A free nation, which is its own master, is born to command the ocean. It cannot secure the dominion of the sea without seizing upon the land, which belongs to the first possessor; that is, to him who is able to drive out the ancient inhabitants. They are to be enslaved by force or fraud, and exterminated in order to get their possessions.
We come now to the conduct of a Protestant people towards the natives of their colonies; and happy would it be if we came with this change to a change in their policy and behaviour. But the Dutch, though zealous Protestants at home, were zealous Catholics abroad in cruelty and injustice. Styling themselves a reformed people, there was no reformation in their treatment of Indians or Caffres. They, as well as other Protestant nations, cast off the outward forms and many of the inward superstitions of the Roman church: but they were far, far indeed from comprehending Christianity in its glorious greatness; in the magnificence of its moral elevation; in the sublimity of its objects; in the purity of its feeling, and the beautiful humanity of its spirit. The temporal yoke of Rome was cast off, but the mental yoke still lay heavy on their souls, and it required ages of bitter experience to restore sufficiently their intellectual sensibility to permit them even to feel it. Popery was dethroned in them, but not destroyed. They recognized their rights as men, and the slavery under which they had been held; but their vision was not enough restored to allow them to recognize the rights of others, and to see that to hold others in slavery, was only to take themselves out of the condition of the victim, to put themselves into the more odious, criminal, and eventually disastrous one of the tyrant. They were still infinitely distant from the condition of freemen. They were free from the immediate compulsion of their spiritual task-masters, but they were not free from the iron which they had thrust into their very souls,—from the corrupt morals, the perverted principles, the debased tone of feeling and perception, which the Papal church had inflicted on them. The wretched substitution of ceremonies, legends, and false maxims, for the grand and regenerating doctrines of Christian truth, which had existed for more than a thousand years, had generated a spurious morality, which ages only could obliterate. It is a fallacy to suppose that the renunciation of the Romish faith, carried with it a renunciation of the habits of mind which it had created,—or that those who called themselves reformers were thoroughly reformed, and rebaptized with the purity and fulness of Christianity. Many and glorious examples were given of zeal for the right, even unto death; of the love of truth, which cast out all fear of flames and scaffolds; of that devotion to the dictates of conscience that shrunk from no sacrifice, however severe;—but even in the instance of the noblest of those noble martyrs, it would be self-delusion for us to suppose that they had sprung from the depth of darkness to perfect light at one leap; that they rose instantaneously from gross ignorance of Christian truths, to the perfection of knowledge; that they had miraculously cast off at one effort all slavery of spirit, and the dimness of intellectual vision, which were the work of ages. They had regained the wish and the will to explore the regions of truth; they had made some splendid advances, and shewn that they descried some of the most prominent features of the genuine faith: but they were, the best of them, but babes in Christ. To become full-grown men required the natural lapse of time; and to expect them to start up into the full standard of Christian stature, was to expect an impossibility. And if the brightest and most intrepid, and most honest intellects were thus circumstanced, what was the condition of the mass? That may be known by calling to mind how readily Protestants fell into the spirit of persecution, and into all the cruelties and outrages of their Popish predecessors. Ages upon ages were required, to clear away the dusty cobwebs of error, with which a spurious faith had involved them; and to raise again the Christian world to the height of Christian knowledge. We are yet far and very far from having escaped from the one, or risen to the other.