TRANSLATED FOR A CONTINENTAL AUDIENCE; NO COPY IN UK LIBRARIES. Full title reads: Preservatif contre l'Incredulité & le Libertinage... & ses deux Lettres aux Colonies de l'Amerique touchant l'Instruction des Négres. Traduit de l'Anglois, par Abraham Le Moine, Ministre de l'Eglise Anglicaine, & Chapelain du Duc de Portland. 8vo. (28); 82 pp; 107 pp, (1); 134 pp; 45 pp, 134-158 pp. Bound in contemporary mottled calf with gilt title label on spine. Joints very slightly cracked; otherwise a well-preserved copy, contents clean and fresh throughout. Extremely rare sole edition of this translation of six of Edmund Gibson’s pastoral letters to his congregants. The Bishop of London’s purview also extended to the American colonies, and his final ‘Exhortation’ as well as two of his letters are expressly addressed to the ‘Heads of the Families of the English Colonies in America” and the missionaries active on their plantations. The translator Abraham Le Moine (d. 1757) was an Englishman resident in London, son of Huguenot refugees; it is thus evident that he went to particular lengths to publicize Gibson’s directions on the Continent in the contemporary lingua franca of French. Le Moine addresses his preface directly to the Bishop of London, according to which the letters were translated with the express approbation of Gibson himself. Le Moine’s introductory text mainly decries Deism, Free-Thinkers, and the “corruption of morals, and in particular impurity, and debauchery” of his age, and is signed and dated from London, 1731. The letters had originally appeared under the title The Bishop of London's Three Pastoral Letters to the People of his Diocese… by Way of Preservative against the late Writings in Favour of Infidelity (1730-31, collected edition 1732); appended here are two further letters on the religious education of slaves in English colonies, The first, to the masters and mistresses of families in the English plantations abroad; exhorting them to encourage and promote the instruction of their negroes in the Christian faith. The second, to the missionaries there; directing them to distribute the said letter, and exhorting them to give their assistance towards the instruction of the negroes within their several parishes (London, 1727). “Appalled by the lack of progress of the Church of England among the plantation slaves, Gibson… asked his British and colonial readers to remember that the blacks ‘were truly a part of our nation, living under the same Government with ourselves, and contributing much by their labour to the support of our Government, and the increase of the trade and wealth of the kingdom’. (Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700-1850, pp. 86-87). OCLC shows just one copy in US libraries (JCB); COPAC shows none in UK libraries. No copy appears in auction records on RareBookHub. * Le Moine’s translation not in Sabin or Alden-Landis. On Le Moine, cf the DNB entry; cf also eg. Denzil Clifton, “Anglicanism and Negro Slavery in Colonial America” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church Vol. 39 (1970), pp. 29-70.