e left to the consciences of
the incumbent ministers of the several parishes.

It must be remembered that every first generation of the slaves had
come to America as captives taken in war of one tribe against another.
Their languages and dialects included perhaps every language in central
and southern Africa; and their unfamiliar languages made it almost
impossible for the average citizen or his parson to do much in the way
of preaching the Christian faith; except perhaps in the observance of
the universal law of kindness.

The birth of slave children, however, removed the barrier of language,
for the children were taught English as their native tongue. The
children therefore could be taught. All teaching of children, whether
children of the master and mistress or those born as their slaves, was
considered the duty of the whole family. And the teaching of the
catechism and the duties of a Christian life to the slave children was
as important a part of the family responsibility in a Christian home as
the teaching of the children of the family itself. No clergyman of the
Church would be willing to baptize a slave child unless there were
responsible sponsors present who would assume the obligation to give
steady Christian teaching. So it became a rule of the clergy, or most
of them, that the master and mistress in the case of each such baptism
must assume the obligation to give the child Christian training. The
baptized children could then in early youth be permitted to attend the
instruction classes which were held by the incumbent minister for them.
The slave child and the master's child would share the privilege of
admission to the Sacrament of the Holy Communion when each one had
shown sufficient knowledge and understanding of right and wrong, and
had been sufficiently instructed in "the things which a Christian
should know and believe." No one knows how many or what percentage of
slave children in Virginia or elsewhere were baptized, or how many
became communicants because no record was kept. But there were enough
baptisms to create a new problem.

There was no Negro slavery in England, and it was generally understood
that when a Negro slave set foot upon the soil of England he became a
free man. Somehow that concept of freedom became linked in common
thinking with the concept of baptism into the Christian faith; and
there arose in practically every slave-holding section of the English
colonies a question whether t