remain aristocratic. It is reasonable to refer this in a great measure to the social character of the religious system. National education has no doubt done much; but national education has its source in the spirit of the national religion. Long after the Reformation the material condition of the poor in Scotland, owing to the poverty of the country, remained very wretched; and towards the end of the seventeenth century, when the Scottish peasantry had already played no mean part in the religious history of the world, Fletcher of Saltoun, a republican of the Classical school, proposed to redeem the Covenanters from their miserable, unprotected, and anxious state, and to restore them again to careless happiness under fatherly guidance, by making them prædial slaves.
If the Slave partook of the Lord’s Supper, much more would he partake in all the other acts of Christian worship. Of course also he would fully share all the religious knowledge of his brethren, and everything that could enable them worthily to worship the God of Truth. He might, as Neander says, be the religious teacher of his master. And as his religious life was blended with that of his fellow-Christians, so his body would rest with theirs in death.
In America, as we have already had occasion to say, there appears, generally speaking, to be no religious communion between the Master and the Slave. The two classes do not belong in any practical sense to the same Church. They can scarcely be said even to unite in public worship; they do not join in family prayer, nor do they really partake together of the Supper of
