holding age, no one need wonder who looks at the wide and withering influence which the slave trade and slavery have exerted, in all the countries of Christendom, during the last three hundred years. During this period, nearly all the literature of the chief European nations was a Negro-hating and a pro-slavery literature. The institution of slavery, wielding a most potent and commanding authority, brought every thing, in politics, science, philosophy, and letters, to bear in support of the slave trade, in maintenance of the institution of slavery, and to uphold the dogma that the Negro was but an inferior animal. The aid of science was invoked; philosophy trimmed her lamps; literature poured forth whatever treasures she could possibly command. The period has but recently passed since distinguished men in England and France exercised the keenest wit and the subtlest genius to prove that the Negro differed physically from the rest of the human species, and had a distinct organization. The puzzling questions concerning the cuticle, the coloring membrane, the "woolly" hair, the facial angle, the pelvis, and all the other supposed characteristic differences of the Negro race, have only recently been settled in a sensible, reasonable manner. In such a state of public sentiment in the Christian world, what wonder that the Church herself should have become tainted and infected by the deadly touch of slavery? And she did not escape; she, too, fell into the common sentiment of the age; she has not yet entirely unschooled herself from it;[1] and hence it was that,
- ↑ See, as a most lamentable instance, a recent scriptural defence of Negro slavery, by the venerable Rt. Rev. Bishop Hopkins, of Vermont.
