u and your posterity for ever! Remember, that
God knoweth the heart; lay not this flattering unction to your soul,
that it is the custom of the country; that you found it so, that not
your will; but your necessity, consents. Ah! think how little such an
excuse will avail you in that aweful day, when your Saviour shall
pronounce judgment on you for breaking a law too plain to be
misunderstood, too sacred to be violated. If we say we are christians,
yet act more inhumanly and unjustly than heathens, with what dreadful
justice must this sentence of our blessed Saviour fall upon us, "_Not
every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of
heaven, but he that doth the will of my Father which is in heaven."_
Matth. vii. 21. Think a moment how much your temporal, your eternal
welfare depends upon an abolition of a practice which deforms the image
of your God, tramples on his revealed will, infringes the most sacred
rights, and violates humanity.

Enough, I hope, has been asserted, to prove that slavery is a violation
of justice and religion. That it is dangerous to the safety of the state
in which it prevails, may be as safely asserted.

What one's own experience has not taught; that of others must decide.
From hence does history derive its utility; for being, when truly
written, a faithful record of the transactions of mankind, and the
consequences that flowed from them, we are thence furnished with the
means of judging what will be the probable effect of transactions,
similar among ourselves.

We learn then from history, that slavery, wherever encouraged, has
sooner or later been productive of very dangerous commotions. I will not
trouble my reader here with quotations in support of this assertion, but
content myself with referring those, who may be dubious of its truth, to
the histories of Athens, Lacedemon, Rome, and Spain.

How long, how bloody and destructive was the contest between the Moorish
slaves and the native Spaniards? and after almost deluges of blood had
been shed, the Spaniards obtained nothing more than driving them into
the mountains.--Less bloody indeed, though, not less alarming, have been
the insurrections in Jamaica; and to imagine that we shall be for ever
exempted from this calamity, which experience teaches us to be
inseparable from slavery, so encouraged; is an infatuation as
astonishing as it will be surely fatal:--&c. &c.

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