the alternative. We all remember that it was made a charge against Mr. Smith, that he had read an inflammatory chapter of the Bible to his congregation,--excellent encouragement for their future teachers to “declare unto them,” according to the expression of an old divine, far too methodistical to be considered as an authority in the West Indies, “the whole counsel of God.” The great body of the Colonists have resolutely opposed religious instruction; and they are in the right. They know, though their misinformed friends in England do not know, that Christianity and slavery cannot long exist together. We have already given it us our opinion, that the great body of the Negroes can never, while their political state remains the same, be expected to become Christians. But, if that were possible, we are sure that their political state would very speedily be changed. At every step which the Negro makes in the knowledge and discrimination of right and wrong, he will learn to reprobate more and more the system under which he lives. He will not indeed be so prone to engage in rash and foolish tumults; but he will be as willing as he now is to struggle for liberty, and far more capable of struggling with effect. The forms in which Christianity has been at different times disguised, have been often hostile to liberty. But wherever the spirit has surmounted the forms,--in France, during the wars of the Huguenots,--in Holland, during the reign of Philip II.,--in Scotland, at the time of the Reformation,--in England, through the whole contest against the Stuarts, from their accession to their expulsion.--in New-England, through its whole history,--in every place,--{313}in every age,--it has inspired a hatred of oppression, and a love of freedom! It would be thus in the West-Indies. The attempts which have been made to press a few detached texts into the cause of tyranny, have never produced any extensive effect. Those who cannot refute them by reasoning and comparison, will be hurried forward by the sense of intolerable wrongs, and the madness of wounded affection. All this the Colonists have discovered; and we feel assured that they will never suffer religious instruction to be unreservedly given to the slaves. In that case, the Establishment will degenerate into a job. This is no chimerical apprehension. There have been clergymen in the West-Indies for many years past; and what have they done for the Negroes? In what have they conduced, either to their temporal or to their spiritual welfare? Doubtless there have been respectable men among them. But is it not notorious, that the benefices of the colonies have been repeatedly given to the outcasts of English society,--men whom the inhabitants would not venture to employ as book-keepers, yet whom they desired to retain as boon companions? Any person who will look over the Parliamentary papers which contain the answers returned by the colonial