more than any other man, gave form and direction to the great “anti-slavery” delusion of modern times, was eminently pious—as piety is accepted by a large portion of the religious world. He was an Episcopalian in form, but preeminently a Puritan in practice; and, while doubtless sincere in his belief, and perfectly correct in his religious habits, he was one of the most complete bigots, religious, political, and social, the world ever saw. Belonging to the ruling class, and possessed of a considerable fortune, he believed that his own status was the stand-point, and himself the model, for the government of society, and therefore was as doggedly and bitterly opposed to any change in England, or to any reform in English society, as he was earnest in his efforts to relieve the “sufferings of the slave” in America. In a public career of some forty years, as a member of Parliament, he never failed to record his vote against any increase of popular freedom, or any change that tended to ameliorate the condition of the white masses, and just as steadily and uniformly labored to “elevate” the negro to the status of the English laborer, or, at all events, to favor that final “abolition of slavery,” which he himself was not, however, destined to witness in the British American possessions. But throughout he regarded the question rather as a religious than a political one, and at an early period, in this respect, impressed his own character on it. Identified with the Church, all his notions those of the High Church party—substantially the notions that Archbishop Laud entertained two centuries before—by birth and association connected with the landed aristocracy, and yet distinguished for 27practical piety, for a zeal and devotion to his religious duties that the most zealous among the Dissenters and Evangelicals might imitate but could not surpass, this was just the man to impress a great movement with his own characteristics, and the “anti-slavery cause” became the cause of religion as well as of liberty with the religious world. Nor was it confined to the “American slave;” it embraced the whole world of heathendom; and a religious crusade sprang up, that finally became more extended, and, in some respects, more permanent, than the great political movement inaugurated by Jefferson a few years before. And if the Father of Lies, Lucifer himself, had plotted a plan or scheme for concealing a great truth, and embarrassing a great cause, he could have accomplished nothing more effective than the movement that Wilberforce inaugurated for the professed benefit of the negro and other subordinate races of mankind, which, masked under the form of religious duty, and appealing to the conscience, the love of proselytism, the enthusiasm, and even the bigotries of the 

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