day, and liberty either to rest or work for himself on a number of holy days. They exhorted their flocks to leave the savings and earnings of the prædial slave untouched. They constantly freed the slaves who came into their own possession. They exhorted the laity to do the same, and what living covetousness refused, they often wrung from deathbed penitence. This they did constantly and effectually during the early part of the Middle Ages, while the Church was still to a great extent in a missionary state, and had not yet been turned into an establishment allied with political power. Afterwards no doubt a change came over the spirit of the Clergy in this, as well as in other respects. The Church became an Estate and a part of the feudal system. Her Bishops became Spiritual Lords. And these Spiritual Lords in the time of Richard II. voted with the Temporal Lords, for the repudiation of the King’s promise of enfranchisement to the villains, and the last serfs who remained in existence were found on the estates of the Church.
Twice vanquished, in the shape of Ancient Slavery and in the shape of Feudal Serfdom, the enemy rose again in the shape of Negro Slavery, the offspring not of Roman or Barbarian Conquest, but of commercial avarice and cruelty. And again Christianity returned to the struggle against the barrier thus a third time reared by tyranny and cupidity in the path of her great social hope and mission, the brotherhood of Man. By the mouth of Clarkson and Wilberforce she demanded and obtained of a Christian nation the emancipation of the Slaves in the West Indies. And if in the
