ability and great humanity,—that he might as well baptize puppies as negroes, an utterance rendered the more significant by the fact that in her own life she was remarkable for her exemplary piety and the care she exhibited in the religious education of her own children. Another woman, who enjoyed a good reputation for character and sense, upon Godwyn’s administering baptism to one of her slaves, remarked that it would have been equally as efficacious if he had sought by the same ceremony to make a Christian of her black bitch.[1] That this feeling did not spring from mere prejudice or self-interest, is revealed in the fact that there was comparatively little opposition on the part of the planters of Barbadoes to the baptism of mulattoes, who as the descendants of white persons on one side were regarded as having been brought within the pale of humanity. In this island, negroes were instructed to avoid the rooms in which religious exercises were holding by the families of their masters, on the ground that they could not be expected to participate in the hopes and promises which the Christian religion extended. An explanation of the course followed by the West Indians in this respect may in many cases be discovered in the belief, that as long as the slave remained unbaptized he was not responsible for his acts in the sight of God, and as he was incapable of leading a pure life, the administration of the sacrament of baptism to him would expose him to certain damnation. A number of masters were influenced by an apprehension that if the negroes were improved in their mental condition by instruction, they might rise up against their owners and deluge the island in blood. Others were moved by the consideration, that if the slave were baptized it would
- ↑ Godwyn’s Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, p. 38. I am indebted to Godwyn for all the details that follow. See pp. 43 et seq.
