by preaching to
the Negroes on fifteen plantations, meeting them twice a day, and in
one year reported the baptism of forty-eight colored children.[6]
Early a champion of the colonization of the Negroes, he was sent on a
successful mission to Georgia in 1818 to secure the release of certain
recaptured Africans who were about to be sold. Going and returning
from the South he was active in establishing auxiliaries of the
American Colonization Society. He helped to extend its sphere also
into the Middle States and New-England.[7]

[Footnote 1: Goodloe, _Southern Platform_, pp. 64-65.]

[Footnote 2: Wightman, _Life of Bishop William Capers_, p. 294.]

[Footnote 3: Jones, _Religious Instruction_, Introductory Chapter.]

[Footnote 4: Goodloe, _Southern Platform_, p. 64.]

[Footnote 5: _Ibid_., p. 65.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid_., p. 66.]

[Footnote 7: _Niles Register_, vol. xvi., pp. 165-166.]

Bishop Meade was a representative of certain of his fellow-churchmen
who were passing through the transitory stage from the position of
advocating the thorough education of Negroes to that of recommending
mere verbal instruction. Agreeing at first with Rev. Thomas Bacon,
Bishop Meade favored the literary training of Negroes, and advocated
the extermination of slavery.[1] Later in life he failed to urge
his followers to emancipate their slaves, and did not entreat his
congregation to teach them to read. He was then committed to the
policy of only lessening their burden as much as possible without
doing anything to destroy the institution. Thereafter he advocated the
education and emancipation of the slaves only in connection with the
scheme of colonization, to which he looked for a solution of these
problems.[2]

[Footnote 1: Meade,_Sermons of Rev. Thos. Bacon_, p. 2; and Goodell,
_The Southern Platform_, pp. 64, 65.]

[Footnote 2:_Ibid_., p. 65.]

Wishing to give his views on the religious instruction of Negroes, the
Bishop found in Rev. Thomas Bacon's sermons that "every argument which
was likely to convince and persuade was so forcibly exerted, and that
every objection that could possibly be made, so fully answered, and
in fine everything that ought to be said so well said, and the same
things so happily confirmed ..." that it was deemed "best to refer
the reader for the true nature and object of the book to the book
itself."[1] Bishop Meade had uppermost in his mind Bacon's logical
arraignment of those who neglected to teac