of
wisdom and of goodness that continued heathenism of the race was
justifiable.[3] Answering these inconsistent persons, John Wesley
inquired: "Allowing them to be as stupid as you say, to whom is that
stupidity owing? Without doubt it lies altogether at the door of the
inhuman masters who give them no opportunity for improving their
understanding and indeed leave them no motive, either from hope or
fear to attempt any such thing." Wesley asserted, too, that the
Africans were in no way remarkable for their stupidity while they
remained in their own country, and that where they had equal motives
and equal means of improvement, the Negroes were not only not inferior
to the better inhabitants of Europe, but superior to some of them.[4]

[Footnote 1: Davis was a logical antislavery agitator. He believed
that if the slaves had had the means of education, if they had been
treated with humanity, making slaves of them had been no more than
doing evil that good might come. He thought that Christianity and
humanity would have rather dictated the sending of books and teachers
into Africa and endeavors for their salvation.]

[Footnote 2: Benjamin Rush was a Philadelphia physician of Quaker
parentage. He was educated at the College of New Jersey and at the
Medical School of Edinburgh, where he came into contact with some of
the most enlightened men of his time. Holding to the ideals of his
youth, Dr. Rush was soon associated with the friends of the Negroes on
his return to Philadelphia. He not only worked for the abolition of
the slave trade but fearlessly advocated the right of the Negroes
to be educated. He pointed out that an inquiry into the methods of
converting Negroes to Christianity would show that the means were
ill suited to the end proposed. "In many cases," said he, "Sunday
is appropriated to work for themselves. Reading and writing are
discouraged among them. A belief is inculcated among some that they
have no souls. In a word, every attempt to instruct or convert them
has been constantly opposed by their masters." See Rush, _An Address
to the Inhabitants_, etc., p. 16.]

[Footnote 3: Meade, _Sermons of Rev. Thomas Bacon_, pp. 81-97.]

[Footnote 4: Wesley, _Thoughts upon Slavery_, p. 92.]

William Pinkney, the antislavery leader of Maryland, believed also
that Negroes are no worse than white people under similar conditions,
and that all the colored people needed to disprove their so-called
inferiority was an equa