Christianity was exerted in the Roman world. And all these edicts had
but one aim: to sweeten servitude, to increase affranchisement by law,
to facilitate voluntary emancipation.

What the Gospel did then against European slavery, it is doing now
against American slavery. Its end is the same; its weapons are the same;
they have not rusted during eighteen centuries. Those planters of the
English islands were not mistaken, who, instinctively divining where lay
their great enemy, had recourse to every measure to expel missionaries
from among them. Neither were those Texan executioners mistaken, who
lately put to death the missionary Bewley, a touching martyr to the
cause of the slaves. I ask, in the face of the gallows of Bewley, what
we are to think of that prodigious paradox according to which the Gospel
is the patron of slavery. To those who mistake its meaning on this
point, the Gospel replies by its acts; it replies also by the unanimous
testimony of its servants. What is more striking, in fact, than to see
that, apart from the country in which the action of interests and habits
disturbs the judgment of Christians, there is but one way of
comprehending and interpreting the Scripture on this point? Consult
England, France, Germany; Christians everywhere will tell you that the
Gospel abolished slavery, although it does not say a single word which
would proclaim this abolition. Why, if the doubt were possible, would
not diversity of opinions be also possible among disinterested judges?
To speak only of France, see the synods of our free churches, which
continually stigmatize both Swedish intolerance and American slavery;
see an address signed three years ago by the pastors and the elders of
five hundred and seventy-one French churches, which has gone to carry to
the United States the undoubted testimony of a conviction which in truth
is that of all.