that to this hour the most sacred principles of Christianity are outraged; and the worst atrocities of the worst ages of Rome are still perpetrated on millions of millions of human beings, over whom we vaunt our civilization, and to whom we present our religion as the spirit of heaven, and the blessing of the earth.
When, therefore, we see the Dutch, ay, and the English, and the Anglo-Americans, still professing truth and practising error; still preaching mercy, and perpetrating the basest of cruelties; still boasting of their philosophy and refinement, and enacting the savage; still vapouring about liberty, with a whip in one hand and a chain in the other; still holding the soundness of the law of conquest, and the equal soundness of the commandment, Not to covet our neighbour's goods; the soundness of the belief that Negroes, Indians, and Hottentots, are an inferior species, and the equal soundness of the declaration that "God made of one blood all the nations of the earth;" still declaring that Love, the love of our neighbour as of ourselves, is the great distinction of Christians;—and yet persisting in slavery, war, massacres, extermination of one race, and driving out of others from their ancient and hereditary lands—we must bear in mind that we behold only the melancholy result of ages of abandonment of genuine Christianity for a base and accommodating forgery of its name,—and the humiliating spectacle of an inconsistency in educated nations unworthy of the wildest dwellers in the bush, entailed on us by the active leaven of that very faith which we pride ourselves in having renounced. We have, indeed, renounced mass and the confessional, and the purchase of indulgences; but
