Reading this morning a tract written by a poor African, I was particularly struck by this circumstance—that a man who has a black skin, being wronged or outraged by a white man, can have no redress; it being a law, in all our colonies, that the oath of a black against a white goes for nothing. What villainy is this!
That He who has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen you in this and all things is the prayer, dear sir, of
Your affectionate servant,
John Wesley.
He represents the slave trade as exceeding in barbarity whatever Christian slaves suffered in Mohammedan countries.
Whitefield's letter to Wesley, in 1751, is a clear defense of slavery in the colonies. He quotes Abraham, who had slaves "bought with his money" and "born in his house." The same argument was employed in later years. Whitefield added to his approval of the slave trade the fact that he became himself a slaveholder. At the time of his death, in 1770, he was the owner of seventy-five slaves, who were connected with his Orphan House plantation, near Savannah, Ga. It is not surprising that God should have swept the whole concern, by fire and flood, from the face of the earth.
"Let it be noted," says Mr. Tyerman, "that besides all his other honors John Wesley, the poor, persecuted Methodist, was one of the first advocates on behalf of the enthralled African that England had, and that, sixty years before slavery was abolished in the dominions of Great Britain, he denounced the thing in the strongest terms it was possible to employ." Mr. Wesley's Thoughts on Slavery, an octavo of fifty-three pages, issued in 1774, did more to awaken England to the horrors of the African slave trade than any other work on the subject. The writer says, "No more severe arraignment of slavery than this was ever written." This American scourge, through the influence of Wesley's early American preachers, who caught their inspiration from his Thoughts, felt the force of his burning words until that form of slavery, which he declared to be "the vilest that ever saw the sun," was a thing of the past. For two hundred and more years it drifted down, gradually, like other forms of barbarism, into the clear light of a better civilization, to be finally put to death by the Gospel of Methodism. It is true that Uncle Tom's Cabin did much, but Wesley's Thoughts prepared the way for this wonderful book. Mr. Wesley must ever be known as the man through whose influence slavery found a grave, from which Heaven forbid it should ever have a resurrection!
Temperance.
In regard to the temperance reform Mr. Wesley was as fully pronounced as on the subject of slavery. Liquor drinking was practiced by all classes, from the archbishop to the meanest street scavenger. Ministers by the hundred drank to intoxication, and in their drunken sprees would head mobs in their assaults on Wesley and his helpers. Wesley thundered away at liquor selling and drinking like a modern prohibitionist. Take the following from one of his sermons as an example:
Neither may we gain by hurting our neighbor in his body. Therefore we may not sell anything which tends to impair his health. Such is eminently all that liquid fire called drams of spirituous liquors. It is true they may have a place in medicine—may be used in some bodily disorders—although there would rarely be occasion for them were it not for the unskillfulness of the practitioner. Therefore such as prepare and sell them only for this end may keep their conscience clean. But who are they who prepare and sell them only for this end? Do you know ten distillers in England? Then excuse these. But all who sell them in the common way, to any that will buy, are poisoners in general. They murder his majesty's subjects by wholesale; neither do their eyes pity or spare. They drive them to hell like sheep. And what is their gain? Is it not the blood of these men? Who, then, would enjoy their large estate and sumptuous palaces? A curse is in the midst of them. A curse cleaves to the stones, the timbers, the furniture of them. The curse of God is in their gardens, their walks, their groves; a fire that burns to the nethermost hell! Blood, blood, is there! The foundation, the walls, the roof, are stained with blood! And canst thou hope, O man of blood, though thou art "clothed in scarlet and fine linen, and farest sumptuously every day"—canst thou hope to deliver thy fields of blood to the third generation? Not so! There is a God in heaven; therefore thy name shall be blotted out. Like as those whom thou hast destroyed, body and soul, thy memory shall perish with thee.[C]