What the Gospel did then against European slavery, it is doing now against American slavery.  Its end is the same; its weapons are the same; they have not rusted during eighteen centuries.  Those planters of the English islands were not mistaken, who, instinctively divining where lay their great enemy, had recourse to every measure to expel missionaries from among them.  Neither were those Texan executioners mistaken, who lately put to death the missionary Bewley, a touching martyr to the cause of the slaves.  I ask, in the face of the gallows of Bewley, what we are to think of that prodigious paradox according to which the Gospel is the patron of slavery.  To those who mistake its meaning on this point, the Gospel replies by its acts; it replies also by the unanimous testimony of its servants.  What is more striking, in fact, than to see that, apart from the country in which the action of interests and habits disturbs the judgment of Christians, there is but one way of comprehending and interpreting the Scripture on this point?  Consult England, France, Germany; Christians everywhere will tell you that the Gospel abolished slavery, although it does not say a single word which would proclaim this abolition.  Why, if the doubt were possible, would not diversity of opinions be also possible among disinterested judges?  To speak only of France, see the synods of our free churches, which continually stigmatize both Swedish intolerance and American slavery; see an address signed three years ago by the pastors and the elders of five hundred and seventy-one French churches, which has gone to carry to the United States the undoubted testimony of a conviction which in truth is that of all.

It seems to me that our demonstration is complete.  What would it be if I should add that American slavery, which its friends so strangely claim to place under the protection of the Apostles, has nothing in common with that of which the Apostles had cognizance.  The thing, however, is certain.  Slavery, in the United States, is founded on color, it is negro slavery.  Now, this is a fact wholly new in the history of mankind, a monstrous fact, which profoundly modifies the nature of slavery.  Before Las Casas, that virtuous creator of the slave trade, the name of which comprises to him alone a whole commentary on the maxim “Do evil that good may come,” before Las Casas, no one had thought of connecting slavery with race.  Now, the slavery connected with race is that of all others most difficult to uproot, for it bears an indelible sign of inequality, a sign which the law did not create, and which it cannot destroy.