Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/129

Rh It is difficult to understand how people who hold these sentiments can even use, without a sense of unfitness, the common language of Christianity. Such phrases as “Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant,” must seem to them to denote something sordid and degrading.

“It is by the existence of slavery,” says another Southern writer, “exempting so large a portion of our citizens from labour, that we have leisure for intellectual pursuits.” But there is something in the spirit of the Gospel which, whether rightly or wrongly understood, has led Christianity, instead of cherishing an exclusive intellectual order, to educate the poor; and to draw forth, by all the means in its power, the intellectual gifts of that class for the highest service of the community. Great systems of education, the direct offspring of Christianity, and a multitude of Christian foundations for the purpose of education, bear witness to the fact. Nor do the comparative fruits of the two systems, so far as they have been tried, condemn the common practice of the Christian world. On the contrary, the principle that all orders are “members one of another” seems, when applied to education, to act more favourably on the intellect even of the higher class than the opposite principle. “From the banks of the Mississippi to the banks of the James,” says a traveller in the South, “I did not (that I remember) see, except perhaps in one or two towns, a thermometer, nor a book of Shakspeare, nor a pianoforte or sheet of music; nor the light of a carcel or other good centre table or reading-lamp, nor an engraving