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Slave-holding, a Crime of enormous Magnitude.

valley, which is here about two hundred yards broad. There are four or five fissures, one above the other, on the face of the rock, each of them about a foot and half long, and a few inches deep. What is remarkable, they run along the breadth of the rock, and are not rent downwards; they are more than a foot asunder, and there is a channel worn between them by the gushing of the water. The Arabs still reverence this rock, and stuff shrubs into the holes, that when any of their camels are sick, they may eat of them and recover. Two of the holes at this time were filled with reed for this purpose, and they believed it to be endowed with a peculiar virtue. The rock is of a beautiful granite, and is about five yards long, five in height, and four yards wide.

This narrow valley soon opened into a plain, capable of containing a large number of people, where they probably stood, as well as around the rock, and in the valley, to receive the water that poured down. It is difficult to take that passage in Scripture literally, which says that the water from the rock followed them in their journeyings, when it is considered that from the nature of the country, their course was afterwards over rocky and rugged places, and tracts of sand: to have carried that water over stony ascents, and along dry and desert paths, which absorb all moisture, would have been an infinitely greater miracle than the bringing it at first out of the rock, or reproducing it in different parts of their journeys. Perhaps the passage may be intended to convey the latter meaning.

We had not the opportunity of making the tour of the whole of the region of Sinai, yet we traversed three sides of the mountain, and found it every where shut in by narrow ravines, except on the north, in which direction we had first approached it. Here there is, as before observed, a valley of some extent, and a small plain, in the midst of which is a rocky hill. These appear to be the only open places in which the Israelites could have stood before the mount, because on the fourth side, though unvisited, we could observe from the summit, were only glens or small rocky valleys, as on the west and south; for the precipices opposite rose near and high and a country like this can change little in the progress of ages. If water was not more plentiful of old than at the present time, it was impossible for so numerous a people to have been sustained without a constant miracle in their favour; 125.-VOL. XI.

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the number of wells is so small, and in summer so soon exhausted.-Carne's Letters from the East, vol. i.

SLAVE-HOLDING, A CRIME OF ENORMOUS
MAGNITUDE.

EVERY slave brought from Africa by force,
with every slave born in a state of slavery
in West India, exhibits a proof of injustice
against some person or persons; and its
most strenuous advocates can only plead
ignorance, or something worse.

In civilized governments, every species of property is identified by law! and that which cannot be held legally, is not bona fide property!

Slave-holders cannot be accused of apathy, they have ransacked heaven and earth for a title to hold slaves and the only title that can be found, is possession. I defy them to find a better title. All stolen property in Great Britain, is held by this title; and slave-holders appear to be determined not to let go this hold!

So far as European governments have put a stop to the exportation of slaves from Africa, they have acknowledged its injustice! but whilst they permit slave-holding to continue in West India, they sanction an evil equal in magnitude! Suppose every slave now held in slavery, were to make his and her escape from slavery! Suppose them to carry away every article denominated theirs, would criminality, or an act of injustice, attach to such slaves? Such an act, committed by Europeans, would not be accounted any crime!

If slave-holding is unjust, every added day or hour of prolonged slavery, enhances the guilt of the holder! Unnecessary delay can only increase the difficulty, and swell the enormity! On the day I commence slave-holder, I purpose renouncing the Christian religion !

There cannot be a more just mart in Africa for the sale of Africans, than in Europe for the sale of Europeans; would European nations allow the nations of Africa to take and make slaves of Europeans? Custom, however long continued in, never can justify a merchandise in human bodies and souls.-I have seen a negro in Newgate. I have seen negroes begging in the streets of London. Can we then deny to the negro the human character? and can it be denied that Europeans have been the cause, both of the imprisoned and the begging negroes? If the negro is liable to a charge of felony, such charge classes him with that of human beings! No creature but man is charg

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Slave-holding, a Crime of enormous Magnitude.

able with felony! If a negro in Britain is charged with felony, he is not a principal, but an accessary? By Europeans he is displaced from the order of Providence! his alleged crime is more justly chargeable upon some other person or persons than it is upon himself! Such pity as is due to prisoners in Newgate, is due to the holders of slaves. There is hardly a description of sinners whom I do not pity, and for whom I would not pray. Were I to advise the planters in West India, my advice would be, Give up every idea of the slave being real property; as he is not property in fact, so neither ought he to be in imagination! Whatever may constitute property in West India, or whatever legitimate rights are held by planters in West India, to the enslaved African no title can be found! No deed of conveyance, no deposit of purchase, can constitute the African the property of the European! That people are yet uncivilized, where man constitutes a part of the property of his fellow-man?

Arguments have little or no effect upon the man who is determined to pursue his Own course; self-interest is a perpetual stimulus to human exertion. Man is prone to put a favourable construction upon his own actions! There is not a thief who wisheth not success to his own enterprise !

If interest dims the sight of honesty itself, what must be the consequence where honesty is absent? Allow the principles of slave-holding, maintained by slave-holders; and slavery will never be abolished! I have seen a string of arguments to prove, that such are the vast advantages of a state of slavery to the slaves, that their condition might be almost deemed desirable. But as yet, I have not seen one argument through which a school-boy would not penetrate, or at which an idiot might not take the alarm!

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Great has been my astonishment at speeches made in the British senate in behalf of the rights of the colonists, and the benefit of slavery to the slaves: speeches much better calculated to entertain company of rustics, than a house of representatives! Speeches to which the speaker himself would not give credit, and which passed without refutation, chiefly from the unpopularity of the subject!

Only in slave-holding countries is man considered as property. Europeans in West India have to learn the value of slaves, and the art of governing them; this species of chattels being entirely of

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a local nature, and founded on a usurped power, is yet unknown as such in Europe, and especially in Great Britain. It is the spurious offspring of British law-transplanted into West India!

Eight hundred thousand Africans, held in slavery and imprisonment by Europeans in West India, is a most awful portraiture of deformity, whether we behold the African or the European!

If barbarism characterize the African, cruelty and injustice characterize the European. European colonists have involved themselves in a most awful predicament: they express great alarm at the state into which they have brought themselves, and solicit the protection of the British government, for the maintenance of a species of property not recognized in Europe,-and primarily obtained by rapine and murder! Every slave in West India is a living witness of European injustice, and the blood of every murdered African cries for justice against the murderer!

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How long shall European governments hesitate to put an end to this usurpation of African rights? If a house were fire, should we justify a delay in determining which engine should first play upon the flames? Were a man perishing in the water, should we justify a delay in determining who shall cast a rope for his deliverance.

The system of slavery in West India inevitably occasions the premature death of slaves; colonial laws fully substantiate this fact? Justice sanctions just laws, but it never sanctioned a law under which one man shall be the property and the slave of another. The British government may turn a deaf ear to remonstrance, and continue to protect the colonists in the possession of slaves; but while it will be a proof of the exercise of British power, it will be an equal proof of the exercise of British injustice! Weakness may connive at injustice, but power has not any excuse! Had the British government any doubt of its power to put an end to slavery, it would have tried the experiment long ere now! Eight hundred thousand free men, might fearlessly have held fifty thousand slaves in chains: but fifty thousand free men holding eight hundred thousand slaves, (without a strong military force,) would ever be in a state of perturbation! The adjustment of this business having been so long declined by colonial legislation, European governments alone can apply a remedy!

Subjects of far less importance than slavery have agitated nations, nnsheathed

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Dissertation on Apparitions.

the sword, depopulated provinces, and dethroned kings! The displeasure of Jehovah is to be deprecated; he is not less able to pour his vengeance upon mighty empires, than to punish individuals! European strength will make but a feeble resistance against Almighty energy: "He breaketh the bow, and snappeth the spear asunder." Be wise, oh ye nations! be instructed, oh ye kings of the earth! If Jehovah enter into a controversy with Europe and India, where is the barrier which shall defend from His power, or turn aside the stroke of His

wrath!

W.

DISSERTATION ON APPARITIONS.

APPARITION, in a general sense, is the appearance or semblance of a thing.-It is also used to denote a spectre, or preternatural appearance of some spirit, or the like.

We read of apparitions of angels, genii, dæmons, fairies, witches, departed souls, &c. apparitions of God, of Christ, the Virgin, saints, prophets, and of the Devil

himself.

Among the most zealous advocates for the reality of apparitions and witchcraft, we may reckon Dr. Henry More, Baxter, and Glanvil. The latter, in particular, has attempted, in a treatise entitled, "Saducismus Triumphatus," to prove the doctrine of apparitions, by arguments deduced from the nature of the soul, the testimony of scripture, and the evidence of fact; and he expressly asserts, (part ii. p. 2.) that those who deny and deride the existence of apparitions and witchcraft, are prepared for the denial of spirits, a life to come, and all the other principles of religion.

On the contrary, it cannot be denied, as a strong presumption against the reality of apparitions, however anciently and generally the belief of them has prevailed, that they have been connected with some causes and circumstances of terror, either real or apprehended; and these have previously disposed the imagination for being imposed upon and deluded. The darkness of the night, the gloom that has overspread particular situations, the horror produced by the record of some disastrous occurrence, such as murder or the like, and a state of mind naturally depressed and melancholy, and of course easily alarmed, have contributed to give rise to many of those stories, that have been credulously received, and as obstinately vin

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dicated and sedulously disseminated by the vulgar.

The ancients also entertained some notions concerning the state of the soul on its escape from the body, which favoured this opinion; and they were disposed to seek the spirits of their deceased ancestors near the habitations in which their bodies were deposited.

Hence, they would be easily led into deception; and when fancying that they actually saw their deceased friends, they distinguished the illusions, which were merely the creations of their own fancy, by the name of "Shades." It ought also to be considered, that the relation and belief of apparitions have prevailed chiefly in times of ignorance, and amongst those who had the fewest opportunities for inquiry and information. In fact, as night and ignorance have been the seasons to which the appearance of ghosts has been referred, so the belief of their reality has gradually subsided in proportion to the degree in which light and knowledge have been diffused. It is also well known that apparitions have, as convenient instruments on particular occasions, rendered essential service to generals, to ministers of state, to priests, and others; to say nothing of the very injudicious and culpable use that has been made of them by those with whom the care of children, at a period when their imagination is easily impressed, has been entrusted. Upon the whole, it must be allowed, that many of the apparitions recorded by writers, or reported by tradition, are mere delusions; others are fictions contrived solely to amuse, or to answer some purpose; while others have originated in dreams or deli. quiums.

There are seasons of slumber when we are not sensible of being asleep. On this principle, Hobbes' (Treatise of Human Nature, part i. c. 2. Works, p. 102.) has endeavoured to account for the spectre that is said to have appeared to Brutus. "We read," says he, "of Marcus Brutus (one that had his life given him by Julius Cæsar, and was also his favourite, and notwithstanding murdered him,) how at Philippi, the night before he gave battle to Augustus Cæsar, he saw a fearful apparition, which is commonly related by historians as a vision; but considering the circumstances, one may easily judge to have been a short dream. For, sitting in his tent, pensive and troubled with the horror of his rash act, it was not hard for him, slumbering in the cold, to dream of that which most affrighted him; which fear,

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On the Moral Effects of Ridicule.

as by degrees it made him awake, so also it must needs make the apparition ) by degrees to vanish; and having no assurrance that he slept, he could have no cause to think it a dream, or any thing but a vision."

The well-known story told by Clarendon, of the apparition of the duke of Buckingham's father, has been solved in | a similar manner. There was no man in the kingdom so much the subject of conversation as the duke; and his character was so corrupt, that he was very likely to be misled by the enthusiasm of the times. Sir George Villiers is said to have appeared to him at midnight; and hence it appears probable that the man was asleep; and as he was terrified by the dream, it must have made a strong im- | pression, and was likely to be repeated.

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Mr. Andrew Baxter, in his "Essay on the Phenomenon of Dreaming," recurs to the principle, "that our dreams are prompted by separate immaterial beings,' in order to account for apparitions. If the power of such beings be unrestrained, this author maintains, that it will equally possess the fancy with delusive scenes, without waiting for the occasion of sleep to introduce them, and obtrude them forcibly upon the organ, amidst the action of external objects. For it requires but a greater degree of the same power to make delusory impressions upon the sensory, while real external objects are making true impressions upon it, than it would require to make the same impressions, while no other impression from external objects is made upon it at the same time. "If our imaginations," says Dr. Tillotson, in one of his sermons, 66 were let loose upon us, we should be always under the most dreadful terrors, and frightened to distraction with the appearance of our own fancy; but an over-ruling power restrains these effects:" that is, as Mr. Baxter conceives, by restraining the power of invisible beings, which would otherwise incessantly distress the soul with such unpleasing sights. Upon this hypothesis, he thinks there is nothing inconsistent in those relations of apparitions which we meet with in history, whether the facts be true or false; for these spirits may, upon some important occasions, be licensed so to affect the sensory, according to the exigency of the case, that the whole scene of vision, which is then thought to have an existence from without, may be the effect of impressions madet on the brain only. Thus, for in stance, that apparition mentioned before, which was presented to Brutus before he

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came over from Asial and again the night | before the battle of Philippi, the noise as one entering into his tent which he heard, and the words spoken, “I am, O Brutus, thy evil genius, but thou shalt see me again near Philippi," might all be only inward representations upon the sensory, and any other person present might neither have heard nor seen any thing. This, in our author's opinion, affords a better account of the appearance than that of Hobbes; who makes cold produce dreams and visions of fear, without either reason or experience to support his assertion. He makes Brutus to be sleeping; but Plutarch tells us, that he had slept the former part of the night immediately after eating, and had risen to digest something in his own mind; so that, according to Hobbes' scheme, it was a waking vision, and it occurred without any previous distemper, either external or internal.

The case of Dion, related by Plutarch, is alleged to the same purpose; for he was sitting in the porch of his own house in a thoughtful and meditating attitude, when the spectre appeared to him; and this happened while the assassins were contriving his death, a little before he was cruelly murdered. No men in antiquity could be less liable to the suspicion of weakness and credulity than Brutus and Dion; and therefore, according to Mr. Baxter, the terror they experienced must have proceeded from the power of some superior being. Upon the whole, he thinks that although Accordatuovia, (Deisidaimonia,) or fear of spirits, hath been much abused by vain or weak people, and carried to an extreme perhaps by crafty and designing men, the most rigorous philosophy will not justify its being entirely rejected. It is true, he adds, no evil can happen to us in God's world, but by our own fault; but that subordinate beings are never permitted, or commissioned, to be the ministers of his will, is a hard point to be proved; and that direct atheism is better than this deisidemony, is horrid. See Essay on the Phenomenon of Dreaming, in the "Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul," vol. ii. p. 3.

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The Abbe de St. Pierre has a discourse expressly on the physical method of solving or accounting for apparitions; he makes them the effect of feverish dreams, disturbed imaginations, &c. REES.

ON THE MORAL EFFECTS OF RIDICULE.

THERE is no engine more generally applied to eradicate absurd or unpopular

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On the Moral Effects of Ridicule.

opinions than ridicule, and it is not only the favourite weapon of the wit, but has even been sometimes employed by the philosopher; it may be doubted, however, upon good grounds, whether in the aggregate it produces the desired reformation, or whether, on the contrary, it is not rather calculated to increase moral evil.

The object of ridicule is to deteriorate the obnoxious opinions, by placing them in a ludicrous or preposterous point of view; and thus, by lowering them in the estimation of their supporters, cause their abandonment, rather from a sense of shame, than from any real conviction in the mind, that they are untenable on rational ground. Ridicule attacks the pride and self-love of man, by covertly putting his opinions at a lower standard than he had himself fixed, and thus exposing his cupidity to an unexpected assault, which, however fallacious and weak in itself, by its subtlety and point disarms opposition, and for the moment sets Leven reason at defiance. Ridicule seldom admits of argument, because it has the effect of instantly reducing its object below the level of sober consideration, by placing it on the ground of assumed absurdity; at this the mind naturally revolts, as below the dignity of man. Ridicule always takes inconsistency and absurdity for granted, and on this foundation builds a sudden and specious conclusion, which admits, in most minds, of no serious refutation.

*: There is no principle in the human mind more powerful than self-love, and this, ridicule wounds,and thus gains a victory, which, however cowardly and transient, is nevertheless secure. But, happily for truth, reason is unconvinced, though her powers may be paralyzed. Sentiments once fixed by the calm deductions of reflection, can only be changed by argument; and the same process is required to eradicate, as to plant them. It is upon this ground that I assert, it may be doubted whether, in the aggregate, ridicule produces the desired reformation, or whether, on the contrary, it is not rather calculated to increase moral evil.

Ridicule, considered in itself, is a fragile and pointless weapon, since it takes an impetus from the hand that wields it, which its own gravity would be unable steadily to support, were it not borne to its destination by the strong current of popular prejudice. The satirist always deals in hyperbole, distorting facts to suit his purpose, and assuming false premises from which to draw his conclusions.

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nature, we shall find this truth confirmed; and though ridicule must be allowed to have had its share in the demoralization of mankind, it will be difficult to find one virtue that has emanated from its influence, Shame may, indeed, in many instances, have stopped the career of open depravity; but it is much to be doubted whether selflove was not more wounded, than conscience savingly awakened, or whether the sense of pride was not rather shocked at the disreputable character of the action in the eye of the world, than the reason was convinced of its turpitude in the eye of God; and in this case it might be abandoned from expediency, but would not be renounced upon principle. On the con trary, I think it will appear, that the ties of religion, morality, and social duty, in well-regulated minds, have never been loosened by the power of ridicule, for as they have been riveted by conviction, nothing but conviction can release them from their hold on the reason.

Nothing has been more the object of ridi. cule than religion. It has been assailed by the wit of Voltaire, the ribaldry of Paine, and the elegant but subtle satire of Gibbon; yet the whole force of their combined talents has been insufficient to invalidate one fact, to refute one fundamental truth, or to hold up the sacred form of vital religion to the scorn and derision of well-directed reason. The pageantry of superstition, and the dreams of fanaticism, have been demolished and scattered by their attacks; but the sacred fabric, though thus despoiled of the votive decorations of its human votaries, built on the rock of ages, has bid a proud defiance to the pointless shafts of ridicule.

Hence ridicule, when applied to eradicate vice and implant virtue, must ever fail in producing a permanent moral effect, since it has no foundation in sound argument and rational conclusion, on which religious and moral principles are built; neither, on the other hand, will it ever be capable of eradicating them, when once fixed on the basis of conviction; and I believe there are few, if any, individuals to be found, who, having been brought up in the fear of God, and having been led by ridicule to deviate into the paths of vice, but may be reclaimed by strong and judicious appeals to reason.

In the above remarks, I would not inculcate an ascetic gravity, or check the exuberance of innocent mirth. There are numerous follies in dress, manners, habits, and even opinions, which it is the legiti If we look into the history of human | mate province of ridicule to correct; an

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