her, I attended, and was happy to find the principal part of the inhabitants of this town present on so interesting an occasion. Every denomination of saints seemed to rejoice that another temple had been erected and dedicated to the worship of Almighty God. It was enough that the pure religion of Jesus Christ was to be inculcated from that sacred pulpit, and as that servant of God, the Rev. C. Teage, remarked, ‘where he then stood, preaching the dedication sermon, sixteen years ago, the devil’s bush stood.’ — How truly animating it is to see temples arise for the worship of God, where not long since there was nothing to be heard, but the savage yell of the native, or the clanking of the poor slaves’ chains!".
We have thus given a sketch of the physical and moral condition of Liberia. We have dwelt upon it, in some detail, because we consider it, in the language of the writer in Chambers’s Journal, "the most interesting colony in existence," — because we fully agree with the declaration of the enlightened and far-seeing British nobleman, who pronounced the foundation of the Colony of Liberia, "one of the greatest events of modern times:"[1] and still further, because we hold it to be the key to that problem we have undertaken to solve, — the reason for the permission, by Divine Providence, of the African slave-trade and slavery in the New World. Without this key, all is dark: with it, all is light; and through the door which that key opens, we behold a vista extending far into the regions of futurity, through which we discern in the distance two continents, America and Africa, freed, purified,
- ↑ See p. 64.
