Page:Notices of Negro slavery as connected with Pennsylvania.djvu/32

396 afterlife, that we think it may be safely asserted that, for self-denial, purity of manners and conversation, firm, consistent and persevering prosecution of duty, and zealous and enlightened benevolence, he has rarely been equalled, and perhaps never excelled. He appears very early in life to have had his mind engaged in reflection upon the subject of slavery. Soon after he attained the age of twenty-one years, being hired as an accountant, he was directed by his employer to write a bill of sale for a negro, which, in obedience to his instructions, he did, though, as he himself says, not without great uneasiness of mind, and that he afterwards found it to be his duty to inform his master and the purchaser of the slave that "he believed slavekeeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion;" and, on a subsequent application by another individual to prepare an instrument of writing of a similar kind, he entirely refused, alleging the foregoing conviction as his excuse. In 1746, he travelled as a minister of the Society of Friends, through the provinces of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, where it appears that his mind was again engaged and his feelings excited, and that he took occasion during the journey to communicate his convictions on this deeply-interesting subject to many of the inhabitants. He says, he "saw in these southern provinces so many vices and corruptions increased by this trade and this way of life [viz., the whites living idly and luxuriously on the labor of the blacks], that it appeared to him as a erloom over the land."