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and met them, enquiring in a feeling manner, 'What is the matter?"—the afflicted parents, apprehensive that they should never recover their child, replied with anguish, "Oh Benjamin, Benjamin! our child is gone, he has been missing all day." Lay paused, and said, "Your child is safe in my house, and you may now conceive of the sorrow you inflict upon the parents of the negroe girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice,"

In the year 1737, he published a book entitled—"All slave keepers, that keep the innocent in bondage, apostates. Pretending to lay claim to the pure and holy Christian religion, of what congregation soever, but especially in their ministers, by whose example the filthy leprosy and apostacy is spread far and near; it is a notorious sin which many of the true friends of Christ and his pure truth, called Quakers, have been for many years, and still are, concerned to write and bear testimony against; as a practice so gross and hurtful to religion,

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