"Zealous for religion as the colonists were, very little
effort was made to convert the Negroes, owing partly, at
least, to a prevalent opinion that neither Christian
brotherhood nor the law of England would justify the holding
Christians as slaves. Nor could repeated colonial
enactments to the contrary entirely root out this idea, for
it was not supposed that a colonial statute could set aside
the law of England."[329]

But the deeper reason the colonists had for excluding slaves from
baptism, and hence citizenship, was twofold; viz., to keep in harmony
with the Mosaic code in reference to "strangers" and "Gentiles," and
to keep the door of the Church shut in the face of the slave; because
to open it to him was to emancipate him in course of time. Religious
and secular knowledge were not favorable to slavery. The colonists
turned to the narrow, national spirit of the Old Testament, rather
than to the broad and catholic spirit of the New Testament, for
authority to withhold the mercies of the Christian religion from the
Negro slaves in their midst.

The rigorous system of domestic slavery established in the colony of
Massachusetts bore its bitter fruit in due season. It was impossible
to exclude the slaves from the privileges of the Church and State
without inflicting a moral injury upon the holy marriage relation. In
the contemplation of the law the slave was a chattel, an article of
merchandise. The custom of separating parent and child, husband and
wife, was very clear proof that the marriage relation was either
positively ignored by the institution of slavery, or grossly violated
under the slightest pretext. All well-organized society or government
rests upon this sacred relation. But slavery, with lecherous grasp and
avaricious greed, trailed the immaculate robes of marriage in the
moral filth of the traffic in human beings. True, there never was any
prohibition against the marriage of one slave to another slave,--for
they _tried_ to breed slaves in Massachusetts!--but there never was
any law encouraging the lawful union of slaves until after the
Revolutionary War, in 1786. We rather infer from the following in the
Act of October, 1705, that the marriage relation among slaves had been
left entirely to the caprices of the master.

"And no master shall unreasonably deny marriage to his Negro
with one of the same nation; any law, usage or custom to the
contra