In 1834 the children of the Jamaica slaves were freed, but at midnight of July 31, 1838, a general proclamation of emancipation went into effect and every adult slave in Jamaica became a free man. In anticipation of this event, William Knibb, the evangelist, gathered together the ten thousand slaves on that island for a prayer and praise meeting, and when the first stroke of the midnight bell pealed out, William Knibb shouted, “The monster is dying!” When the second stroke came, he said “dying”—after the third stroke he again said “dying,” and when the twelfth stroke struck he said “The monster is dead—let us bury him.” They had ready an immense coffin, into which they cast the whips, the branding-irons, the handcuffs and fetters, the slave garments and all the memorials of their slavery—and screwed down the lid. They let the coffin down into a twelve-foot deep grave, and, covering it over, they buried out of sight all the memorials of their past life of bondage.
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SLAVES NOT HEROES
When Louis XIV, in order to check what he perceived to be the growing supremacy of England upon the seas, determined to establish a navy, he sent for his great minister Colbert, and said to him, “I wish a navy—how can I create it?” Colbert replied, “Make as many galley-slaves as you can.” Thereupon every Huguenot who refused to doff his bonnet on the street as the King passed by, every boy of seventeen who could give no account of himself, every vagrant without an occupation, was seized, convicted and sent to the galleys. Could a navy of heroes be made of galley-slaves? The history of the Anglo-Saxon race says “No.”—Hampton L. Carson.
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SLAVES OF PLEASURE
Philanthropists in prison cells, missionaries to the Fiji Islanders, people doing rescue work in the worst sections of great cities, Livingstone in Africa, all these, through zeal, can work till midnight to save lost men, but the votary of pleasure will toil on up and down a waxed floor till daylight, until the head reels and the whole heart is sick. In his “Confessions” Tolstoi says that for ten years he went from banquet to banquet, drinking rich wines, feasting, following his tailor, concocting flatteries, lies, sleeping by day and dissipating at night, and he adds, “My observation is that no galley-slave or apostle like Paul has to toil as hard as a society man and a society woman,” and both have lost their beauty, their happiness and their health before the life course is half run. So pleasure makes its disciples become galley-slaves. But pleasure promised a velvet path, air heavy with roses, the wine and nectar of Venus and Bacchus. Pleasure promised perfumed bowers, days of happiness, nights of laughter and song. But pleasure is a deceiver. (Text.)—N. D. Hillis.
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Sleeping in Church—See [Self-blame].
SLOWNESS