Page:Notes on the History of Slavery - Moore - 1866.djvu/80

 in thee notes; and a recent writer of Englih hitory has o clearly tated our own views, that his language requires very little change here.

It would be to miread hitory and to forget the change of times, to ee in the Fathers of New England mere commonplace lavemongers; to themelves they appeared as the elect to whom God had given the heathen for an inheritance; they were men of tern intellect and fanatical faith, who, believing themelves the favorites of Providence, imitated the example and aumed the privileges of the choen people, and for their wildet and wort acts they could claim the anction of religious conviction. In eizing and enlaying Indians, and trading for negroes, they were but entering into poeion of the heritage of the aints; and New England had to outgrow the theology of the Elizabethan Calvinits before it could undertand that the Father of Heaven repected neither peron nor color, and that his arbitrary favor—if more than a dream of divines—was confined to piritual privileges. Compare Froude's Hitory of England, Vol., 480.

It was not until the truggle on the part of the colonits themelves to throw off the fat-cloing hackles of Britih oppreion culminated in open reitance to the mother-country, that the inconitency of maintaining lavery with one hand while pleading or triking for freedom with the other, compelled a reluctant and gradual change in public opinion on this ubject.

If it be true that at no period of her colonial and provincial hitory was Maachuetts without her