in the Colonies after 1st March, 1808." This bill was passed on 16th March, 1807, and through the strenuous exertions of Lord Granville, received the royal assent on Wednesday, 25th, a few minutes only before the ministers resigned their respective offices, as they had been required to do, by a message delivered to them that morning.
So, fell the legality of the African slave trade. God was gracious to his servants as far as they were faithful to his cause. They struck at the branch, and were enabled to fell it—but the root remained uninjured by the wound. They attacked an effect; but left the great cause untouched. They cut off a stream; but left the fountain still to pour forth floods of guilt and misery.
It refreshes my soul to find, that Granville Sharp, partook not of this unfaithfulness. Contemplating the depth and almost death in sin, of the national mind, the others solemnly deliberated, whether they should attack the whole evil, or only a part of it; for it does not seem, that they saw so clearly, as we now cannot help seeing, that the slave trade was merely a branch of slavery—they saw that it was a similar evil—but they do not seem to have seen, that it was an effect of another evil; and that slavery, its cause, must be abolished before it could cease. But they shrunk from attacking, at once, the united force of the slave holder and of the slave dealer, and chose the latter as being most vincible. Granville Sharp, on the contrary, questioned not the power of his enemies—he regarded not the fewness of his friends—he did not stumble at his own unworthiness. He saw his country's guilt and danger; and he did not dare to mete it out, as the favor or fear of man dictated. He heard the voice of heaven calling him up to the whole conflict, and he solemnly and vehemently remonstrated with the committee against the resolution which they had adopted declaring, that "as slavery was as much a crime against the Divine law, as the slave trade, it became the committee to exert themselves equally against the continuance of both; and he did not hesitate to pronounce all present, guilty before God, for shutting those, who were then slaves, out of the pale of their approaching
