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Show 144 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. can any thing be more exquisitely touching than those words, ' Shall I hide. from Abraham that thing which I do?' It is the language of a friend who feels that concealment would wrong the confidential intimacy" existing. The love of this venerable servant of God in his promptness to immolate his son bas been the theme of apostles and preachers for ages; and such was his faith, that all who believe arc called 'the children of faithful Abraham.' This Abraham, you admit, held slaves. Who is surprised that Whitefield, with this single fact before him could not believe slavery to be a sin ? Yet if ;our definition of slavery be co!Tect, holy Abraham lived all his life in the commission of one of the most aggravated crimes against God and man which can be conceived. llis life was spent in outraging the rights of hundreds of human beings, as moral, intellectual, immortal, fallen creatures, and in violating their relations as parents and children, and husbands and wives. And God not only connived at this appalling iniquity, but, in the covenant of circumcision made with Abraham, expressly mentions it, and confirms the patriarch in it, speaking of tl10se 'bought with his money,' and rec1uiring him to circumcise them. ARGUMENT FROM TllE SCRIPTURES. 145 Why, at the very first blush, every Christian will cry out against this statement. To this, however, you must come, or yield your position; and this is only the first utterly incredible and monstrous corollary involved in the assertion that slavery is essentially and always 'a sin of appalling magnitude.'" Slavery among the llehrews, however, was not left merely to a tacit or implied sanction. It was thus sanctioned by the express legislation of the Most lligh: "Both thy bondmen and thy handmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that arc round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and handmaids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do .sojoum among yon, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they bcgat in your land; and they shaJI be yottr possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever."* Now these words are so perfectly explicit, that there is no getting around them. Even Dr. Wayland, as we have seen, admits that the authority to take slaves seems K Lev. nv. 44, 15, 46. 13 |