# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1864_S380
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

380 Miscellany.

A Learned Negro on Slavery. In the Acta historico-ecclesiastica
it is told of a Negro that, as a child of 7 or 8 years, already robbed
of his parents, he was sold to a Dutch ship's captain named Arnold
Steenhart, who had landed at a place on the African coast called the
River of St. Andrew. This man gave the young Negro to his friend
Jacob van Goch, a merchant belonging to the African Company, who was
then residing in Guinea. The latter gave the boy given to him the
name Capitein, formed a fatherly affection for him, and after some
years took him along on his return voyage to Europe, namely to his
own birthplace, The Hague. Here the Negro not only joyfully received
the instruction given him in God's Word, so that he soon received
baptism, and in it the names Jacobus Elisa Johannes, but also showed
as much desire as gift for study, so that, once properly equipped, he
might preach the Gospel to his poor, wretched brothers after the
flesh, in their mother tongue. His wish was granted him. After a
schooling of seven and a half years, spent chiefly on learning Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldean, he studied theology for four more years
at Leiden. In an oration held on his departure from the school at The
Hague for the university, our Negro dealt with the calling of the
Gentiles, and thereby showed that he had not, amid his language
studies, lost sight of his goal of going out in due time as a
missionary. Especially remarkable, however, is a Latin dissertation
which our Capitein wrote shortly before his departure from the
university, in the year 1742, and himself defended in a public
academic disputation under the presidency of the famous Reformed
theologian van den Honert, whereupon he followed a call to the castle
of St. George d'Elmina in Guinea, and there worked as a missionary
among the Negroes. The dissertation in question had, remarkably
enough, as its subject: "De servitute libertati christianae non
contraria,"*) that is, that slavery is not contrary to Christian
liberty. In the Acta a lengthy extract is given from this thorough
dissertation, which fills 10 printed sheets, and it would well be
worth reproducing here too, to the shame of the abolitionist
pseudo-theology, twisting of Scripture, and falsification of history
now spreading so widely — set forth by a Negro who had himself once
been a slave, and who went out to preach the Gospel to slaves, but not
the new humanist and Methodist gospel of a worldly and fleshly
[liberty], but rather the old Gospel of Christian, spiritual liberty,
namely liberty from the slavery of the devil, of sin, and of death.
(See Acta hist.-eccles., vol. VI, pp. 963–982.)

*) This Latin title is given by the Unpartheiische Kirchen-Historie,
vol. IV, p. 510.

────◆◆────