Seeing then
no hope for the elevation of the Negro as a slave, he became a more
determined abolitionist.
[Footnote 1: _Ibid._, p. 78.]
William Jay, a son of the first Chief Justice of the United States,
and an abolition preacher of the ardent type, later directed his
attention to these conditions. The keeping of human beings in heathen
ignorance by a people professing to reverence the obligation of
Christianity seemed to him an unpardonable sin. He believed that the
natural result of this "compromise of principle, this suppression
of truth, this sacrifice to unanimity," had been the adoption of
expediency as a standard of right and wrong in the place of the
revealed will of God.[1] "Thus," continued he, "good men and
good Christians have been tempted by their zeal for the American
Colonization Society to countenance opinions and practices
inconsistent with justice and humanity."[2] Jay charged to this
disastrous policy of neglect the result that in 1835 only 245,000 of
the 2,245,144 slaves had a saving knowledge of the religion of
Christ. He deplored the fact that unhappily the evil influence of the
reactionaries had not been confined to their own circles but had to a
lamentable extent "vitiated the moral sense" of other communities.
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