Christian preachers did not escape the imputation of turning the world upside down, and at length, in some sense, effected what was imputed.  It is matter of conjecture, whether any greater convulsion would have happened, if the apostles had done as the Quakers in America.  No Quaker holds slaves:  why not?  Because the Quakers teach their members that it is an essential immorality.  The slave-holding states are infinitely more alive and jealous to keep up their “peculiar institution,” than was the Roman government; yet the Quakers have caused no political convulsion.  I confess, to me it seems, that if Paul, and John, and Peter, and James, had done as these Quakers, the imperial administration would have looked on it as a harmless eccentricity of the sect, and not as an incentive[16] to sedition.  But be this as it may, I did not say what else the apostles might have succeeded to enforce; I merely pointed out what it was that they actually taught, and that, as a fact, they did not declare slavery to be an immorality and the basest of thefts.  If any one thinks their course was more wise, he may be right or wrong, but his opinion is in itself a concession of my fact.

As to the historical progress of Christian practice and doctrine on this subject, it is, as usual, mixed of good and evil.  The humanity of good Pagan emperors softened the harshness of the laws of bondage, and manumission had always been extremely common amongst the Romans.  Of course, the more humane religion of Christ acted still more powerfully in the same direction, especially in inculcating the propriety of freeing Christian slaves.  This was creditable, but not peculiar, and is not a fact of such a nature as to add to the exclusive claims of Christianity.  To every proselyting religion the sentiment is so natural, that no divine spirit is needed to originate and establish it.  Mohammedans also have a conscience against enslaving Mohammedans, and generally bestow freedom on a slave as soon as he adopts their religion.  But no zeal for human freedom has ever grown out of the purely biblical and ecclesiastical system, any more than out of the Mohammedan.  In the middle ages, zeal for the liberation of serfs first rose in the breasts of the clergy, after the whole population had become nominally Christian.  It was not men, but Christians, whom the clergy desired to make free:  it is hard to say, that they thought Pagans to have any human rights at all, even to life.  Nor is it correct to represent ecclesiastical influences as the sole agency which overthrew slavery and serfdom.  The desire of the kings to raise up the chartered cities as a bridle to the barons, was that which chiefly made rustic slavery untenable in its coarsest form; for a “villain” who escaped into the free cities could not be recovered.  In later times, the first public act against slavery came from republican France, in the madness of atheistic enthusiasm; when