commands, to labour for your worldly advantages; or you may sell them in a market to work for other masters. power over the bodies of

For this possession of your fellow-creatures, claim which sanctions

you have the same legal the holding of any other possession which human laws have given and secured to their respective owners. Upon this ground, and under this view of it, you stand, as we all stand in regard to earthly possessions, with your legal claim upon this your temporal property. In this view of the subject, therefore, upon the mere point of legal ownership, I may adopt the language of the Apostle to his Corinthian converts, and say, "I write not these things to "shame you," for they did not originate with beloved you;" but as my sons, I warn you." (1 Cor. iv. 14.) For if God have now, in his merciful providence as a universal father, brought men's minds so generally to feel as they do feel, and would gladly act upon this great and momentous subject, and so speaks to us all by a "sign of the times," think, my brethren, how strongly he speaks to you! How he presses the consideration of your own mercies, as the ground for the extension of them to those who have all the human capa

bilities which you have, and who are subject to the same bondage, in things spiritual, from which the knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ hath proclaimed, in your ears, a most glorious emancipation. Say that your conscience may be at peaceful rest in your legal property over them. Will that exempt you from even still deeper and more anxious consideration of the reciprocal duties of this extraordinary relationship? If they work for your earthly consolations, if you reap their carnal "things, is it a great thing for you to sow unto “them spiritual things?" This, my brethren, is one great and manifest token of this "sign "of the times," to whatever still greater extent it may haply speak. It calls upon you, in this especial matter, to "remember them that are " in bonds.'

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And here I need not dwell much upon the rightful mode whereby you may fulfil this Christian call. The path is plain before you. As professed disciples of Jesus Christ you are bound to make his sovereign mercy known. Your light must shine: and where can it brighter shine than where all, save its own glorious rays now scarcely beginning to beam forth, is perfect darkness? Pour its

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gracious truths fully and freely among your poor degraded slaves, your fellows;-fellowsufferers, and fellow-sinners;-under the true Christian feeling, that the swarthy tincture of their body is but the faintest emblem of the awful darkness which envelopes their soul. Tell them, that though in bodily slavery they are deprived of a liberty which you enjoy, yet that in spiritual slavery to the law of corruption and sin, that total darkness of the soul, there is no other difference among men, save only where it is dispersed by that Sun of Righteousness who hath arisen with "healing "on his wings." These glad tidings proclaim to them gladly. Hitherto little is done. A mother country at home has not yet imposed an authority which colonial provisions abroad will meet and sanction: her best, her wisest, her most humane provisions have been almost every where at once resisted. And so little by our own law itself is done, that at this very moment our Court groans under its legal decision, that the public feeling and opinion, which led us to the expected hope that a slave once free was for ever free, were not founded upon law; and that though the first tread upon English ground emancipates the captive, a

return to the land of slavery rivets her chains afresh. Till more, therefore, be done by the sovereign arm of law, do you meet of these evils what may be met, by the merciful and gracious provisions of the Gospel. Promote the knowledge of Christ among them; and as professed members of our own Church, do your utmost to promote the introduction of Christianity to their benighted souls, under its truly evangelical character, through the ministration. of Christian bishops. Aid them at once, stimulate and encourage them in the utmost zeal of Christian love in their great office over your poor dependents: meet them in every possible shape. Instruct through their schools ; preach through their encouraged. ministry, encouraged and befriended by all your local influence, and fullest expenditure of means. Thus by your exercise of the power which human laws have given you, show your poor slaves in distant lands that, while you live by the sweat of their brow, you remember their bonds: tell them of Him whom you profess to know, but whom they know not; tell them of "God who commanded the light to shine out "of darkness;" and, if you can add the experienced testimony of your own heart, go on

with this holy text, and tell them that he "hath shined in" your "hearts, to give the

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light of the knowledge of the glory of God, "in the face of Jesus Christ." (2 Cor. iv. 6.) But here, my brethren, on this point I stop. If this be your case, and your hearts are warm in love, and humbled under a sense of your own personal interest in a redeeming Saviour, you need no argument from me to make you forward in bringing your poor dependents abroad to the knowledge of Him whose love is bounded by no place nor time, and whose redemption is a purchased gift for every colour. You already work his work among them, and grieve that you do not, perhaps cannot, work

more.

If, on the other hand, your own souls be dead and heedless in things spiritual, how can you be otherwise than listless, perhaps with much hostility of feeling opposed, to any and to every means suggested or adopted for teaching enslaved bodies, that there is within them an immortal and a redeemed soul? How can you be willing to have preached to them, what heretofore you value not for yourselves? How will you be prevailed upon to regard a "sign "of the times" for them also to profit by, in