the guardians of the public welfare, the patrons of those virtues which promote the prosperity of states, and the avengers of injustice, perfidy, and fraud.

207. Of whatever benefit superstition might formerly be productive, by the scattered particles of truth which it contained, these advantages can only now be reaped from the soil of true religion; nor is there any other alternative left than the belief of Christianity, or absolute atheism. In the revolutions of the human mind, exploded opinions are often revived; but an exploded superstition never recovers its credit. The pretension to divine revelation is so august and commanding, that, when its falsehood is once discerned, it is covered with all the ignominy of detected imposture; it falls from such a height, (to change the figure,) that it is inevitably crumbled into atoms.

208. Nothing is more certain, than that the communion of saints is by no means confined to one particular occasion, or limited to one transaction, such as that of assembling around the Lord's table; it extends to all modes by which believers recognize each other as the members of a common head. Every expression of fraternal regard,—every participation in the enjoyments of social worship, every instance of the unity of the Spirit, exerted in prayer and supplication, or in acts of Christian sympathy and friendship,-as truly belongs to the communion of saints, as the celebration of the eucharist. In truth, if we are strangers to communion with our fellow Christians on other occasions, it is impossible for us to enjoy it there; for the mind is not a piece of mechanism which can be set a-going at pleasure, whose movements are obedient to the call of time and place. Nothing short of an habitual sympathy of spirit, springing from the cultivation of benevolent feeling, and the interchange of kind offices, will secure that reciprocal delight, that social pleasure, which is the soul of Christian communion.

209. The genius of the age, distinguished as it is, beyond all former example, by the union of Christians in the promotion of a common cause, and their merging their minor differences in the cultivation of great principles, and the pursuit of great objects;

instead of confining themselves each to the defence of his own citadel, they are sallying forth in all directions, in order to make a powerful and combined attack on the kingdom of darkness. The church of Christ, no longer the scene of intestine warfare among the several denominations into which it is cantoned and divided, presents the image of a great empire, composed of distant but not hostile provinces, prepared to send forth its combatants, at the command of its invisible Sovereign, to invade the dominions of Satan, and subdue the nations of the earth. The weapons of its warfare have already made themselves felt in the East and in the West; and whereever its banner is unfurled, it gathers around it, without distinction of name or of sect, "the called, the chosen, the faithful," who, at the heart-thrilling voice of Him whose vesture is dipped in blood, and who goes forth conquering and to conquer, rush to the field, unmindful of every distinction but that of his friends and his foes, and too eager for the combat to ask any other question than, Who is on the Lord's side?

210. It had been the constant boast of infidels, that their system, more liberal and generous than Christianity, needed but to be tried, to produce an immense accession to human happiness; and Christian nations, careless and supine, retaining little of religion but the profession, and disgusted with its restraints, lent a favourable ear to these pretensions. God permitted the trial to be made. In one country, and that the centre of Christendom, revelation underwent a total eclipse; while atheism, performing on a darkened theatre its strange and fearful tragedy, confounded the first elements of society, blended every age, rank, and sex in indiscriminate proscription and massacre, and convulsed all Europe to its centre; that the imperishable memorial of these events might teach the last generations of mankind to consider religion as the pillar of society, the safeguard of nations, the parent of social order, which alone has power to curb the fury of the passions, and secure to every one his rights: to the laborious, the reward of their industry; to the nobles, the preservation of their honours; and to princes, the stability of their thrones.

This, it must be admitted, appears not only the general, but almost universal sentiment of the abolitionists; to oppose it therefore may seem a most presumptuous as well as hopeless attempt. But truth and justice are stubborn and inflexible; they yield neither to numbers nor authority. The history of emancipation in St. Domingo, and of the conduct of the emancipated slaves for thirty years subsequent to that event, (as detailed in Blackson's admirable pamphlet on the necessity of improving the condition of our West Indian slaves,) is a complete refutation of all the elaborate arguments which have been artfully advanced to discredit the design of immediate emancipation. No instance has been recorded in these important annals, of the emancipated slaves (not the gradually, but the immediately emancipated slaves) having abused their freedom. On the contrary, it is frequently asserted in the course of the narrative, that the negroes continued to work upon all the plantations as quietly as before emancipation."

Through the whole of Blackson's diligent and candid investigations of the conduct of emancipated slaves, comprising a body of more than 500,000 persons, under a great variety of circumstances; a considerable proportion of whom had been suddenly emancipated, with all the vicious habits of slavery upon them; many of them accustomed to the use of arms; he has not throughout this vast mass of emancipated slaves, found a single instance of bad behaviour, not even a refusal to work, or of disobedience to orders; much less had he heard of frightful massacres, or of revenge for past injuries, even when they had it

96.-VOL. VIII.

amply in their power. Well therefore might this benevolent and indefatigable abolitionist arrive at the conclusion, "that emancipation (why did he not say immediate emancipation?) was not only practicable, but practicable without danger." All the frightful massacres and conflagrations which took place in St. Domingo, in 1791 and 1792, occurred during the days of slavery. They originated too, not with the slaves, but with the white and coloured planters-between the royalists and the revolutionists; who, for purposes of mutual vengeance, called in the aid of the slaves.

Colonel Malenfant, in his history of the emancipation, written during his residence in St. Domingo, ridicules the notion that the negroes would not work without compulsion; and asserts that, in one plantation, more immediately under his own observation, on which more than four hundred negroes were employed, not one in the number refused to work after their emancipation.-"In the face of such a body of evidence, the detaining our West Indian slaves in bondage is a continued acting of the same atrocious injustice which first kidnapped and tore them from their kindred and native soil, and robbed them of that sacred unalienable right, of which no considerations, how plausible soever, can justify the withholding. We have no right, on any pretext of expediency, or pretended humanity, to say,-“ Because you have been made a slave, and thereby degraded and debased; therefore I will continue to hold you in bondage, until you have acquired a capacity to make a right use of your liberty." As well might you say to a poor wretch gasping and languishing in a pest-house, Here I will keep you, till I have given you a capacity for the enjoyment of pure air.

"You admit that the vices of the slave, as well as his miseries-his intellectual and moral as well as corporeal degradation-are consequent on his slavery. Remove the cause then, and the effect will cease-give the slave his liberty-in the sacred name of justice, give it him at once. Whilst you hold him in bondage, he will profit little from your plans of amelioration. He has not, by all his complicated injuries and debasements, been disinherited of his sagacity; this will teach him to give no credit to your

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"The enemies of slavery have hitherto ruined their cause by the senseless cry of gradual emancipation. It is marvellous that the wise and the good should have suffered themselves to be imposed upon by this wily artifice of the slave-holder; for with him must the project of gradual emancipation have first originated. The slave-holder knew very well that his prey would be secured so long as the abolitionists could be cajoled into a demand for gradual instead of immediate abolition, that the contemplation of a gradual emancipation would beget a gradual indifference to emancipation itself, and that even the wise and the good may by habits and familiarity be brought to endure and tolerate almost any thing. He had caught the poet's idea, that-

"Vice is a monster of snch frightful mien,
That to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."

And having caught the idea, he knew how to turn it to advantage.

"He knew very well that the faithful delineation of the horrors of West Indian slavery, would produce such a general insurrection of sympathetic and indignant feeling; such an abhorrence of the oppressor, such compassion for the oppressed, as must soon have been fatal to the whole system. He knew very well that a strong moral fermentation had begun, which, had it gone forward, must soon have purified the nation from this foulest of its corruptions; that the cries of the people for emancipation would have been too unanimous and too importunate for the government to resist; and that slavery would long ago have been exterminated throughout the British dominions. Our example might have spread from kingdom to kingdom, from continent to continent; and the slavetrade and slavery might, by this time, have been abolished all the world over. "A sacrifice of a sweet savour" might have ascended to the great Parent of the universe; “his kingdom might have come, and his will (thus far) have been done on earth as it is in heaven." But this gradual aboli

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By converting the cry for immediate into gradual emancipation, the prince of slave-holders "transformed himself, with astonishing dexterity, into an angel of light;" and thereby "deceived the very elect." He saw very clearly that if public justice and humanity (especially if Christian justice and humanity) could be brought to demand only a gradual exterminatiou of the enormities of the slave system, if they could be brought to acquiesce but for one year, or for one month, in the slavery of our African brother-in robbing him of all the rights of humanity, and degrading him to a level with the brutes; that then they could imperceptibly be brought to acquiesce in all this for an unlimited duration.

"He saw very clearly, that the time for the extermination of slavery was precisely that, when its horrid impiety and enormity were first distinctly known and strongly felt. He knew that every moment's unnecessary delay, between the discovery of an imperious duty, and the setting earnestly about its accomplishment, was dangerous if not fatal to success. He knew that strong excitement was necessary to strong effort; that intense feeling was necessary to stimulate intense exertion; that as strong excitement and intense feeling are generally transient in proportion to their strength and intensity, the most effectual way of crushing a great and virtuous enterprise, was to gain time-to defer it to" a more convenient season," when the zeal and ardour of the first convictions of duty had subsided; when our sympathies had become languid; when consideration of the difficulties and hazards of the enterprise, the solicitations of ease and indulgence, should have chilled the warm glow of humanity, and quenched the fervid heroism of virtue; when familiarity with relations of violence and outrage, crimes and miseries, should have abated the horror of their first impression, and at length induced indifference.