ciples; that they can unblushingly presume to serve at the table of the Lord; or that they can calmly seat themselves around the sacred board-is a manifest demonstration of that obduracy of heart, which sin naturally engenders, and of that blindness of vision, which nothing but the Holy Spirit's energy can possibly remove.

Our life past may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles: now it is high time to awake out of sleep, to discard this iniquity, to repent, and to reform this atrocity; or we may fearfully anticipate that he who holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, will come unto us quickly, and will remove our candlestick out of his place, except we repent; that he will lay his axe unto the root of the tree, hew it down, and cast it into the fire: and that he whose fan is in his hand, will thoroughly purge his floor and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. The fruit is a destruction of every devotional temper, the tree is daring impiety: the tree is incessant cruelty, the fruit is unparalleled insensibility to human wo; the tree is invariable deception, the fruit is unintermitted falsehood; and the fruits are every diversified unrighteousness, the tree is uninterrupted injustice: therefore, as all the fruits are atrociously and detestably corrupt, the tree itself must be incorrigibly rotten.

As no participant in this complicated enormity can possibly be innocent of the guilt which it comprises; every slave-holding professor, is either so wretchedly besotted by the influence of sin as to be wilfully ignorant of the true nature and requisitions of the gospel, or he has assumed a profession of Christianity as a cloak for his malignant and ungodly conduct; hence, whether he be perversely deluded,

or a contumacious deceiver, unless he manifest a sincere contrition, by immediately desisting from all concern with a combination of impiety, barbarism, falsehood and dishonesty, he ought to be excommunicated from the church of God.

SLAVERY

INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE GOSPEL.

SLAVERY is adverse to all the principles and requisitions which the scriptures reveal. The purchase, or sale, or vassalage, or involuntary hire of men or women, destroys the rights which are granted to the human family by the God of nature; extinguishes all capacity for the fulfilment of terrestrial duties and a compliance with divine injunc tions; nullifies the evangelic law of love and equity; and is unequivocally denounced by the Holy Bible, as the highest degree of criminality connected with this temporal state of probation.

'Slavery naturally tends to destroy all sense of justice and equity. It puffs up the mind with pride; teaches youth a habit of looking down upon their fellow creatures with contempt, esteeming them as dogs or devils, and imagining themselves beings of superior dignity and importance, to whom all are indebted. This banishes the idea, and unqualifies the mind for the practice of common justice. If I have all my days, been accustomed to live at the expense of a coloured man, without making him any compensation, or considering myself at all in his debt, I cannot think it any great crime to live at the expense of a white man. If I rob a coloured man without guilt, I shall contract no great guilt by robbing a white man. If I have been accustomed to think a coloured man was made for me, I may easily take it into my head to think so of a white If I have no sense of obligation to do justice to a black man, I can have little to do justice to a white man. In this case, the tinge of our skins, or the place of our nativity,

man.

can make but little difference. If I am in principle a friend to slavery, I cannot, to be consistent, think it any crime to rob my country of its property and freedom, whenever my interest calls, and I find it in my power. If I make any difference here, it must be owing to a vicious education, the force of prejudice, or pride of heart. If in principle a friend to slavery, I cannot feel myself obliged to pay the debt due to my neighbour. If I can wrong him of all his possessions, and avoid the law, all is well."-Rice.

"The holding of our fellow creatures in perpetual slavery is inconsistent with the honour and brotherly love, which Christians acknowledge to be due to all men. Honour all men. The Lord make you to increase and abound in love to one another and to all men. We are to love and honour all men as the partakers of the same human nature, as descended from the same original parent. God hath made of one blood all nations, and hath determined the bounds of their habitations: also as having immortal souls capable of saving grace, capable of being members of Christ and temples of the Holy Ghost. But the slavery, in which American citizens are now detained, indicates hatred and contempt, instead of honour and love. It is invidiously restricted to those of a certain complexion; deprives them of the common rights of man; and exhibits them to be bought and sold like beasts.

"The evil consequences which have constantly attended slavery, are sufficient to make every Christian abhor it. It is shocking to relate the many instances, disgraceful to human nature, of the dreadful punishment inflicted on these miserable captives for slight offences, of the excessive labour to which they are compelled, of the scanty and unwholesome allotment that is given them of the necessaries of life, and of other sorts of cruel treatment. The education of slaves in the principles of our holy religion, is universally neglected. Hence, they are grossly ignorant of religion and openly immoral in their practice. Thus a race of heathens or infidels is propagated; whose example and conversation must be an infectious and destructive plague to the rest of the inhabitants of the land. Nor is there any reasonable prospect of the reformation of persons while in

a state of slavery; for the masters are generally possessed with a notion, that slaves are unteachable, and that knowledge would render them more intractable. Besides, slaves are naturally and justly prejudiced against the instructions of their oppressors."-Brown.

"Liberty conducts to every thing that is sublime in genius and virtue, while slavery extinguishes all. What sentiments of dignity or of respect, can those mortals have for themselves, who are considered as cattle, and who are often staked, by their masters, at cards or billiards, against barrels of rice or other merchandise. What can individuals perform when degraded below the condition of brutes, overwrought, covered with rags, famished by hunger, and for the slightest fault torn by the bloody whip of an overseer? Slavery supposes all the crimes of tyranny, and engenders all its vices. Virtue can hardly thrive among men who have no consideration, who are soured by misfortune, dragged into corruption by the example of crimes, driven from all honourable or supportable ranks in society, deprived of religious and moral instruction, placed in a situation where it is impossible to acquire knowledge, and struggling against obstacles which oppose the development of their faculties. In their place, perhaps, we should have been less virtuous, than the virtuous among them, and more vicious than their worst characters; for their vices are the work of the nations called Christian."-Gregoire.

Revealed religion is predicated upon the natural equality, the individual responsibility, the reciprocal duties of the human family, and the paramount claims of the most high God to the services, and the obedience of all his creatures. Slavery does not merely diminish the energy, and mitigate the obligation of the sacred scriptures, but it totally nullifies all the fundamental principles of Christianity.

Paul assured the Areopagites, that God made of one flesh all nations of men. The dissimilarity of the rational species, upon the pretext of colour, is consequently a chimera; and if the members of the various countries of the globe are derived from a different origin, they cannot be bound by the same laws as ourselves. This aggravates the iniquity of slave-holding to an inconceivable degree, because it pre

supposes the right to grasp every reasonable creature who bears not our own external conformation, or whose features differ; but the same principles in reaction would justify every country in enslaving its neighbours, and every individual for stealing defenceless men.

Slavery is the legitimate offspring, and the frequent cause of a rejection of the bible. Christian instructors may justly be alarmed; they cannot be silent upon man-stealing, much less excuse, defend, or engage in it, without a virtual admission that divine revelation is not our sole infallible directory.

Men calumniate the coloured people, that they may claim a right to enslave them; and for justification of their culpable conduct. The accusers are both judges and executioners.

Slavery extinguishes all the rights of man: from his equal rank in creation, the slave is ignominiously debased to a brute; and the immunities which naturally inhere to him, are all stolen. The thief becomes a despot, and the kidnapped immortal is buried in terrestrial vassalage, without hope and without end. His life is at the disposal of a barbarian, who may render it as wretched as he will uncontrolled, or shorten its duration by every refinement of torture of his freedom he is altogether divested: and his labour, his comforts, his children, and his all, are the property of the most guilty violator of the eighth commandment. What peculiarly daring effrontery do men display, when they assume the garb of religion, and deny its most obvious principles, its most luminous prescriptions, and its most tremendous denunciations!

"The principles of conjugal love and fidelity in the breast of a virtuous pair, of natural affection in parents, and a sense of duty in children, are inscribed there by the finger of God; they are the laws of heaven; but an enslaving law directly opposes them, and virtually forbids obedience. The relations of husband and wife, of parent and child, are formed by divine authority and founded on the laws of nature. But it is in the power of a cruel master, and of a needy creditor, to break those tender connexions, and for ever to separate those dearest rela