“He that is robb’d------
Let him not know it, and he’s not robbed at all.”

But, your authority is not conclusive.  The crime of the depredation is none the less, because the subject is ignorant or unconscious of it.  It is true, the slave, who never possessed liberty—­who was kidnapped at his birth—­may not grieve, under the absence of it, as he does, from whose actual and conscious possession it had been violently taken:  but the robbery is alike plain, and is coupled with a meanness, in the one case, which does not disgrace it in the other. ]

1st.  The book of Acts sets forth the fundamental doctrines and requirements of Christianity.  It is to the letters of the Apostles we are to look for extended specifications of right and wrong affections, and right and wrong practices.  Why do these letters omit to specify the sin of slaveholding?  Because they were addressed to professing Christians exclusively; who, far more emphatically then than now, were “the base things of the world,” and were in circumstances to be slaves, rather than slaveholders.  Doubtless, there were many slaves amongst them—­but I cannot admit, that there were slaveholders.  There is not the least probability, that slaveholding was a prevalent sin amongst primitive Christians[B].  Instructions to them on that sin might have been almost as superfluous, as would be lectures on the sin of luxury, addressed to the poor Greenland disciples, whose poverty compels them to subsist on filthy oil.  No one, acquainted with the history of their lives, believes that the Apostles were slave-holders.  They labored, “working with (their) own hands.”  The supposition, that they were slaveholders, is inconsistent with their practice, and with the tenor of their instructions to others on the duty of manual labor.  But if the Apostles were not slaveholders, why may we suppose, that their disciples were?  At the South, it is, “like people, like priest,” in this matter.  There, the minister of the gospel thinks, that he has as good right to hold slaves, as has his parishioner:  and your Methodists go so far, as to say, that even a bishop has as good right, as any other person, to have slaves

[Footnote B:  How strongly does the following extract from the writings of the great and good Augustine, who lived in the fourth century, argue, that slaveholding was not a prevalent sin amongst primitive Christians!  “Non opurtet Christianum possidere servum quomodo equum aut argentum.  Quis dicere audeat ut vestimentum cum debere contemni?  Hominem namque homo tamquam seipsum diligere debet cui ab omnium Domino, ut inimicos diligat, imperatur.” A Christian ought not to hold his servant as he does his horse or his money.  Who dares say that he should be thought as lightly of as a garment?  For man, whom the Lord of all has commanded to love his enemies, should love his fellow-man as himself.]