day, and liberty either to rest or work for himself on a number of holydays. They exhorted their flocks to leave the savings and earnings of the prædial slave untouched. They constantly freed the slaves who came into their own possession. They exhorted the laity to do the same, and what living covetousness refused, they often wrung from deathbed penitence. This they did constantly and effectually during the early part of the Middle Ages, while the Church was still to a great extent in a missionary state, and had not yet been turned into an establishment allied with political power. Afterwards no doubt a change came over the spirit of the Clergy in this, as well as in other respects. The Church became an Estate and a part of the feudal system. Her Bishops became Spiritual Lords. And these Spiritual Lords in the time of Richard II. voted with the Temporal Lords, for the repudiation of the King's promise of enfranchisement to the villains, and the last serfs who remained in existence were found on the estates of the Church. Twice vanquished, in the shape of Ancient Slavery and in the shape of Feudal Serfdom, the enemy rose again in the shape of Negro Slavery, the offspring not of Roman or Barbarian Conquest, but of commercial avarice and cruelty. And again Christianity returned to the struggle against the barrier thus a third time reared by tyranny and cupidity in the path of her great social hope and mission, the brotherhood of Man. By the mouth of Clarkson and Wilberforce she demanded and obtained of a Christian nation the emancipation of the Slaves in the West Indies. And if in the case of American Slavery, the upper classes of this country, from political considerations, have shewn a change of feeling, and the Clergy of the Established Church have gone with the upper classes, the Free Churches, more unbiassed organs of Christianity, have almost universally kept the faith. If, then, we look to the records of Christianity in the Bible, we find no sanction for American Slavery there. If we look to the history of Christendom, we find the propagators and champions of the faith assailing Slavery under different forms and in different ages, without concert, yet with a unanimity which would surely be strange if Christianity and Slavery were not the natural enemies of each other. On the other side of the Atlantic two communities are now grappling in deadly conflict. The principle of one of them is Free Labour, while that of the other is Slavery; and few can doubt that this is the root of their antagonism, whatever may be the immediate cause of the present war. It can hardly be denied that the community of New England, of which Free Labour is the principle, was founded under the auspices of Christianity, though it may have been Christianity of an austere and narrow kind, such as persecution produces in peasant hearts. The avowed object of the settlement was "the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith;" and one of the fathers of the Colony said, "It concerneth New England to remember that they were originally a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade. If any man among us make religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, such an one hath not the spirit of a true New Englandman." The settlers at first, like the Early Church, had all things in common, till the natural desire of separate property arose, and in this, as in other respects, the little religious community became a nation. The primary germ of the Puritan settlement has, of course, been overlaid by a vast alien immigration; the original character of the people has to a great extent disappeared under the vast growth of the commercial element; and other things have taken place which would make it difficult for one of the Pilgrim Fathers, if he could return to life, to recognise the offspring of his "religious plantation" in the America of the present day. Still the great Christian idea so far survives that it remains the fundamental principle of the community to treat all men as equally entitled to the full benefit of the social union, and to make the State a brotherhood of which all are equally recognised as members. And the destinies of a community of which this can be said, whatever may be its defects, its errors, or its misfortunes, cannot cease to be an object of interest to Christendom. Virginia and the Confederate States, on the other hand, of which Slavery is declared to be the fundamental principle, were assuredly not founded under the auspices of Christianity. They were founded by mere commercial adventurers of the very lowest kind. They were fostered by that darker Power which waits on the beneficent genius of commerce, and of which slavetrading Bristol was then the chosen seat. This power has been worshipped in all ages with human misery and blood. It has led men in all ages to reduce their fellow men to slavery for their own profit. It leads men now to put their own children under the lash of the overseer. Nor does the Slave Power fail, in its extremity, to receive the sympathy of the element from which it is sprung. The heart of capitalist tyranny everywhere is with that supreme tyranny of capital which makes its victims slaves. Feudalism, too, knows its own, and feels its affinity to a system under which, as in the times of serfdom, the labourer is under the absolute dominion of the lord. Christian England tampered with Slavery for wealth. She has paid the penalty of her offence in the depraving influence of the West Indian slave-owners on the character and manners of this nation, in the heavy sum which, when the hour of remorse arrived, was given to purchase Emancipation, and in the burden and expense of holding a number of useless dependencies in the West Indies; a burden and expense which will probably be greatly increased if a great Slave Power is established on the neighbouring shore. The Christian States of North America have tampered with Slavery for Empire and for the pride of a great Confederacy; and they have paid the penalty, first in the poison which the domination of the Slave-owner has spread through their political and social system, and secondly, in this dreadful and disastrous war. Printed by Messrs. Parker, Cornmarket, Oxford. |