The End of Enslavement in the British West Indies

The End of Enslavement in the British West Indies is presented as both a major change in the condition of the enslaved and a turning point for Christian mission. The book emphasizes its consequences in Jamaica: after a period of violence against Jesus Christ’s disciples, the island was open to missionary labor, and missionaries entered the field. The author reads that opening as Providence removing an obstacle to the preaching of the gospel.

Circumstances in Jamaica

The account places abolition against recent persecution in Jamaica. The disciples of Jesus Christ had suffered the destruction of their places of worship, the plundering of their property, imprisonment, and murder. The book gives no further particulars about these attacks, but uses their contrast with the island’s changed circumstances to mark the scale of the reversal: Jamaica, once a place of danger for the disciples, now stood open to missionary work.

The book describes slavery in the West Indies as cruel and says it had been abolished. It does not specify the date, legislation, or administrative process of abolition, nor does it describe the subsequent conditions of formerly enslaved people. Its focus is the consequence it identifies for religious work: missionaries could enter Jamaica and preach to people whom the author describes as injured by slavery.

Missionary Consequences

The author makes the opening of Jamaica’s mission field the event’s central practical consequence. Missionaries had already entered, and the island is characterized as ready for their labor. Abolition thus appears not merely as an end to a system of enslavement, but as a change in what Christian workers could do there: a barrier to preaching had been removed.

The passage situates this development within a wider rise in organized religious activity. The author points to the many institutions established to spread religious teaching, including missionary, Bible, and education societies, and treats their increased activity as evidence of a broader movement toward worldwide gospel proclamation. The end of slavery in the British West Indies is one part of that account of obstacles being removed and new opportunities for mission opening.

The Book’s Providential Interpretation

The author attributes the opening of Jamaica to the providential rule of Jesus Christ, who, in the book’s account, removed the barriers and opened the way for missionaries. This is an interpretation of the event rather than a description of its political mechanism: the passage does not identify particular decision-makers or explain how abolition was achieved. Instead, it gives the change a place in a history of Providence in which events that enable the spread of the gospel are understood as part of a larger divine purpose.

That reading follows the book’s broader argument that apparently ordinary historical developments can serve an intended end without suspending the usual course of events. In its treatment of the book of Esther, it describes a sequence of human actions and seemingly contingent circumstances as contributing to deliverance, while maintaining that human agents remain responsible for their choices. Applied to Jamaica, this framework makes the new scope for missionary work a sign of Providence at work through historical change.

Place in a Wider Historical Argument

The book connects the event to its account of the gospel’s predicted spread among nations. It argues that this spread depended on a long succession of developments, including discoveries and inventions that made the Scriptures and Christian teaching more widely accessible. Its examples include the mariner’s compass, which enabled voyages beyond familiar coasts, and the Reformation, whose progress it also interprets as providentially guided.

Within this large account, Jamaica’s opening to missionaries is a specific social and religious consequence of abolition, not a complete history of emancipation across the West Indies. The passage’s emphasis is on what changed for Christian mission and on the author’s theological explanation of that change: the removal of an obstacle allowed preaching to proceed, and that opportunity was understood as part of the Providence directing the spread of the gospel.