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[ 29 ] engaged in; yet it did not escape the notice of some, who might be esteemed in a peculiar manner as watchmen in their day to the different societies of Christians, whereunto they belonged. Richard Baxter, an eminent preacher amongst the Nonconformists, in the last century, well known and particularly esteemed by most of the serious Presbyterians and Independents, in his Christian Directory mostly, wrote about an hundred years ago, fully shews his detestation of this practice in the following words, "Do you not mark how God hath followed you with plagues, and may not conscience tell you, that it is for your inhumanity to the souls and bodies of men. — To go as pirates and catch up poor Negroes, or people of another land that never forfeited life or liberty, and to make them slaves, and sell them, is one of the worst kind of thievery in the world, and such persons are to be taken for the common enemies of mankind; and they that buy them, and use them as beasts, for their meer commodity, and betray, or destroy, or neglect their fouls, are fitter to be called devils than Christians. It is an heinous sin to buy them, unless it be in charity to deliver them. — Undoubtedly they are presently bound to deliver them; because by right the man is his own; therefore no man else can have a just title to him.'"

We also find George Fox, a man of exemplary piety, who was the principal instrument in gathering the religious society of people, called Quakers, expressing his concern and fellow-feeling for the bondage of the Negroes: In a discourse taken from his mouth, in Barbados, in the year 1671, says, Consider with yourselves, if you were in the same condition as the Blacks are, — who came strangers to you, and were sold to you ' as