truction.[1] Mather
believed that servants were in a sense like one's children, and that
their masters should train and furnish them with Bibles and other
religious books for which they should be given time to read. He
maintained that servants should be admitted to the religious exercises
of the family and was willing to employ such of them as were competent
to teach his children lessons of piety. Coming directly to the issue
of the day, Mather deplored the fact that the several plantations
which lived upon the labor of their Negroes were guilty of the
"prodigious Wickedness of deriding, neglecting, and opposing all
due Means of bringing the poor Negroes unto God." He hoped that
the masters, of whom God would one day require the souls of slaves
committed to their care, would see to it that like Abraham they have
catechised servants. They were not to imagine that the "Almighty God
made so many thousands reasonable Creatures for nothing but only to
serve the Lusts of Epicures, or the Gains of Mammonists."[2]

[Footnote 1: Locke, _Anti-slavery_, etc., p. 15.]

[Footnote 2: Meade, _Sermons of Thomas Bacon_, p. 137 _et seq_.]

The sentiment of the clergy of this epoch was more directly expressed
by Richard Baxter, the noted Nonconformist, in his "Directions to
Masters in Foreign Plantations," incorporated as rules into the
_Christian Directory_.[1] Baxter believed in natural liberty and
the equality of man, and justified slavery only on the ground of
"necessitated consent" or captivity in lawful war. For these reasons
he felt that they that buy slaves and "use them as Beasts for their
meer Commodity, and betray, or destroy or neglect their Souls are
fitter to be called incarnate Devils than Christians, though they be
no Christians whom they so abuse."[2] His aim here, however, is not to
abolish the institution of slavery but to enlighten the Africans and
bring them into the Church.[3] Exactly what effect Baxter had on this
movement cannot be accurately figured out. The fact, however, that his
creed was extensively adhered to by the Protestant colonists among
whom his works were widely read, leads us to think that he influenced
some masters to change their attitude toward their slaves.

[Footnote 1: Baxter, _Practical Works_, vol. i., p. 438.]

[Footnote 2: Baxter, _Practical Works_, vol. i., p. 438-40.]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid_., p. 440.]

The next Puritan of prominence who enlisted among the helpers of the
African slave