the
lips of his selfish and unjust owner, were questions which no defender
of the system ever answered satisfactorily for Channing. Seeing then
no hope for the elevation of the Negro as a slave, he became a more
determined abolitionist.

[Footnote 1: _Ibid._, p. 78.]

William Jay, a son of the first Chief Justice of the United States,
and an abolition preacher of the ardent type, later directed his
attention to these conditions. The keeping of human beings in heathen
ignorance by a people professing to reverence the obligation of
Christianity seemed to him an unpardonable sin. He believed that the
natural result of this "compromise of principle, this suppression
of truth, this sacrifice to unanimity," had been the adoption of
expediency as a standard of right and wrong in the place of the
revealed will of God.[1] "Thus," continued he, "good men and
good Christians have been tempted by their zeal for the American
Colonization Society to countenance opinions and practices
inconsistent with justice and humanity."[2] Jay charged to this
disastrous policy of neglect the result that in 1835 only 245,000 of
the 2,245,144 slaves had a saving knowledge of the religion of
Christ. He deplored the fact that unhappily the evil influence of the
reactionaries had not been confined to their own circles but had to a
lamentable extent "vitiated the moral sense" of other communities.
The proslavery leaders, he said, had reconciled public opinion to the
continuance of slavery, and had aggravated those sinful prejudices
which subjected the free blacks to insult and persecution and denied
them the blessings of education and religious instruction.[3]

[Footnote 1: Jay, _An Inquiry_, etc., p. 24.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 25.]

[Footnote 3: Jay, _An Inquiry_, etc., p. 26.]

Among the most daring of those who censured the South for its
reactionary policy was Rev. John G. Fee, an abolition minister of
the gospel of Kentucky. Seeing the inevitable result in States where
public opinion and positive laws had made the education of Negroes
impossible, Fee asserted that in preventing them from reading God's
Word and at the same time incorporating them into the Church as
nominal Christians, the South had weakened the institution. Without
the means to learn the principles of religion it was impossible for
such an ignorant class to become efficient and useful members.[1]
Excoriating those who had kept their servants in ignorance to secure
the