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Show ' ' ' 152 TIIE BIDLE V~. SLAVERY. Now, this either means that the Bible requires that all institutions be adjusted and harmonized with the moral law-the law of love-or it means nothing. For, we maintain, that slavery is per se wrong, where the enslaver bas no direct warrant from heaven, or the enslaved has not forfeited liberty by crime on principles of recognized and universal cqufty; and the whole Bible forbidding wrong must be held as forbidding slavery, or any arbitrary and inhuman tamperings with the inalienable rights of a fellow· creature. If slavery is not a wrong in itself, irrespective of what are called its abuses, then aU that is essential in it may be retained from age to age; and all the amelioration which the Christian law superinduces may be such as to consist with the violation of the natural prerogatives of humanity, and with the denial to man of the essential and dearest privileges of social and domestic life, with the denial of the rights of conscience too. For slavery, as distinguished from service by contract, is this thing and no other :-it is labor undefined, unrcwarded, on the condition of being used as vendible property, and every independent right of the slave, as an intellectual "-' uu '}1/t r ) ) I THE BIDLE VS. SLAVERY. 153 and moral being, is ignored. By practical indulgence such rights may be sometimes conceded. But the slave-law ceases as such when these are recognized. Now, we hold it a libel ou the Bible to affirm tl1at it sanctions such slavery. We must warn you of the fallacy that lies in this distinction of the thing itself, and its abuse. What is called the abuse here is the essence and the characteristic of the subject. Service as well as slavery may be abused. Everything may be abused. But, the claim of the slaveholder is itself the abuse of the God·m·dained relation of master and servant. Can men be regarded as a chattel ?-that is the question-and so regarded without his consent, a"d his family treated as such permanently, without his consent, or even with it? It comes of this bad interpretation of the Christian law, that in the nineteenth century slavery still re· mains,-is cherished. It is not that the principles of Christianity do not tend to extinguish it. But men, forcing their false interpretation on the Scriptures, plead their authority for a system or institution, to which their whole spirit is opposed,-and which con· fesses its unscriptural character by keeping out Chris- . tian light, and forbidding the Scriptures with the slave. 7• |