Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/263

Rh which I have seen beaming in those of the latter, when the light-life of Christianity was preached to them with clearness and naïveté. And this is going on through wider and still wider circles, especially in the Slave States of North America, in the east, from Virginia to South Carolina and Georgia, and this last-mentioned State, in particular, seemed to me to be animated by a noble, youthfully vigorous, spirit of freedom. And it is becoming more and more general for the negroes themselves to stand forth as religious leaders of their people, and churches are erected for them. In the south-western Slave States, on the contrary, the religious life is but very little awakened, and the condition of the negroes on the plantations is, most frequently, alike gloomy with regard to the life both of soul and body. There is, however, no doubt, but that light is breaking through; noble-minded Christians are opening a path for its rays, and the gospel will soon be preached to the slaves, even among the swampy wildernesses of the Mississippi, and on the banks of the distant Red-River, in Texas and Arkansas.

The gospel advances, the Church of Christ unfolds its arms, and the gates of the slave prison-house burst open before it, throughout the Slave States of America! All that we have a right to demand from them as a Christian community is, that the gospel should advance unimpeded and that law should follow in the steps of the gospel; that the slave legislation of the United States should adopt that law of emancipation which the Spanish legal-code now possesses.

If the law of the Southern States, like that of the Spaniard, allowed the slaves, male or female, to purchase their own and their children's freedom by labour; if it would open to them a prospect of liberating themselves and their children for a reasonable and legally-fixed sum; and would appoint judges to watch over the rights of the black population; if it would, in addition to this, extend