s,
holding commission from Christian England, as criminals for so
preaching. A Christian commissioned officer, member of the Established
Church of England, signed the auction notices for the sale of slaves as
late as the year 1824. In the evidence before a Christian court-martial,
a missionary is charged with having tended to make the negroes
dissatisfied with their condition as slaves, and with having promoted
discontent and dissatisfaction amongst the slaves against their
lawful masters. For this the Christian judges sentenced the Demerara
abolitionist missionary to be hanged by the neck till he was dead.
The judges belonged to the Established Church; the missionary was a
Methodist. In this the Church of England Christians in Demerara were
no worse than Christians of other sects: their Roman Catholic Christian
brethren in St. Domingo fiercely attacked the Jesuits as criminals
because they treated negroes as though they were men and women, in
encouraging "two slaves to separate their interest and safety from that
of the gang", whilst orthodox Christians let them couple promiscuously
and breed for the benefit of their owners like any other of their
plantation cattle. In 1823 the _Royal Gazette_ (Christian) of Demerara
said:

"We shall not suffer you to enlighten our slaves, who are by law our
property, till you can demonstrate that when they are made religious and
knowing they will continue to be our slaves."

When William Lloyd Garrison, the pure-minded and most earnest
abolitionist, delivered his first anti-slavery address in Boston,
Massachusetts, the only building he could obtain, in which to speak, was
the infidel hall owned by Abner Kneeland, the "infidel" editor of the
_Boston Investigatory_ who had been sent to gaol for blasphemy. Every
Christian sect had in turn refused Mr. Lloyd Garrison the use of the
buildings they severally controlled. Lloyd Garrison told me himself how
honored deacons of a Christian Church joined in an actual attempt to
hang him.

When abolition was advocated in the United States in 1790, the
representative from South Carolina was able to plead that the Southern
clergy "did not condemn either slavery or the slave trade"; and Mr.
Jackson, the representative from Georgia, pleaded that "from Genesis to
Revelation" the current was favorable to slavery. Elias Hicks, the brave
Abolitionist Quaker, was denounced as an Atheist, and less than twenty
years ago a Hicksite Quaker was expelled from