Neither does it escape our notice, when we are speaking of the fatal wound which every social duty must receive, how considerably Christianity suffers by the conduct of you receivers.  For by prosecuting this impious commerce, you keep the Africans in a state of perpetual ferocity and barbarism; and by prosecuting it in such a manner, as must represent your religion, as a system of robbery and oppression, you not only oppose the propagation of the gospel, as far as you are able yourselves, but throw the most certain impediments in the way of others, who might attempt the glorious and important task.

Such also is the effect, which the subsequent slavery in the colonies must produce.  For by your inhuman treatment of the unfortunate Africans there, you create the same insuperable impediments to a conversion.  For how must they detest the very name of Christians, when you Christians are deformed by so many and dreadful vices?  How must they detest that system of religion, which appears to resist the natural rights of men, and to give a sanction to brutality and murder?

But, as we are now mentioning Christianity, we must pause for a little time, to make a few remarks on the arguments which are usually deduced from thence by the receivers, in defence of their system of oppression.  For the reader may readily suppose, that, if they did not hesitate to bring the Old Testament in support of their barbarities, they would hardly let the New escape them.

St. Paul, having converted Onesimus to the Christian faith, who was a fugitive slave of Philemon, sent him back to his master.  This circumstance has furnished the receivers with a plea, that Christianity encourages slavery.  But they have not only strained the passages which they produce in support of their assertions, but are ignorant of historical facts.  The benevolent apostle, in the letter which he wrote to Philemon, the master of Onesimus, addresses him to the following effect:  “I send him back to you, but not in his former capacity[111], not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.  In this manner I beseech you to receive him, for though I could enjoin you to do it, yet I had rather it should be a matter of your own will, than of necessity.”

It appears that the same Onesimus, when he was sent back, was no longer a slave, that he was a minister of the gospel, that he was joined with Tychicus in an ecclesiastical commission to the church of the Colossians, and was afterwards bishop of Ephesus.  If language therefore has any meaning, and if history has recorded a fact which may be believed, there is no case more opposite to the doctrine of the receivers, than this which they produce in its support.