whom they confessed, that temporal men were glad to manumit all their villeins. But," he adds, "the holy fathers themselves did not manumit their own slaves, and the bishops behaved like the other ecclesiastics. But, at last, some bishops enfranchised their villeins for money, and others on account of popular outcry: and at length the monasteries falling into lay hands were the occasion that almost all the villeins in the kingdom were manumitted."

The same things which were enacted in England, at the abolition of villeinage, are, in principle, now being enacted in this country. The religious teachers of the day instructed the people in Christianity, and made them see that slaveholding and villeinage were inconsistent with it. But the priests, trusting in the reverence of the people for their religious character, would not submit to a practical application of their own principles, till compelled to it by a public sentiment, the reflection of their own teachings, rising from the people. "And the bishops behaved like the other ecclesiastics." A year or more since, a man from this city travelling down the Ohio, said the boat took on board the Right Reverend Bishop Polk, of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and brother, I believe, of our worthy President of the United States, with his sixty slaves, whom he was taking to his plantation. "A few miles below," said my informant, "a swine-merchant came a-board, with a large drove of hogs." And in legal and social condition, the slave-gang of this "Holy Bishop" were precisely on an equal footing with that herd of swine; and both sustained the same property relation to their masters.

As to the question, whether any teachers of religion, at the present day, are driven by public opinion to act against slavery, it is most humiliating to reflect on what would be the course of our General Assemblies, and General Conferences, on the subject of slavery, if no petitions had gone, or should hereafter go up from the people to them on that subject. The monks, friars, and bishops of England freed their bondmen under the same pressure that has, in our day, pro

cured the reading of anti-slavery notices, viz: "popular outcry." But the main-spring, which kept the whole of the machinery of emancipation in movement was the conviction, seated in the conscience of the nation, that slave-holding was sinful.

I now call

your attention to the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.

Opposition to West Indian Slavery, was formally commenced by Granville Sharpe, in the year 1772, and the first fruit of his labors was the decision obtained in that year, by the English Bench, that slaves became free by setting foot upon English soil. This was the celebrated case of the negro Somersett. Peckard, Benezet, Gregoire, and others, had already written against the enslavement of the Africans, which, till now, was pursued as a lawful christian calling. In 1785, Dr. Peckard, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, gave to the Senior Bachelors, as a subject for a Latin dissertation, the question, "Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?" Thomas Clarkson obtained the prize upon this thesis, and the investigation of his subject so wrought upon his mind, that he devoted his life to the destruction of slavery. A committee was soon organized, of which Granville Sharpe was chairman, which for a time labored alike against slavery and the slave trade. But they afterwards thought it would be wiser to drop direct opposition to slavery, and oppose the slave-trade alone, as the most obnoxious of the two, and easiest suppressed. They were induced to this course by two considerations, the great strength and endless ramifications of the slavery interest in England; and the idea that the slave-trade, once abolished, slavery would speedily die, as a stream when its fountain is stopped. That was a great error. When the Abbe Gregoire heard of it, he wrote to the British abolitionists: "In your late change of policy, I hear the groans, and see the falling tears of coming millions." This prophecy has been verified.

The slave-trade was abolished in England, under the

Grenville administration, in 1807; from which time the British philanthropists took up opposition to slavery itself. But they labored for years under the incubus notion of gradual emancipation. They had not yet learned the truth of the proverb "Give the sinner to-day, and he and the devil will take care of to-morrow."

I may as well stop here to say, there is nothing, there can be nothing but immediateism in morals. You have no right to tell a man he is sinning, and that it is his duty to repent next week. The only command which God ever gave to men involved in wrong practices, is in the present tense"Cease to do Evil;" and whoever holds another language grants indulgence to sin. But while this is the only correct theory of reformation; in practice, the law always allows

a reasonable time" for change. If slave-holders were now preparing to emancipate their slaves in six weeks or two months, and would actually do so, would not that be "immediate emancipation?" The slavery ceases when the emanci pation is honestly and effectually begun.

My first public lecture against slavery, was delivered while I was a student. It was in the little town of Haddonfield, New Jersey; where I met, after the mob, a thing of course at that day, a New Jersey farmer and explained to him our doctrine of "Immediate Abolition." I urged that slaveholding is sin-because slavery repeals and resists the laws by which God has regulated human society: that it is a repeal of the marriage relation. That it is not the taking apart a man and his wife that makes the separation. The Atlantic ocean has rolled between me and my wife, but I thanked God that I had a wife then. It is not distance which parts man and wife in the slave system, but slavery. They could remain married while an ocean is between them, but they cannot be married while they are slaves.

I showed him that slavery forbids the required promises of parents to instruct their children to read the Word of God, and thus virtually forbids infant baptism itself. That by the

law of several States, it is a punishable crime in parents to teach their children to read the name of God.

When the old man (for he was a parent himself) began to see that my doctrine was truth, one present said: "Oh! but it will never do to free them all at once!" The farmer replied, "I don't see any particular danger of that; but we all say the thing must be brought to an end; and though a man has his knife on the grindstone and another at the crank, it never begins to sharpen till he begins to turn. If we are ever to get rid of slavery, I think its time to begin to turn." But I return to the British abolitionists. Their teaching of gradual emancipation not being founded in truth, influenced conscience little or none, and produced no emancipation. But about the year 1824, a change occurred in their teaching, and a corresponding change in their tone. They still taught the same principle, that slave-holding is sin, but they varied their application of it, and demanded immediate repentance. A pamphlet issued from the press this year, written by Elizabeth Heyrick, of Leicester, entitled "Immediate not Gradual Abolition," which expressed, and perhaps helped to mould the anti-slavery movement into the form, and possibly gave it the name, of" immediate abolition."

The result of this agitation you all know. On the 31st day of July, 1834, at midnight, 800,000 human beings knelt down. slaves, when the clock began to strike twelve, (if brother Rice had been there, he would have struck the hour of the debate,) [a laugh] and when the clock ceased striking, arose up men.

There is no doubt upon what principles the British emancipation was brought about; that it was the principle that slave-holding is sin, and immediate abolition a duty. Principles urged and carried forward by abolitionists, almost all of whom are still living, as Clarkson, Sturge, Buxton, Thompson, Scoble, Scales, and their coadjutors, with whose minds and hearts modern abolitionism may almost be said to have originated, and from whose operations, perhaps, derived its name.

I will read the record of the event, which took place in the West Indies, at midnight, August 1, 1834, from Kimball & Thome's "Emancipation in the West Indies," p. 144:

"The Wesleyans kept 'watch-night' in all their chapels on the night of the 31st July. One of the Wesleyan missionaries gave us an account of the watch-meeting at the chapel in St. Johns. The spacious house was filled with the candidates for liberty. All was animation and eagerness. A mighty chorus of voices swelled the song of expectation and joy, and as they united in prayer, the voice of the leader was drowned in the universal acclamations of thanksgiving and praise, and blessing, and honor, and glory to God, who had come down for their deliverance. In such exercises, the evening was spent, until the hour of twelve approached. The missionary then proposed, that when the clock on the Cathedral should begin to strike, the whole congregation should fall upon their knees, and receive the boon of freedom in silence. Accordingly, as the loud bell tolled its first note, the crowded assembly prostrated themselves on their knees. All was silence, save the quivering, half-stifled breath of the struggling spirit. The slow notes of the clock fell upon the multitude; peal on peal, peal on peal, rolled over the prostrate throng, in tones of angels' voices, thrilling among the desolate chords and weary heart-strings. Scarce had the clock sounded its last note, when the lightning flashed vividly around, and a loud peal of thunder roared along the sky-God's pillar of fire, and his trump of Jubilee! A moment of profoundest silence passed-then came the burst. They broke forth in prayer; they shouted; they sang, glory, alleluia; they clapped their hands, leaped up, fell down, clasped each other in their free arms, cried, laughed, and went to and fro, tossing upward their unfettered arms. But, high above the whole, there was a mighty sound, which ever and anon swelled,-it was the utterings, in broken negro dialect, of gratitude to God."

This is the doctrine, and this the practice, of immediate abolitionism—principles which chall spread until the