up the profession of Christianity where he lives. And it is an obligation bat little more remote, to assist in doing it in our factories abroad; and in the colonies to which we are related, by their being peopled from our own mother country, and subjects, indeed very necessary ones, to the same government with ourselves; and nearer yet is the obligation upon such persons, in particular, as have the interoourse of an advantageous commerce with them.
Of these our colonies, the slaves ought to be considered as inferior members, and therefore to be treated as members of them, and not merely as cattle or goods, the property of their masters. Nor can the highest property possible to be acquired in these servants, cancel the obligation to take care of their religious instruction. Despicable as they may appear in our eyes, they are the creatures of God, and of the race of mankind for whom Christ died: and it is inexcusable to keep them in ignorance of the end for which they were made, and the means whereby they may become partakers of the general redemption. On the contrary, if the necessity of the case requires that they may be treated with the very utmost rigour that humanity will at all permit, as they certainly are, and for our advantage made as miserable as they well can be in the present world; this surely heightens our obligation to put them into as advantageous a situation as we are able, with regard to another.
The like charity we owe to the natives; owe to them in a much stricter sense than we are apt to consider, were it only from neighbourhood and our having gotten possessions in their country. For incidental circumstances of this kind appropriate all the general obligations of charity to particular persons, and make such and such instances of it the duty of one man rather than another. We are most strictly bound to consider these poor uninformed creatures as being in all respects of one family with ourselves, the family of mankind, and instruct them in our "common salvation," Jude 3; that they may not pass through this stage of their
