good works, he was Hopkins's co-laborer. His Literary Diary*—that invaluable repository of all sorts of things-was commenced only fifteen months before the installation of Hopkins. In the record of those fifteen months we find such entries as these. February 19, 1770. "In the evening I preached to a meeting of negroes. Jno. xvii, 3." That was a Monday evening, and the text was, " And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." Again, March 4, "I preached, A. M., Matt. xviii, 49, 50. [The words are, "And he stretched forth his hands toward his disciples and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister, and mother." How beautiful a preparation for the transaction next recorded.] "Baptized and admitted three negroes communicants and administered the Lord's Supper to fifty-four communicants, having admitted ten since last sacrament. P. M. Isai. xxx, 11, and baptized two children, negroes." Let this suffice to show that in the matter of attention to the negroes, and sympathy with them, Hopkins was as likely to learn of Stiles, as Stiles was to learn of Hopkins. Be that as it may, there was a strong bond of union between them. It was not much to either of them that they were both natives of New Haven county, both graduates of Yale College, both Congregationalists in a colony and in a town where Congregationalism was greatly in the minority. Nor was it much that a near kinsman of one had been the colleague tutor, and the intimate friend of the other. It was not much that both were studious men; for in their studies they had little sympathy. The one with his Hebrew and his Syriac, with his Rabbinical commentaries and his Arabic, with his researches among the Fathers and his zeal for scientific observation and discovery,-and the other, with his narrow

* The Diary, with other Stiles MSS., is preserved in the Library of Yale College.

Samuel Hopkins, D. D., of Hadley, was the cousin of the great theologian, and letters still extant show the early friendship between him and Dr. Stiles.

range of reading, his passion for argument and controversy, his hard metaphysics, his sharp distinctions, his paradoxical conclusions,-were, intellectually, wide as the poles asunder. Their dogmatic differences on the questions between the old Divinity and the New, would have made them antagonists, had they not been men of kindred zeal for Christ, for truth, for progress, for their country, and for freedom.

Just three years after the installation of Hopkins, he communicated to Dr. Stiles his scheme for a mission to Africa. Among the negro communicants in his church, there were two whom he proposed to educate for that service, and then to send forth, if means could be provided. At first Stiles seems to have been a little suspicious of what might be a plan to propagate the New Divinity among the heathen;-though he was far enough from the opinion of his friend and correspondent, Dr. Chauncey of Boston, who thought "that the negroes had better continue in paganism than embrace Mr. Hopkins's scheme." But soon afterward we find the mercurial enthusiasm of Stiles, and the graver earnestness of Hopkins, united in zeal for the African mission, "like mingling flames in sacrifice." In August, 1773, a circular subscribed by both of them was sent abroad, soliciting for their enterprise the charity and prayers of "all who are desirous to promote the kingdom of God on earth in the salvation of sinners." That circular contained, among other arguments, a suggestion which shows, plainly enough, that "the iniquity of the slave trade," and the "inhumanity and cruelty of enslaving our fellow men," were already acknowledged and deeply felt not only by the authors of the circular but by those to whom they made their appeal.

"And it is humbly proposed to those who are convinced of the iniquity of the slave trade, and are sensible of the great inhumanity and cruelty of enslaving so many thousands of our fellow men every year, with all the dreadful and horrid attendants, and are ready to bear testimony against it in all proper ways, and do their utmost to put a stop to it, whether they have not a good opportunity of doing this by cheerfully contributing according to their ability, to promote the mission proposed, and whether this is not the best compensation we are able to make the poor Africans, for the injuries they are constantly receiving by this unrighteous practice and all its attendants."-Park's Memoir of Hopkins, p. 132.

This appeal was sent forth three years prior to the Declaration of Independence. Yet the Minister's Wooing leads careless readers to believe that, twenty years after this after the war of independence-after the establishment of the Federal Constitution-when Washington was President and Aaron Burr a Senator of the United States-Ezra Stiles had no sympathy with the honest and outspoken zeal of Samuel Hopkins, but, like some modern theologians, regarded slavery as a Divine arrangement for giving the Gospel to the Africans. At the date which the author compels us to give to her story, Dr. Stiles had ceased for twenty years to be a resident of Newport; and having been the President of the Connecticut Society for the abolition of slavery, was dead or dying at a venerable age.

If we judge correctly, the reason of the great anachronism in the story, is found in the introduction of Aaron Burr, as one of the dramatis persona. "Colonel Burr, of the United States Senate "that brilliant and fascinating man in his full blown popularity-could not, by any violence of imagination, be carried back to the days before the revolution; but Hopkins and Stiles, being less known to the million readers of light literature, might be more easily dislocated from their historical position. We do not propose to inquire whether the introduction of that particular personage is advantageous or otherwise to the story; nor whether the portraiture of Burr in this story, if it be considered as a creation of the author's genius, is true to human nature. The only question for us is whether her representation of that personage is in accordance with the truth of history. Nay, we will not enter on any critical examination even of this question. Let it suffice for us to say that in our opinion the comparatively favorable coloring in which the author has given her portraiture of that ineffably bad man, is by far, in respect to moral and religious influence, the most exceptionable thing in the whole book. She has evidently been studying Parton's Life of Burr; and not understanding that author's naive unconsciousness of the distinction between good and evil, she has likewise failed to understand the hero of his melodrama. Indeed, there is the

best apology for her not understanding her material in a case like this. We doubt whether it is possible for a pure and true woman to form the conception of a wickedness so base as that of Aaron Burr.

But the violation of historic truth in the anachronism which was committed for the sake of making Burr a conspicuous figure, is not merely that Hopkins and Stiles are removed from their proper place in history. The basis of the whole storythat on which the chief interest, aside from the love adventures, rests is the representation that at the date of the events narrated, after the establishment of the Federal Constitution, when Aaron Burr was in the Senate of the United States, no definite opposition to slavery had begun to manifest itself in the pulpits or among the religious people of New England. Ill informed and unthinking readers of the Minister's Wooing will of course believe that, as lately as the year 1795, there existed in New England a general indifference and insensibility to the cruelties of the slave trade, and that for a Congregational pastor to preach upon that theme was an unheard of act of moral courage-somewhat as if some pastor in Richmond, the Rev. Doctor Reed for example, should now preach against the Virginia slave trade. Such a representation is unjust to the pastors, to the churches and to the people of those states as they then were. We impute no intentional injustice to the author. We only regret that, in forming the plan of her historical fiction, she did not more adequately consider the facts of the history which she had to deal with. What are the facts?

Prior to the revolution, the slave trade between Africa and these colonies was a great interest of British commerce. The right of prohibiting the importation of slaves, or of putting any restraint upon it, was jealously denied to the colonial legislatures so far as they were under the control of the imperial government in the mother country. From about the beginning of the eighteenth century, the inhumanity of the slave trade and the injustice of slavery had been discussed from time to time, in Pennsylvania among the Quakers, and in Massachusetts by divines like Cotton Mather, and judges,

like Samuel Sewall.* In the very first year of that century, the town of Boston had instructed its representatives to propose in the colonial legislature a prospective abolition of negro slavery. But at that early period, there were no such means as in more recent times, for acting on the public mind, or for organizing and concentrating public opinion. In the then existing condition of society, the progress of thought was necessarily slow. The ancient doctrine, that captives taken in lawful war are of course slaves, the lawful property of the captor-a doctrine as old and as universal as the adjustment of international controversies by war--had been modified in the international law of Christendom by the idea that Christians ought not to enslave each other, but the law of war between Christian and heathen nations remained unchanged. As in wars among the Indians, so in wars between Indians and the English colonists, at that day, those who, by the fortune of war, fell into the hands of the enemy were not prisoners merely, but captives, and therefore slaves; for, as enemies in arms, they were supposed to have forfeited their right to life, and the slavery to which they were reduced was only a commutation of punishment, as a murderer is sometimes sent to the penitentiary for life instead of being hanged. Slaves imported from Africa were held as slaves not because they were black, but because they were presumed to have been lawfully reduced to slavery under the laws of war. But by degrees the subject came to be better understood among thoughtful and conscientious men. Especially in the discussions which preceded the separation of these colonies from Great Britain, doctrines wholly inconsistent with the practice of enslaving innocent human beings, began to be firmly established in an intelligent popular conviction. The idea that the right to life and the right to liberty are equally inalienable and equally sacred-rights of which no human being can be justly deprived except in punishment of his own crime against the

* Mather's Essays to do good, is one of the books from which the New York American Tract Society has expurgated the sentiment of opposition to slavery. Sewall's pamphlet was entitled "The Selling of Joseph."