Reader, remember that the corner stone of your religion, is to do unto others as you would they should do unto you; ask then your own heart, whether it would not abhor any one, as the most outrageous violater of that and every other principle of right, justice, and humanity, who should make a slave of you and your posterity for ever!  Remember, that God knoweth the heart; lay not this flattering unction to your soul, that it is the custom of the country; that you found it so, that not your will; but your necessity, consents.  Ah! think how little such an excuse will avail you in that aweful day, when your Saviour shall pronounce judgment on you for breaking a law too plain to be misunderstood, too sacred to be violated.  If we say we are christians, yet act more inhumanly and unjustly than heathens, with what dreadful justice must this sentence of our blessed Saviour fall upon us, “Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doth the will of my Father which is in heaven." Matth. vii. 21.  Think a moment how much your temporal, your eternal welfare depends upon an abolition of a practice which deforms the image of your God, tramples on his revealed will, infringes the most sacred rights, and violates humanity.

Enough, I hope, has been asserted, to prove that slavery is a violation of justice and religion.  That it is dangerous to the safety of the state in which it prevails, may be as safely asserted.

What one’s own experience has not taught; that of others must decide.  From hence does history derive its utility; for being, when truly written, a faithful record of the transactions of mankind, and the consequences that flowed from them, we are thence furnished with the means of judging what will be the probable effect of transactions, similar among ourselves.

We learn then from history, that slavery, wherever encouraged, has sooner or later been productive of very dangerous commotions.  I will not trouble my reader here with quotations in support of this assertion, but content myself with referring those, who may be dubious of its truth, to the histories of Athens, Lacedemon, Rome, and Spain.

How long, how bloody and destructive was the contest between the Moorish slaves and the native Spaniards? and after almost deluges of blood had been shed, the Spaniards obtained nothing more than driving them into the mountains.—­Less bloody indeed, though, not less alarming, have been the insurrections in Jamaica; and to imagine that we shall be for ever exempted from this calamity, which experience teaches us to be inseparable from slavery, so encouraged; is an infatuation as astonishing as it will be surely fatal:—­&c. &c.

EXTRACT

OF A

SERMON

PREACHED BY THE

BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER,