MONTSERRAT.
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there was any acknowledged field for their services. But as an effective church establishment has at length been commenced, and will, I most fervently hope, be perfected and maintained, so the time should seem to be past, when a Christian minister could think and say that the souls of the slaves within his parish were not within his cure. That time has been, but it is past, or it is passing while I write. The pretence that the numbers of the clergy were inadequate to such a duty is more than half taken away; the sophism, (for so it appears to me,) that a teacher of a lower or, to speak plainly, of a more vulgar stamp is required for the uncultivated negros, has been exposed. I am yet to learn why erudition and good manners are to disqualify a minister of the Gospel from teaching and humanizing a negro. Why will we consent that our Christian religion, a religion which enjoins courtesy and prudence as virtues, should unnecessarily and through wilful neglect on our parts be degraded, if I may so speak, and disfigured by the ignorance and coarseness of men who neither are, nor in any nation or age ever were, intended for the ministry ? I am sure that quite as much discretion is necessary in the work of instructing the slave population as in the known labors of attending to the spiritual wants of the free: in fact, much more is necessary; for the course of the missionary is through an undiscovered sea, where his charts serve him not, and his