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The book of Morgan Godwin is a literary curiosity and an ethical wonder.

I deem myself fortunate in being the owner of a copy of it. I met with it while in White Haven, England, thirty-seven years ago. I was then abroad for safety rather than for health, for at that time there was no place of safety for me anywhere under the American flag or on American soil. An Irish Number 1 is safer here now, than I was then. Our Government then had no tenderness for refugees, however innocent of crime, if their skins happened to be slightly tanned or their hair a trifle woolly. But to return to Dr. Godwin and his book. He very evidently was not a Negro worshiper, nor what in our day would be called an abolitionist. He proposed no disturbance of the relation of master and slave. On the contrary, he conceded the right of the master to own and control the body of the Negro, but insisted that the soul of the Negro belonged to the Lord. His able reasoning on this point, it is true, left the Negro for himself neither soul nor body. When he claimed his body, he found that belonged to his earthly master, and when he looked around for his soul, he found that that belonged to his master in Heaven. Nevertheless the ground taken in this book by Dr. Godwin was immensely important. It was, in fact, the starting point, the foundation of all the grand concessions yet made to the claims, the character, the manhood and the dignity of the Negro. In the light of his present acknowledged position among men, here and elsewhere, a book to prove the Negro's right to baptism seems ridiculous, but so it did not seem two hundred years ago. Baptism was then a vital and commanding question, one with which the moral and intellectual giants of that day were required to grapple.

The opposition to baptizing and admitting the Negro to membership in the Christian church, was serious, determined and bitter. That ceremony was, in his case, opposed on many grounds, but especially upon three. First, the Negro's unfitness for baptism; secondly, the nature of the ordinance itself; and thirdly, because it would disturb the relation of master and slave. The wily slaveholders of that day were sharp-eyed and keen-scented, and snuffed danger from afar. They saw in this argument of Godwin the thin edge of the wedge which would sooner or later rend asunder the bonds of slavery. They therefore sought in piety to heaven security for their possessions on earth; in reverence to God contempt for man. They sought in the sacredness of baptism the salvation of slavery.

They contended that this holy ordinance could only be properly administered to free and responsible agents, men who, in all matters of moral conduct, could exercise the sacred right of choice; and this proposition was very easily

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defended. For, plainly enough, the Negro did not answer that description. The laws of the land did not even know him as a person. He was simply a piece of property, an article of merchandise, marked and branded as such, and no more fitted to be admitted to the fellowship of saints than horses, sheep or swine.

When Chief Justice Taney said that Negroes in those early days had no rights which white men felt bound to respect, he only uttered an historical truth. The trouble was that it was uttered for an evil purpose, and made to serve an evil purpose. The slave was solely answerable for his conduct to his earthly master. To thrust baptism and the church between the slave and his master was a dangerous interference with the absolute authority of the master. The slave-holders were always logical. When they assumed that slavery was right, they easily saw that everything inconsistent with slavery was wrong.

But deeper down than any modification of the master's authority, there was a more controlling motive for opposing baptism. Baptism had a legal as well as a religious significance. By the common law at that time, baptism was made a sufficient basis for a legal claim for emancipation. I am informed by Hon. A. B. Hagner, one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of this District, that there is now an old law in the State of Maryland, reversing the common law at this point.

Had I lived in Maryland before that law was enacted, I should have been baptized if I could have gotten anybody to perform the ceremony.

For in that day of Christian simplicity, honest rules of Biblical interpretation were applied. The Bible was thought to mean just what it said. When a heathen ceased to be a heathen and became a Christian, he could no longer be held as a slave. Within the meaning of the accepted word of God it was the heathen, not the Christian, who was to be bought and sold, and held as a bondman forever.

This fact stood like a roaring lion ready to tear and devour any Negro who sought the ordinance of baptism.

In the eyes of the wise and prudent of his times, Dr. Godwin was a dangerous man, a disturber of the peace of the church. Like our ever-faithful friend, Dr. Rankin, he was guilty of pressing religion into an improper interference with secular things, and making mischief generally.

In fact, when viewed relatively, low as was the ground assumed by this good man two hundred years ago, he was as far in advance of his times then as Charles Sumner was when he first took his seat in the United States Senate. What baptism and church membership were for the Negro in the days of Godwin, the ballot and civil rights were for the Negro in, the days of Sumner. Though stan ding two centuries apart