Chapter 31 of 69
A PORTION OF AN ACT OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN 1800.
The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War · Carter Godwin Woodson
The Assembly recommended:
"2. The instruction of Negroes, the poor and those who are destitute of the means of grace in various parts of this extensive country; whoever contemplates the situation of this numerous class of persons in the United States, their gross ignorance of the plainest principles of religion, their immorality and profaneness, their vices and dissoluteness of manners, must be filled with anxiety for their present welfare, and above all for their future and eternal happiness.
"3. The purchasing and disposing of Bibles and also of books and short essays on the great principles of religion and morality, calculated to impress the minds of those to whom they are given with a sense of their duty both to God and man, and consequently of such a nature as to arrest the attention, interest the curiosity and touch the feelings of those to whom they are given."—Act and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. in the Year 1800, Philadelphia.