said: "For to sell Souls for Money seemeth to me to be dangerous
Merchandise, to sell away from all Means of Grace whom Christ hath
provided Means of Grace for you is the Way for us to be active in
destroying their Souls when they are highly obliged to seek their
Conversion and Salvation." Eliot bore it grievously that the souls of
the slaves were "exposed by their Masters to a destroying Ignorance
meerly for the Fear of thereby losing the Benefit of their
Vassalage."[2]

[Footnote 1: _Pennsylvania Magazine of History_, vol. xiii., p. 265.]

[Footnote 2: Locke, _Anti-slavery Before 1808_, p. 15; Mather, _Life
of John Eliot_, p. 14; _New Plymouth Colony Records_, vol. x., p.
452.]

Further interest in the work was manifested by Cotton Mather. He
showed his liberality in his professions published in 1693 in a set of
_Rules for the Society of Negroes_, intended to present the claims of
the despised race to the benefits of religious instruction.[1] Mather
believed that servants were in a sense like one's children, and that
their masters should train and furnish them with Bibles and other
religious books for which they should be given time to read. He
maintained that servants should be admitted to the religious exercises
of the family and was willing to employ such of them as were competent
to teach his children lessons of piety. Coming directly to the issue
of the day, Mather deplored the fact that the several plantations
which lived upon the labor of their Negroes were guilty of the
"prodigious Wickedness of deriding, neglecting, and opposing all
due Means of bringing the poor Negroes unto God." He hoped that
the masters, of whom God would one day require the souls of slaves