RELIGION, my brethren, is a substance of deep consideration among all nations of the earth.  The Pagans have a kind, as well as the Mahometans, the Jews and the Christians.  But pure and undefiled religion, such as was preached by Jesus Christ and his apostles, is hard to be found in all the earth.  God, through his instrument, Moses, handed a dispensation of his divine will to the children of Israel after they had left Egypt for the land of Canaan, or of Promise, who through hypocrisy, oppression, and unbelief, departed from the faith.  He then, by his apostles handed a dispensation of his, together with the will of Jesus Christ, to the Europeans in Europe, who, in open violation of which, have made merchandize of us, and it does appear as though they take this very dispensation to aid them in their infernal depredations upon us.  Indeed, the way in which religion was and is conducted by the Europeans and their descendants, one might believe it was a plan fabricated by themselves and the devils to oppress us.  But hark! my master has taught me better than to believe it—­he has taught me that his gospel as it was preached by himself and his apostles remains the same, notwithstanding Europe has tried to mingle blood and oppression with it.

It is well known to the Christian world that Bartholomew Las Casas, that very notoriously avaricious Catholic priest or preacher, and adventurer with Columbus in his second voyage, proposed to his countrymen, the Spaniards in Hispaniola, to import the Africans from the Portuguese settlement in Africa, to dig up gold and silver, and work their plantations for them, to effect which, he made a voyage thence to Spain, and opened the subject to his master, Ferdinand, then in declining health, who listened to the plan; but who died soon after, and left it in the hands of his successor, Charles V.[12]—­This wretch, ("Las Cassas, the Preacher,”) succeeded so well in his plans of oppression, that in 1503, the first blacks had been imported into the new world.  Elated with this success, and stimulated by sordid avarice only, he importuned Charles V. in 1511, to grant permission to a Flemish merchant to import 4000 blacks at one time.  Thus we see, through the instrumentality of a pretended preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ our common master, our wretchedness first commenced in America—­where it has been continued from 1503 to this day, 1829.  A period of three hundred and twenty-six years.  But two hundred and nine, from 1620—­when twenty of our fathers were brought into Jamestown, Virginia, by a Dutch man-of-war, and sold off like brutes to the highest bidders; and there is not a doubt in my mind, but that tyrants are in hopes to perpetuate our miseries under them and their children until the final consummation of all things.  But if they do not get dreadfully, deceived, it will be because God has forgotten them.