The Spanish and French were doing so much more than the English to enlighten their slaves that certain teachers and missionaries in the British colonies endeavored more than ever to arouse their countrymen to discharge their duty to those they held in bondage.  These reformers hoped to do this by holding up to the members of the Anglican Church the praiseworthy example of the Catholics whom the British had for years denounced as enemies of Christ.  The criticism had its effect.  But to prosecute this work extensively the English had to overcome the difficulty found in the observance of the unwritten law that no Christian could be held a slave.  Now, if the teaching of slaves enabled them to be converted and their Christianization led to manumission, the colonists had either to let the institution gradually pass away or close all avenues of information to the minds of their Negroes.  The necessity of choosing either of these alternatives was obviated by the enactment of provincial statutes and formal declarations by the Bishop of London to the effect that conversion did not work manumission.[1] After the solution of this problem English missionaries urged more vigorously upon the colonies the duty of instructing the slaves.  Among the active churchmen working for this cause were Rev. Morgan Goodwyn and Bishops Fleetwood, Lowth, and Sanderson.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 352.]

[Footnote 2:  On observing that laws had been passed in Virginia to prevent slaves from attending the meetings of Quakers for purposes of being instructed, Morgan Goodwyn registered a most earnest protest.  He felt that prompt attention should be given to the instruction of the slaves to prevent the Church from falling into discredit, and to obviate the causes for blasphemy on the part of the enemies of the Church who would not fail to point out that ministers sent to the remotest parts had failed to convert the heathen.  Therefore, he preached in Westminster Abbey in 1685 a sermon “to stir up and provoke” his “Majesty’s subjects abroad, and even at home, to use endeavors for the propagation of Christianity among their domestic slaves and vassals.”  He referred to the spreading of mammonism and irreligion by which efforts to instruct and Christianize the heathen were paralyzed.  He deplored the fact that the slaves who were the subjects of such instruction became the victims of still greater cruelty, while the missionaries who endeavored to enlighten them were neglected and even persecuted by the masters.  They considered the instruction of the Negroes an impracticable and needless work of popish superstition, and a policy subversive of the interests of slaveholders.  Bishop Sanderson found it necessary to oppose this policy of Virginia which had met the denunciation of Goodwyn.  In strongly emphasizing this duty of masters, Bishop Fleetwood moved the hearts of many planters of North Carolina to allow missionaries access to their slaves.  Many of them were thereafter instructed and baptized.  See Goodwyn, The Negroes and Indians’ Advocate; Hart, History Told by Contemporaries, vol. i., No. 86; Special Rep.  U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 363; An Account of the Endeavors of the Soc., etc., p. 14.]