With falling oars they kept the time."

Unhappily, they very early became owners of slaves, in imitation of the
colonists around them. No positive condemnation of the evil system had
then been heard in the British islands. Neither English prelates nor
expounders at dissenting conventicles had aught to say against it. Few
colonists doubted its entire compatibility with Christian profession and
conduct. Saint and sinner, ascetic and worldling, united in its
practice. Even the extreme Dutch saints of Bohemia Manor community, the
pietists of John de Labadie, sitting at meat with hats on, and pausing
ever and anon with suspended mouthfuls to bear a brother's or sister's
exhortation, and sandwiching prayers between the courses, were waited
upon by negro slaves. Everywhere men were contending with each other
upon matters of faith, while, so far as their slaves were concerned,
denying the ethics of Christianity itself.

Such was the state of things when, in 1671, George Fox visited Barbadoes.
He was one of those men to whom it is given to discern through the mists
of custom and prejudice something of the lineaments of absolute truth,
and who, like the Hebrew lawgiver, bear with them, from a higher and
purer atmosphere, the shining evidence of communion with the Divine
Wisdom. He saw slavery in its mildest form among his friends, but his
intuitive sense of right condemned it. He solemnly admonished those who
held slaves to bear in mind that they were brethren, and to train them up
in the fear of God. "I desired, also," he says, "that they would cause
their overseers to deal gently and mildly with their negroes, and not use
cruelty towards them as the manner of some hath been and is; and that,
after certain years of servitude, they should make them free."

In 1675, the companion of George Fox, William Edmundson, revisited