Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/348

 frequently attended their meetings, the Methodists expected to get him, too, at last. Gouge was a very devout Baptist, who had been regularly converted and dipped, and had built a church at Augusta, almost entirely at his own expense; but with all his piety, he had never been able to see any harm in the business, buying and selling fellow church members with as little scruple as the mere unconverted heathen. Indeed, Gouge thought slavery and slave trading a very good thing every way, not only in the concrete, but in the abstract also. Didn't St Paul say, "Slaves, obey your masters"? And didn't that settle the question that some were to be slaves, and some were to be masters, and that the slaves had nothing to do but to obey? Such was the way that Gouge reasoned, putting the matter with wonderful force and unction; so much so, that once, when on a visit to New York in search of three or four prime house servants, — who had been purchased in Baltimore, but had broken prison the night after, and whom Gouge had traced to that city, — falling into an argument on the subject, at the hotel where he was stopping, and having a very grave address and clerical aspect, he had been mistaken by a clergyman, who happened to be present, for a D. D., and had been invited to preach on the divine origin of slavery, in one of the most fashionable churches of that city.

"Still," said Colter, "in spite of the reasoning and the texts of my pious partner, I never have been able to approve either slavery or the slave trade in the abstract. What, indeed, could be more contemptible, than for a parcel of intelligent and able-bodied white folks to employ their whole time, pains, and ingenuity, in partly forcing, partly teasing, and-partly coaxing a set of reluctant, unwilling negroes into half doing, in the most slovenly, slouchy, deceptive, and unprofitable manner, what those same white people might do fifty times better, and with fifty times less care and trouble for themselves? Viewed