tives, and even for their wives and children. Nor should we forget that a large portion of this race are born slaves to the chieftains, whose wars with each other are mere excursions of robbery and theft.

Lander, vol. i. p. 107, speaking of Jenna, says

"It must not be imagined that because the people of this country are almost perpetually engaged in conflicts with their neighbours, the slaughter of human beings is therefore very great. They pursue war, as it is called, partly as an amusement, or to keep their hands in it; and partly to benefit themselves by the capture of slaves."

One decrepit old woman was the victim of a hundred engagements, at Cape La Hoo, during a three years' war. Lander describes those who claim to be free, as the war men of the path, who are robbers. He says, p. 145, "they subsist solely by pillage and rapine."

Such is the condition of the poor free negro in Africa. The chieftain often, it is true, has goats, sheep, fields of corn and rice; but we mistake when we suppose that the slaves, the surplus of whom were formerly sent to market, were the proprietors of such property. At Katunqua, p. 179, Lander describes the food to be "such as lizards, rats, locusts, and caterpillars, which the natives roast, grill, bake, and boil." No people feed on such vermin who possess fields and flocks.

We can form some notion of their companionship, from p. 110: "It is the custom here, when the governor dies, for two of his favourite wives to quit the world on the same day;" but in this case they ran and hid themselves. Also, p. 182: "This morning a young man visited us, with a countenance so rueful, and spoke in a tone so low and melancholy, that we were desirous to learn what evil had befallen him. The cause of it was soon explained by his informing us that he would be doomed to die, with two companions, as soon as the governor's dissolution should take place."

There is little or no discrepancy among travellers in their descriptions of the Africans. Their state of society must have been well known to Paley; yet Paley gives us a picture of their state of society from imagination, founded upon that state of society with which his pupils were conversant: "Because the slaves were torn away from their parents, wives, children, and friends, homes, companions, country, fields, and flocks."

If the picture drawn by Paley were the lone consideration ad

dressed to our commiseration in the argument against slavery as a Divine institution of mercy, we should, perhaps, be at some loss to determine what amount was due from us to the African slave, who had thus been torn from the danger of being put to death! —thus torn from his fields of lizards and locusts, and flocks of caterpillars!

But what shall we think of an argument, founded on relations in England, but applied to Africa, where no such relations exist?

It is a rule to hesitate as to the truthfulness of all that is stated, when the witness is discovered to be under the influence of a prejudice so deeply seated as to mislead the mind, and especially when we discover a portion of the stated facts to be either not true or misapplied.

The reasons assigned by Dr. Paley why the Christian Scriptures did not prohibit and condemn slavery, we deem also quite erroneous: "For Christianity, soliciting admission into all nations of the world, abstained, as behooved it, from intermeddling with the civil institutions of any;" and then asks, with an air of triumph, "But does it follow from the silence of Scripture concerning them, that all the civil institutions that prevailed were right? or that the bad should not be exchanged for better?"

We wish to call particular attention to this passage, for, even after having examined the books of the Greek philosophers, we are constrained to say we have never seen a more beautiful sophism.

Is it a fact, then, that Jesus Christ and his apostles did compromise and compound with sin, as Dr. Paley thinks it behooved them, and with the design to avoid opposition to the introduction of Christianity?

Say, thou humble follower of the lowly Jesus, art thou ready to lay down thy life for Him who could truckle to sin-to a gross, an abominable sin, which alone would destroy the purity of his character and the divinity of his doctrine? In all love, we pray Him who holds your very breath in his hand, to cause you to tremble, before you shall say that Jesus Christ was a liar, and his apostles perjured!

* * *

"I am the true vine; and my Father is the husbandman as the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you; continue ye in my love. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth; but I have called

you friends; for ALL THINGS that I have heard of my Father, I have made known unto you." John xv. 1, 9, 13, 15.

"And when they were come to him, he said unto them; ye know, from the first day that I came into Asia, after what manner I have been with you, at all seasons, serving the Lord with all humility of mind, and with many tears and temptations, which befell me by the lying in wait of the Jews. And how I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you; but have showed you, and have taught you publicly and from house to house. Wherefore, I take you to record this day, that I am pure from the blood of all men. For I have not shunned to declare unto you ALL THE COUNSEL OF GOD." Acts xx.

Had St. Paul foreseen the attack upon his character, made by Dr. Paley, seventeen hundred and eighty-five years after, and that upon his Master and their religion, he need not have altered his language to have repelled the slander.

"Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us, through the righteousness of God and of our Saviour Jesus Christ: grace and peace be multiplied unto you, through the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ our Lord, according as his divine power hath given unto us ALL THINGS THAT PERTAIN UNTO LIFE AND GODLINESS, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue." 2 Pet. i. 1, 2, 3.

And what says this holy man,-what says this same Peter, touching the subject of Dr. Paley's remarks?

"Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward, * for hereunto were ye called." 1 Pet. ii. 18–21.

Permit us to inquire whether the language of Jesus Christ himself, of St. Paul and St. Peter, does not, in a strong degree, contradict the supposition of Dr. Paley? And let us inquire whether it is probable that a class of men, devoted to the promulgation of a doctrine which ran so counter to many of the civil institutions, customs, habits, and religions then in the world, as to have subjected them to death, would have secretly kept back a part of their creed, when, to have made it known, could not have increased their danger; and, especially, as by the creed itself, such keeping back would have insured to them the eternal punishment hereafter?

"Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God: that we might know the things that are

freely given to us of God; which things we also speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth." 1 Cor. ii. 12, 13. "And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying; all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe ALL THINGS whatsoever I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Matt. xxviii. 18-20. "And now, O Father, glorify thou me, with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world. Now they have known ALL THINGS whatsoever thou hast given me of thee: for I have given unto them the WORDS which thou gavest me, and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee." John xvii. 5-8.

It is not possible that we could have had greater evidence that the whole counsel of God, illustrating the Christian duty, was delivered to the apostles, and through them, to the world. Besides, the very presumption of the incompleteness of the instruction undermines the divinity of the doctrine.

There is, perhaps, no one who does not feel pain, sometimes almost unspeakable, when we see a great man leaning upon the staff of error, especially when such error is palpable, gross, and calamitous in its tendency and effects.

But, cheering as the early ray of hope, and welcome as the rest-giving witness of a covenant, will be the proof that human weakness still had power to wade from out the miry labyrinth of error-to stand upon the rock from whence even human eyes might behold some few glimpses of the rising effulgence of truth.

We have some evidence that Dr. Paley did, at a later period of his life, adopt a more consistent view of the Christian Scriptures, touching the subject of this inquiry. In his "Hore Paulinæ," a work of exceeding great merit, on the subject of Paul's letter to the Corinthian church, he enumerates and classifies the subjects of Paul's instruction, among which slavery is conspicuously mentioned, and then says "That though they" (the subjects) "be exactly agreeable to the circumstances of the persons to whom the letter was written, nothing, I believe, but the existence and reality. of the circumstances" (subjects) "could have suggested them to the writer's thought."

In all Christian love and charity, we are constrained to believe that he had discovered his error; and that, had his life been spared longer, he, with diligence and anxiety, would have expunged from his works charges so reflecting on himself, and contrary to the character of the God of our hope.

LESSON XIII.

SLAVERY existed in Britain when history commenced the records. of that island. It was there found in a state and condition predicated upon the same causes by which its existence is now continued and perpetuated in Africa. But as early as the year 692-3 A. D., the Witna-Gemot, convoked by Ina, began to manifest a more elevated condition of the Britons. Without abolishing slavery, they regulated its government, ameliorated the old practice of death or slavery being the universal award of conquest; by submission and baptism the captive was acknowledged to merit some consideration; life, and, in some cases, property were protected against the rapacity of the conqueror; the child was secured against the mere avarice of the savage parent, and heavy punishment was announced against him who should sell his countryman, whether malefactor, slave, or not, to any foreign master.

He who has the curiosity to notice the steps by which the Britons emerged from savage life, in connection with their condition of slavery, may do well to examine the works of William of Malmsbury, Simeon of Durham, Bede, Alcuin, Wilkins, Huntingdon, Hoveden, Lingard, and Wilton. But he will not find the statutes of the monarchies succeeding Ina free from these enactments until he shall come down near the fourteenth century. Thus, generations passed away before these statutes came to be regarded with general respect. National regeneration has ever been thus slow. Thus, savage life has ever put to death the captive; while we find that slavery, among such tribes, has ever been introduced as a merciful provision in its stead, and is surely a proof of one step towards a more elevated state of moral improvement. But in the case of Britain and the whole of Europe, the slave was of the same original stock with the master; he, therefore, presented no physical impediment to amalgamation, by which has been brought about whatever of equality now exists among their descendants.