Sermons on Several Subjects
The collected sermons of Beilby Porteus, bishop of Chester and then of London. Sermon 17, preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1783, concerns the slaves on the Society’s own plantations in Barbados.
Porteus, then bishop of Chester, preached the seventeenth sermon in February 1783 before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Its printed title is “The civilization, improvement, and conversion of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India islands recommended”. He speaks of the Society’s “trust-estates” in Barbados, left to it by General Codrington, and of “the slaves employed on their plantations”, and he urges the Society to make them a model of Christian instruction.
The sermon is cited as the Society’s own preacher describing, before the Society, the fact that it held enslaved people. Thomas Clarkson counts Porteus, from this sermon onward, among the friends of abolition.
Cited in
- 25 March 1807, firm date