found among his papers a charge to the grand jury at
Richmond, Virginia, in which are expressed the most authentic principles
of international drawn from natural law, at a period and in a country
where the former had not been codified or even vaguely understood; and
so practical as to be of direct application to the exigencies of the
present hour. At the root of these convictions was a profound religious
faith. No one of the early American statesmen, for instance, has left on
record a more clear and just statement of his views of slavery;--that
foul blot on the escutcheon of the republic was ever before the eyes and
conscience of Jay; he sought not to evade, but to make apparent its
inevitable present shame and future consequences, and argued for a
prospective abolition clause in the Constitution. The events of the last
three years are a terrible and true response to his warnings. 'Till
America,' he wrote, 'comes into this measure (emancipation) her prayers
to heaven will be impious. I believe God governs the world, and I
believe it is a maxim in His as in our courts, that those who ask for
equity ought to do it.' He set the example in the manumission of a boy
then his legal property, and was the president of the first anti-slavery
society, bequeathing the cause to his descendants, who have faithfully
acquitted themselves of the once contemned but now honored trust, for
three generations; for his son succeeded him in the office, his grandson
has been and is its strenuous advocate, and his great-grandson now
confronts the slaveholding rebels in the Army of the Potomac. His
intelligent and patriotic fellow citizens realized and recognized the
faith and probity whence arose his moral courage and his clear mental
vision, 'His life,' says Sullivan, 'was governed by the dictates of an
enlightened Christian conscience.' One of his last letters was in reply
to the congratulation of the corporation of New York that he lived to
witness the fiftieth anniversary of our national independence, and an
invitation to join in its commemoration; too feeble, from advanced age,
to meet their wishes in this respect, in gratefully declining he thus
bore testimony to his life-long convictions: 'The most essential means
of securing the continuance of our civil and religious liberties is
always to remember with reverence and gratitude the source from which
they flow?' We can readily appreciate the literal truth of Verplanck's
observation, when de