Page:A memoir of Granville Sharp.djvu/137



The African slave trade has been publicly supportted and encouraged by the Legislature of this kingdom for near a century last past; so that the monstrous destruction of the human species which is annually occasioned thereby, may certainly be esteemed a national crime of the most aggravating kind, which (according to the usual course of God's Providence in the world) will probably draw down some exemplary vengeance upon the unrepenting inhabitants of this island! And, with respect to the British colonies the uncharitable practice of slaveholding, especially in the West-India Islands and the more Southern Colonies, is grown up into a more enormous and destructive oppression (whether we view the prodigious multitudes of the oppressed, or the unconscionable severity of the oppresors) than perhaps ever disgraced any other nation at any one period of time! The several attempts that have lately been made to justify these two branches of abominable national iniquity by the Holy Scriptures, and especially by the permission