ight from them. Under the plea of "bringing them to God," Christians
are to deny by law, to every slave who refuses to be converted, the
rights of husband and father, rights of persons, rights of property,
rights over his own body. Thus manumission is a bribe to make
hypocritical converts, and Christian superiority a plea for depriving
men of their dearest rights. Is not freedom older than Christianity?
Does the Christian recommend his religion to a Pagan by stealing his
manhood and all that belongs to it? Truly, if only Christians have a
right to personal freedom, what harm is there in hunting and catching
Pagans to make slaves of them? And this was exactly the "development"
of thought and doctrine in the Christian church. The same priests who
taught that _Christians_ have moral rights to their sinews and skin,
to their wives and children, and to the fruit of their labour, which
_Pagans_ have not, consistently developed the same fundamental idea
of Christian superiority into the lawfulness of making war upon
the heathen, and reducing them to the state of domestic animals. If
Christianity is to have credit from the former, it must also take the
credit of the latter. If cumulative evidence of its divine origin is
found in the fact, that Christendom has liberated Christian slaves,
must we forget the cumulative evidence afforded by the assumed right
of the Popes to carve out the countries of the heathen, and bestow
them with their inhabitants on Christian powers? Both results flow
logically out of the same assumption, and were developed by the same
school.

But, I am told, a man must not be freed, until we have ascertained
his capacity for self-rule! This is indeed a tyrannical assumption:
_vindicioe secundum servitutem_. Men are not to have their human
rights, until we think they will not abuse them! Prevention is to be
used against the hitherto innocent and injured! The principle involves
all that is arrogant, violent, and intrusive, in military tyranny
and civil espionage. Self-rule? But abolitionists have no thought of
exempting men from the penalties of common law, if they transgress
the law; we only desire that all men shall be equally subjected to
the law, and equally protected by it. It is truly a strange inference,
that because a man is possibly deficient in virtue, therefore he shall
not be subject to public law, but to private caprice: as if this were
a school of virtue, and not eminently an occasion of vice. Tr