Page:Notices of Negro slavery as connected with Pennsylvania.djvu/46

410 engaged,and in all of which he was highly active and useful. * * * The firmness of his resolution was invincible, and the mildness of his temper never changed. His knowledge was very extensive; the strength of his memory verified what has been thought incredible or fabulous, when related of others. His judgment was correct, his modesty extreme, his benevolence unbounded, and his piety unaffected and exemplary. * * * If he failed in any duty, it was that he was possibly too disinterested,his own interest was almost the only thing he ever forgot." In the Arch Street Presbyterian Buryinground, the inscription upon his tomb records (and his memory deserves a more fitting memorial) that he "died 21th of January, 1191, aged sixty years; that he was among the earliest and most active and uniform friends of the rights of man before the Revolutionary War. As a member of the Assemby of Pennsylvania and of the Congress at New York, in 1765, and as a citizen, he was conspicuous in opposition to the Stamp and other Acts of British tyranny. He was equally an opponent of Domestic Slavery The emancipation of people of color engaged the feelings of his heart and the energies of his mind, and the Act of Abolition, which laid the foundation of their liberation, issued from his pen." The italics are our own. Against this emphatic testimony, no word of dissent, so far as we know, was ever raised. And it is not to be believed that his right to authorship, asserted with the knowledge of his associates in his philanthropic workat the very period of his deathin the public prints, and also upon his tomb, would have remained uncontradicted had it been unfounded. The Preamble, in which the claims to human liberty are so grandly and convincingly set forth, is not readily accessible; and we trust we shall be excused for here presenting it: "When we contemplate our abhorrence of that condition to which the arms and tyranny of Great Britain were exerted to reduce us, when we look back on the variety of dangers to which we have been exposed, and how miraculously our wants in many instances have been supplied and our deliverances wrought, when even hope and human fortitude have become unequal to the conflict, we are unavoidably led to a serious and grateful sense of the manifold blessings which we have undeservedly received from the hand of that Being from whom every good and perfect gift cometh. Impressed with these ideas, we conceive that it is our duty, and we rejoice that it is