to the necessities of a great and holy cause. The final answer, however, is, that under no condition, in no form, and with no restrictions, will the United States enter into any convention or treaty, or make combined efforts of any sort or kind, with other nations, for the suppression of the trade. We much mistake the state of public opinion in the United States, if its government will not find itself under the necessity of changing this resolution. The slave-trade will henceforth, we have little doubt, be carried on