What a spectacle was that, for the sight of a brother?  The God of heaven only knows the conflict of feeling I then endured; He alone witnessed the tumult of my heart, at this outrage of manhood and kindred affection.  God knows that my will was good enough to have wrung his neck; or to have drained from his heartless system its last drop of blood!  And yet I was obliged to turn a deaf ear to her cries for assistance, which to this day ring in my ears.  Strong and athletic as I was, no hand of mine could be raised in her defence, but at the peril of both our lives;—­nor could her husband, had he been a witness of the scene, be allowed any thing more than unresisting submission to any cruelty, any indignity which the master saw fit to inflict on his wife, but the other’s slave.

Does any indignant reader feel that I was wanting in courage or brotherly affection, and say that he would have interfered, and, at all hazards, rescued his sister from the power of her master; let him remember that he is a freeman; that he has not from his infancy been taught to cower beneath the white man’s frown, and bow at his bidding, or suffer all the rigor of the slave laws.  Had the gentlemanly woman-whipper been seen beating his horse, or his ox, in the manner he beat my poor sister, and that too for no fault which the law could recognize as an offence, he would have been complained of most likely; but as it was, she was but a “slave girl,”—­with whom the slave law allowed her master to do what he pleased.

Well, I finally passed on, with a clinched fist and contracted brow, to the church, and rung the bell, I think rather furiously, to notify the inhabitants of Bath, that it was time to assemble for the worship of that God who has declared himself to be “no respecter of persons.”  With my own heart beating wildly with indignation and sorrow, the kind reader may imagine my feelings when I saw the smooth-faced hypocrite, the inhuman slave-whipper, enter the church, pass quietly on to his accustomed seat, and then meekly bow his hypocritical face on the damask cushion, in the reverent acknowledgment of that religion which teaches its adherents “to do unto others as they would be done by,” just as if nothing unusual had happened on that Sabbath morning.  Can any one wonder that I, and other slaves, often doubted the sincerity of every white man’s religion?  Can it be a matter of astonishment, that slaves often feel that there is no just God for the poor African?  Nay, verily; and were it not for the comforting and sustaining influence that these poor, illiterate and suffering creatures feel as coming from an unearthly source, they would in their ignorance all become infidels.  To me, that beautiful Sabbath morning was clouded in midnight darkness, and I retired to ponder on what could be done.