OF

SLAVERY AND ANTI-SLAVERY.

ADVANTAGES OF NEGRO SLAVERY AND THE

BENEFITS OF NEGRO FREEDOM.

MORALLY, SOCIALLY, AND POLITICALLY CONSIDERED.

BY

JOHN BELL ROBINSON.

PHILADELPHIA:

1330 NORTH THIRTEENTH STREET.

Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by JOHN BELL ROBINSON,

in the Office of the Clerk of the District Court of the United States in and for the Eastern District of the State of Pennsylvania.

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PREFACE.

To the people of the United States and the Christian ministry; especially those of them who seem to have forgotten the "prize of their high calling," and have converted their pulpits into places of political, sectional strife, and rendezvous for recruiting in. civil war.

I HAVE written the following chapters on the relation between Christianity, civilization, the prosperity of the universe, and negro slavery. I have long feared a dissolution of this great and glorious Union would sooner or later occur in consequence of sectional, political questions being introduced into the pulpits of the Christian church, believing it to be as much infidelity to have introduced the slave question into the church, in the way it has mostly been done, as it would be to deny that the several Epistles of Paul were a part of the Gospel.

Had I not just grounds for fears when the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church divided in 1844 on the slave question, and a majority of that body deposed a bishop who stood high for his talents, zeal, and great moral worth, who had never owned a slave, though a Georgian by birth, education, and residence through his entire life, but had recently married a lady who, a short time before, fell heir to two or three little negro children, whom she had to raise up to maturity? For marrying this lady, Bishop Andrews was suspended from his office as bishop. Since that

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