Seeing then no hope for the elevation of the Negro as a slave, he became a more determined abolitionist.
[Footnote 1: _Ibid._, p.

78.] William Jay, a son of the first Chief Justice of the United States, and an abolition preacher of the ardent type, later directed his attention to these conditions.

The keeping of human beings in heathen ignorance by a people professing to reverence the obligation of Christianity seemed to him an unpardonable sin.

He believed that the natural result of this "compromise of principle, this suppression of truth, this sacrifice to unanimity," had been the adoption of expediency as a standard of right and wrong in the place of the revealed will of God.[1] "Thus," continued he, "good men and good Christians have been tempted by their zeal for the American Colonization Society to countenance opinions and practices inconsistent with justice and humanity."[2] Jay charged to this disastrous policy of neglect the result that in 1835 only 245,000 of the 2,245,144 slaves had a saving knowledge of the religion of Christ.

He deplored the fact that unhappily the evil influence of the reactionaries had not been confined to their own circles but had to a lamentable extent "vitiated the moral sense" of other communities.
The proslavery leaders, he said, had reconciled public opinion to the continuance of slavery, and had aggravated those sinful prejudices which subjected the free blacks to insult and persecution and denied them the blessings of education and religious instruction.[3] [Footnote 1: Jay, _An Inquiry_, etc., p.