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+Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Slavery Ordained of God
+
+Author: Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
+Posting Date: April 6, 2014 [EBook #9171]
+Release Date: October, 2005
+First Posted: September 10, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD
+
+By
+
+Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+
+"The powers that be are ordained of God." Romans xiii. 1.
+
+
+TO
+The Men
+NORTH AND SOUTH,
+WHO HONOR THE WORD OF GOD
+AND
+LOVE THEIR COUNTRY.
+
+
+
+
+Preface.
+
+
+
+The book I give to the public, is not made up of isolated articles. It is
+one harmonious demonstration--that slavery is part of the government
+ordained in certain conditions of fallen mankind. I present the subject in
+the form of speeches, actually delivered, and letters written just as
+published. I adopt this method to make a readable book.
+
+I give it to the North and South--to maintain harmony among Christians,
+and to secure the integrity of the union of this great people.
+
+This harmony and union can be preserved only by the view presented in this
+volume,--_i.e._ that _slavery is of God_, and to continue for the good of
+the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family,
+until another and better destiny may be unfolded.
+
+The _one great idea_, which I submit to North and South, is expressed in
+the speech, first in order, delivered in the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, May 27, 1853. I therein say:--
+
+"Let us then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend _two
+ideas_, and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern
+philanthropist learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave
+is not sin _per se_. Let him learn that God says nowhere it is sin. Let
+him learn that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no
+law there is no sin, and that _the Golden Rule_ may exist in the
+relations of slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil _in
+certain circumstances_. Let him learn that _equality_ is only the highest
+form of social life; that _subjection_ to authority, even _slavery_, may,
+in _given conditions_, be _for a time_ better than freedom to the slave
+of any complexion. Let him learn that _slavery_, like _all evils_, has
+its _corresponding_ and _greater good_; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded _compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa_. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself: And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+_God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual_.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny."
+
+All which comes after, in the speech delivered in New York, 1856, and in
+the letters, is just the expansion of this one controlling thought, which
+must be understood, believed, and acted out North and South.
+
+The Author.
+
+Written in Cleveland, Ohio, May 28, 1857.
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+Speech Before the General Assembly at Buffalo
+Speech Before the General Assembly at New York
+Letter to Rev. A. Blackburn
+What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?
+
+Letters to Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+  I.--Results of the slavery agitation--Declaration of Independence--
+      The way men are made infidels--Testimonies of General Assemblies
+ II.--Government over man a divine institute
+III.--Man-stealing
+ IV.--The Golden Rule
+
+
+
+
+Speech Delivered at Buffalo, Before the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church.
+
+
+
+To understand the following speech, the reader will be pleased to
+learn--if he don't know already--that the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, before its division in 1838, and since,--both Old
+School and New School,--has been, for forty years and more, bearing
+testimony, after a fashion, against the system of slavery; that is to say,
+affirming, in one breath, that slave-holding is a "blot on our holy
+religion," &c. &c.; and then, in the next utterance, making all sorts of
+apologies and justifications for the slave-holder. Thus: this august body
+has been in the habit of telling the Southern master (especially in the
+Detroit resolutions of 1850) that he is a _sinner_, hardly meet to be
+called a _Christian_; but, nevertheless, if he will only sin "from
+unavoidable necessity, imposed by the laws of the States,"--if he will
+only sin under the "obligations of guardianship,"--if he will only sin
+"from the demands of humanity,"--why, then, forsooth, he may be a
+slave-holder as long as _he has a mind to_. Yea, he may hold one slave,
+one hundred or one thousand slaves, and till the day of judgment.
+
+Happening to be in attendance, as a member of the body, in Buffalo, May,
+1853, when, as usual, the system of slavery was touched, in a series of
+questions sent down to the church courts below, I made the following
+remarks, in good-natured ridicule of such preposterous and stultifying
+testimony; and, as an argument, opening the views I have since reproduced
+in the second speech of this volume, delivered in the General Assembly
+which convened in New York, May, 1856, and also in the letters
+following:--
+
+BUFFALO, FRIDAY, May 27, 1853.
+
+The order of the day was reached at a quarter before eleven, and the
+report read again,--viz.:
+
+"1. That this body shall reaffirm the doctrine of the second resolution
+adopted by the General Assembly, convened in Detroit, in 1850, and,
+
+"2. That with an express disavowal of any intention to be impertinently
+inquisitorial, and for the sole purpose of arriving at the truth, so as to
+correct misapprehensions and allay all causeless irritation, a committee
+be appointed of one from each of the synods of Kentucky, Tennessee,
+Missouri, and Virginia, who shall be requested to report to the next
+General Assembly on the following points:--1. The number of slave-holders
+in connection with the churches, and the number of slaves held by them. 2.
+The extent to which slaves are held from an unavoidable necessity imposed
+by the laws of the States, the obligations of guardianship, and the
+demands of humanity. 3. Whether the Southern churches regard the
+sacredness of the marriage relation as it exists among the slaves; whether
+baptism is duly administered to the children of the slaves professing
+Christianity, and in general, to what extent and in what manner provision
+is made for the religious well-being of the slave," &c. &c.
+
+Dr. Ross moved to amend the report by substituting the following,--with
+an express disavowal of being impertinently inquisitorial:--that a
+committee of _one_ from each of the Northern synods of ---- be appointed,
+who shall be requested to report to the next General Assembly,--
+
+1. The number of Northern church-members concerned, directly or
+indirectly, in building and fitting out ships for the African slave-trade,
+and the slave-trade between the States.
+
+2. The number of Northern church-members who traffic with slave-holders,
+and are seeking to make money by selling them negro-clothing, handcuffs,
+and cowhides.
+
+3. The number of Northern church-members who have sent orders to New
+Orleans, and other Southern cities, to have slaves sold, to pay debts
+owing them from the South. [See Uncle Tom's Cabin.]
+
+4. The number of Northern church-members who buy the cotton, sugar, rice,
+tobacco, oranges, pine-apples, figs, ginger, cocoa, melons, and a thousand
+other things, raised by slave-labor.
+
+5. The number of Northern church-members who have intermarried with
+slave-holders, and have thus become slave-owners themselves, or enjoy the
+wealth made by the blood of the slave,--especially if there be any
+Northern ministers of the gospel in such a predicament.
+
+6. The number of Northern church-members who are the descendants of the
+men who kidnapped negroes in Africa and brought them to Virginia and New
+England in former years.
+
+7. The aggregate and individual wealth of members thus descended, and what
+action is best to compel them to disgorge this blood-stained gold, or to
+compel them to give dollar for dollar in equalizing the loss of the South
+by emancipation.
+
+8. The number of Northern church-members, ministers especially, who have
+advocated _murder_ in resistance to the laws of the land.
+
+9. The number of Northern church-members who own stock in under-ground
+railroads, running off fugitive slaves, and in Sabbath-breaking railroads
+and canals.
+
+10. That a special commission be sent up Red River, to ascertain whether
+Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to death, (and who was a Northern
+_gentleman_,) be not still in connection with some Northern church in good
+and regular standing.
+
+11. The number of Northern church-members who attend meetings of
+Spiritual Rappers,--or Bloomers,--or Women's-Rights Conventions.
+
+12. The number of Northern church-members who are cruel husbands.
+
+13. The number of Northern church-members who are hen-pecked husbands.
+
+[As it is always difficult to know the temper of speaker and audience from
+a printed report, it is due alike to Dr. R., to the whole Assembly, and
+the galleries, to say, that he, in reading these resolutions, and
+throughout his speech, evinced great good-humour and kindness of feeling,
+which was equally manifested by the Assembly and spectators, repeatedly,
+while he was on the floor.]
+
+Dr. Ross then proceeded:--Mr. Moderator, I move this amendment in the best
+spirit. I desire to imitate the committee in their refinement and delicacy
+of distinction. I disavow all intention to be _impertinently_
+inquisitorial. I intend to be inquisitorial, as the committee say they
+are,--but not _impertinently_ so. No, sir; not at all; not at all.
+(Laughter.) Well, sir, we of the South, who desire the removal of the evil
+of slavery, and believe it will pass away in the developments of
+Providence, are grieved when we read your graphic, shuddering pictures of
+the "middle passage,"--the slave-ship, piling up her canvas, as the shot
+pours after her from English or American guns,--see her again and again
+hurrying hogshead after hogshead, filled with living slaves, into the
+deep, and, thus lightened, escape. Sir, what horror to believe that
+clipper-ship was built by the hands of Northern, noisy Abolition
+church-members! ["Yes, I know some in New York and Boston," said one in
+the crowd.] Again, sir, when we walk along your _Broadways_, and see, as
+we do, the soft hands of your church-members sending off to the South, not
+only clothing for the slave, but manacles and whips, manufactured
+expressly for him,--what must we think of your consistency of character?
+[True, true.] And what must we think of your self-righteousness, when we
+know your church-members order the sale of slaves,--yes, slaves such as
+St. Clair's,--and under circumstances involving all the separations and
+all the loathsome things you so mournfully deplore? Your Mrs. Stowe says
+so, and it is so, without her testimony. I have read that splendid, bad
+book. Splendid in its genius, over which I have wept, and laughed, and got
+mad, (here some one said, "All at the same time?") yes--all at the same
+time. Bad in its theology, bad in its morality, bad in its temporary evil
+influence here in the North, in England, and on the continent of Europe;
+bad, because her isolated cruelties will be taken (whether so meant by her
+or not) as the general condition of Southern life,--while her Shelbys, and
+St. Clairs, and Evas, will be looked upon as angel-visitors, lingering for
+a moment in that earthly hell. The _impression made by the book is a
+falsehood_.
+
+Sir, why do your Northern church-members and philanthropists buy Southern
+products at all? You know you are purchasing cotton, rice, sugar,
+sprinkled with blood, literally, you say, from the lash of the driver! Why
+do you buy? What's the difference between my filching this blood-stained
+cotton from the outraged negro, and your standing by, taking it from me?
+What's the difference? You, yourselves, say, in your abstractions, there
+is no difference; and yet you daily stain your hands in this horrid
+traffic. You hate the traitor, but you love the treason. Your ladies,
+too,--oh, how they shun the slave-owner _at a distance_, in _the
+abstract_! But alas, when they see him in the _concrete_,--when they see
+the slave-owner _himself_, standing before them,--not the brutal driver,
+but the splendid gentleman, with his unmistakable grace of carriage and
+ease of manners,--why, lo, behold the lady says, "Oh, fie on your
+slavery!--what a _wretch_ you are! But, indeed, sir, I love your
+sugar,--and truly, truly, sir, _wretch_ as you are, I love you too." Your
+gentlemen talk just the same way when they behold our matchless women. And
+well for us all it is, that your good taste, and hearts, can thus
+appreciate our genius, and accomplishments, and fascinations, and
+loveliness, and sugar, and cotton. Why, sir, I heard this morning, from
+one pastor only, of two or three of his members thus intermarried in the
+South. May I thus give the mildest rebuke to your inconsistency of
+conduct? (Much good-natured excitement.)
+
+Sir, may we know who are the descendants of the New England kidnappers?
+What is their wealth? Why, here you are, all around me. You, gentlemen,
+made the best of that bargain. And you have kept every dollar of your
+money from the charity of emancipating the slave. You have left us,
+unaided, to give millions. Will you now come to our help? Will you give
+dollar for dollar to equalize our loss? [Here many voices cried out, "Yes,
+yes, we will."]
+
+Yes, yes? Then pour out your millions. Good. I may thank you personally.
+My own emancipated slaves would to-day be worth greatly more than
+$20,000. Will you give me back $10,000? Good. I need it now.
+
+I recommend to you, sirs, to find out your advocates of _murder_,--your
+owners of stock in under-ground railroads,--your Sabbath-breakers for
+money. I particularly urge you to find Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to
+death. He is a Northern _gentleman_, although having a somewhat Southern
+name. Now, sir, you know the Assembly was embarrassed all yesterday by
+the inquiry how the Northern churches may find their absent members, and
+what to do with them. Here then, sir, is a chance for you. Send a
+committee up Red River. You may find Legree to be a Garrison, Phillips,
+Smith, or runaway husband from some Abby Kelly. [Here Rev. Mr. Smith
+protested against Legree being proved to be a Smith. Great laughter.
+[Footnote: This gentleman was soon after made a D.D., and I think in part
+for that witticism.]] I move that you bring him back to lecture on the
+_cuteness_ there is in leaving a Northern church, going South, changing
+his name, buying slaves, and calculating, without _guessing_, what the
+profit is of killing a negro with inhuman labor above the gain of
+treating him with kindness.
+
+I have little to say of spirit-rappers, women's-rights conventionists,
+Bloomers, cruel husbands, or hen-pecked. But, if we may believe your own
+serious as well as caricature writers, you have things up here of which we
+down South know very little indeed. Sir, we have no young Bloomers, with
+hat to one side, cigar in mouth, and cane tapping the boot, striding up to
+a mincing young gentleman with long curls, attenuated waist, and soft
+velvet face,--the boy-lady to say, "May I see you home, sir?" and the
+lady-boy to reply, "I thank ye--no; pa will send the carriage." Sir, we of
+the South don't understand your women's-rights conventions. Women have
+their wrongs. "The Song of the Shirt,"--Charlotte Elizabeth,--many, many
+laws,--tell her wrongs. But your convention ladies despise the Bible. Yes,
+sir; and we of the South are afraid _of them_, and _for you_. When women
+despise the Bible, what next? _Paris,--then the City of the Great Salt
+Lake,--then Sodom, before_ and _after the Dead Sea_. Oh, sir, if slavery
+tends in any way to give the _honour of chivalry_ to Southern young
+gentlemen towards ladies, and the exquisite delicacy and heavenly
+integrity and love to Southern maid and matron, it has then a glorious
+blessing with its curse.
+
+Sir, your inquisitorial committee, and the North so far as represented by
+them, (a small fraction, I know,) have, I take it, caught a Tartar this
+time. Boys say with us, and everywhere, I _reckon_, "You worry my dog, and
+I'll worry your cat." Sir, it is just simply a _fixed fact: the South will
+not submit to these questions_. No, not for an instant. We will not permit
+you to approach us at all. If we are morbidly sensitive, you have made us
+so. But you are directly and grossly violating the Constitution of the
+Presbyterian Church. The book forbids you to put such questions; the book
+forbids _you to begin discipline_; the book forbids your sending this
+committee to help common fame bear testimony against us; the book guards
+the honour of our humblest member, minister, church, presbytery, against
+all this impertinently-inquisitorial action. Have you a _prosecutor_, with
+his definite charge and witnesses? Have you _Common Fame_, with her
+specified charges and witnesses? Have you a request from the South that
+you send a committee to inquire into slanders? No. Then hands off. As
+gentlemen you may ask us these questions,--we will answer you. But,
+ecclesiastically, you cannot speak in this matter. You have no power to
+move as you propose.
+
+I beg leave to say, just here, that Tennessee [Footnote: At that time I
+resided in Tennessee.] will be more calm under this movement than any
+other slave-region. Tennessee has been ever high above the storm, North
+and South,--especially we of the mountains. Tennessee!--"there she
+is,--look at her,"--binding this Union together like a great, long,
+broad, deep stone,--more splendid than all in the temple of Baalbec or
+Solomon. Tennessee!--there she is, in her calm valour. I will not lower
+her by calling her unconquerable, for she has never been assailed; but I
+call her ever-victorious. King's Mountain,--her pioneer
+battles:--Talladega, Emucfau, Horse-shoe, New Orleans, San Jacinto,
+Monterey, the Valley of Mexico. Jackson represented her well in his
+chivalry from South Carolina,--his fiery courage from Virginia and
+Kentucky,--all tempered by Scotch-Irish Presbyterian prudence from
+Tennessee. We, in his spirit, have looked on this storm for years
+untroubled. Yes, Jackson's old bones rattled in their grave when that
+infamous disunion convention met in Nashville, and its members turned
+pale and fled aghast. Yes, Tennessee, in her mighty million, feels
+secure; and, in her perfect preparation to discuss this question,
+politically, ecclesiastically, morally, metaphysically, or physically,
+with the extreme North or South, she is willing and able _to persuade
+others to be calm_. In this connection, I wish to say, for the South to
+the North, and to the world, that we have no fears from our
+slave-population. There might be a momentary insurrection and bloodshed;
+but destruction to the black man would be inevitable. The Greeks and
+Romans controlled immense masses of white slaves,--many of them as
+intelligent as their lords. Schoolmasters, fabulists, and poets were
+slaves. Athens, with her thirty thousand freemen, governed half a
+million of bondmen. Single Roman patricians owned thirty thousand. If,
+then, the phalanx and the legion mastered such slaves for ages, when
+battle was physical force of man to man, how certain it is that
+infantry, cavalry, and artillery could hold in bondage millions of
+Africans for a thousand years!
+
+But, dear brethren, our Southern philanthropists do not seek to have this
+unending bondage; Oh, no, no. And I earnestly entreat you to "stand still
+and see the salvation of the Lord." Assume a masterly inactivity, and you
+will behold all you desire and pray for,--you will see _America liberated
+from the curse of slavery_.
+
+The great question of the world is, WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE
+AMERICAN SLAVE?--WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MASTER? The
+following _extract from the "Charleston Mercury"_ gives my view of the
+subject with great and condensed particularity:--
+
+"Married, Thursday, 26th inst., the Hon. Cushing Kewang, Secretary of
+State of the United States, to Laura, daughter of Paul Coligny,
+Vice-President of the United States, and one of our noblest Huguenot
+families. We learn that this distinguished gentleman, with his bride, will
+visit his father, the Emperor of China, at his summer palace, in Tartary,
+north of Pekin, and return to the Vice-President's Tea Pavilion, on Cooper
+River, ere the meeting of Congress." The editor of the "Mercury" goes on
+to say: "This marriage in high life is only one of many which have
+signalized that immense emigration from Christianized China during the
+last seventy-five years, whereby Charleston has a population of 1,250,000,
+and the State of South Carolina over 5,000,000,--an emigration which has
+wonderfully harmonized with the great exodus of the negro race to
+Africa." [Some gentleman here requested to know of Dr. Ross the date of
+the "Charleston Mercury" recording this marriage. The doctor replied, "The
+date is 27th May, 1953, exactly one hundred years from this day." Great
+laughter.]
+
+Sir, this is a dream; but it is not all a dream. No, I verily believe you
+have there the Gordian knot of slavery untied; you have there the solution
+of the problem; you have there the curtain up, and the last scene in the
+last act of the great drama of Ham.
+
+I am satisfied with the tendencies of things. I stand on the mountain-peak
+above the clouds. I see, far beyond the storm, the calm sea and blue sky;
+I see the Canaan of the African. I like to stand there on the Nebo of his
+exodus, and look across, not the Jordan, but the Atlantic. I see the
+African crossing as certainly as if I gazed upon the ocean divided by a
+great wind, and piled up in walls of green glittering glass on either
+hand, the dry ground, the marching host, and the pillar of cloud and of
+fire. I look over upon the Niger, black with death to the white man,
+instinct with life to the children of Ham. _There_ is the black man's
+home. Oh, how strange that you of the North see not how you degrade him
+when you keep him here! You will not let him vote; you will not let him
+rise to honors or social equality; you will not let him hold a pew in your
+churches. Send him away, then; tell him, begone. Be urgent, like the
+Egyptians: send him out of this land. _There_, in his fatherland, he will
+exhibit his own type of Christianity. He is, of all races, the most gentle
+and kind. The _man_, the most submissive; the _woman_, the most
+affectionate. What other slaves would love their masters better than
+themselves?--rock them and fan them in their cradles? caress them--how
+tenderly!--boys and girls? honor them, grown up, as superior beings? and,
+in thousands of illustrious instances, be willing to give life, and, in
+fact, die, to serve or save them? Verily, verily, this emancipated race
+may reveal the most amiable form of spiritual life, and the _jewel_ may
+glitter on the Ethiop's brow in meaning more sublime than all in the
+poet's imagery. Brethren, let them go; and, when they are gone,--ay,
+before they go away,--rear a monument; let it grow in greatness, if not on
+your highest mountain, in your hearts,--in lasting memory of the
+South,--in memory of your wrong to the South,--in memory of the
+self-denial of the South, and her philanthropy in training the slave to
+be free, enlightened, and Christian.
+
+Can all this be? Can this double emigration civilize Africa and more than
+re-people the South? Yes; and I regard the difficulties presented here, in
+Congress, or the country, as little worth. God intends both emigrations.
+And, without miracle, he will accomplish both. Difficulties! There are no
+difficulties. Half a million emigrate to our shores, from Ireland, and all
+Europe, every year. And you gravely talk of difficulties in the negro's
+way to Africa! Verily, God will unfold their destiny as fast, and as
+fully, as he sees best for the highest good of the slave, the highest good
+of the master, and the glory of Christ in Africa.
+
+And, sir, there are forty thousand Chinese in California. And in Cuba,
+this day, American gentlemen are cultivating sugar, with Chinese hired
+labor, more profitably than the Spaniards and their slaves. Oh! there is
+China--half the population of the globe--just fronting us across that
+peaceful sea,--her poor, living on rats and a pittance of red rice,--her
+rich, hoarding millions in senseless idolatry, or indulging in the
+luxuries of birds'-nests and roasted ice. Massed together, they must
+migrate. Where can they go? They must come to our shores. They must come,
+even did God forbid them. But he will hasten their coming. They can live
+in the extremest South. It is their latitude,--their side of the ocean.
+They can cultivate cotton, rice, sugar, tea, and the silkworm. Their
+skill, their manipulation, is unrivalled. Their commonest gong you can
+neither make nor explain. They are a law-abiding people, without castes,
+accustomed to rise by merit to highest distinctions, and capable of the
+noblest training, when their idolatry, which is waxing old as a garment,
+shall be folded up as a vesture and changed for _that_ whose years shall
+not fail. The English ambassador assures us that the Chinese negotiator of
+the late treaty was a splendid gentleman, and a diplomatist to move in any
+court of Europe. Shem, then, can mingle with Japheth in America.
+
+The Chinese must come. God will bring them. He will fulfil Benton's noble
+thought. The railroad must complete the voyage of Columbus. The statue of
+the Genoese, on some peak of the Rocky Mountains, high above the flying
+cars, must point to the West, saying, "There is the East! There is India
+and Cathay."
+
+Let us, then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend _two ideas_,
+and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern philanthropist
+learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave is not sin
+_per se_. Let him learn that God nowhere says it is sin. Let him learn
+that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no law,
+there is no sin; and that _the golden rule_ may exist in the relations of
+slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil _in certain
+circumstances_. Let him learn that _equality_ is only the highest form of
+social life; that _subjection_ to authority, even _slavery_, may, in
+_given conditions_, be _for a time_ better than freedom to the slave, of
+any complexion. Let him learn that _slavery_, like _all evils_, has its
+_corresponding_ and _greater good_; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded _compared with his master_, is _elevated_ and _ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa_. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself. And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+_God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual_.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away, in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny.
+
+Ham will be ever lower than Shem; Shem will be ever lower than Japheth.
+All will rise in the Christian grandeur to be revealed. Ham will be lower
+than Shem, because he was sent to Central Africa. Man south of the
+Equator--in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa--is
+inferior to his Northern brother. The _blessing_ was upon Shem in his
+magnificent Asia. The _greater blessing_ was upon Japheth in his
+man-developing Europe. _Both blessings_ will be combined, in America,
+_north of the Zone_, in commingled light and life. I see it all in the
+first symbolical altar of Noah on that mound at the base of Ararat. The
+father of all living men bows before the incense of sacrifice, streaming
+up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all
+flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of
+the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness,
+near the long-necked giraffe, type of his _Africa_,--his magnificent wife,
+seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her
+long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered with gems from
+mines before the flood. Higher up is Shem, leaning his arm over that
+mouse-colored horse,--his _Arab_ steed. His wife, in pure white linen,
+feeds the elephant, and plays with his lithe proboscis,--the mother of
+Terah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, and Christ. And yet she looks
+up, and bows in mild humility, to _her_ of Japheth, seated amid plumed
+birds, in robes like the sky. Her noble lord, meanwhile, high above all,
+stands, with folded arms, following that eagle which wheels up towards
+Ararat, displaying his breast glittering with stars and stripes of scarlet
+and silver,--radiant heraldry, traced by the hand of God. Now he purifies
+his eye in the sun, and now he spreads his broad wings in symbolic flight
+to the _West_, until lost to the prophetic eye of Japheth, under the bow
+of splendors set that day in the cloud. God's covenant with man,--oh, may
+the bow of covenant between us be here to-day, that the waters of _this
+flood_ shall never again threaten our beloved land!
+
+
+
+
+Speech Delivered in the General Assembly
+New York, 1856.
+
+
+
+The circumstances, under which this speech was delivered, are sufficiently
+shown in the statement below.
+
+It was not a hasty production. After being spoken, it was prepared for the
+"Journal of Commerce," with the greatest care I could give to it: most of
+it was written again and again. Unlike Pascal, who said, as to his longest
+and inferior sixteenth letter, that he had not had time to make it
+shorter, I had time; and I did condense in that one speech the matured
+reflections of my whole life. I am calmly satisfied I am right. I am sure
+God has said, and does say, "Well done."
+
+The speech brings to view a wide range of thought, all belonging to the
+subject of slavery, of immense importance. As introductory,--there is the
+question of the abolition agitation the last thirty years; then, what is
+right and wrong, and the foundation of moral obligation; then, the
+definition of sin; next, the origin of human government, and the
+relations, in which God has placed men under his rule of subjection;
+finally, the word of God is brought to sustain all the positions taken.
+
+The challenge to argue the question of slavery from the Bible was thrown
+down on the floor of the Assembly, as stated. Presently I took up the
+gauntlet, and made this argument. The challenger never claimed his glove,
+then nor since; nor has anybody, so far as I know, attempted to refute
+this speech. Nothing has come to my ears (save as to two points, to be
+noticed hereafter) but reckless, bold denial of God's truth, infidel
+affirmation without attempt at proof, and denunciations of myself.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_ having said that he would argue the question on the Bible at
+a following time, Dr. Ross rose, when he took his seat, and, taking his
+position on the platform near the Moderator's chair, said,--
+
+"I accept the challenge given by Dr. Wisner, to argue the question of
+slavery from the Scriptures."
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--Does the brother propose to go into it here?
+
+_Dr. Ross_.--Yes, sir.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--Well, I did not propose to go into it here.
+
+_Dr. Ross_.--You gave the challenge, and I accept it.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--I said I would argue it at a proper time; but it is no
+matter. Go ahead.
+
+_Dr. Beman_ hoped the discussion would be ruled out. He did not think it a
+legitimate subject to go into,--Moses and the prophets, Christ and his
+apostles, and all intermediate authorities, on the subject of what the
+General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America had done.
+
+_Judge Jessup_ considered the question had been opened by this report of
+the majority: after which _Dr. Beman_ withdrew his objection, and _Dr.
+Ross_ proceeded.
+
+I am not a slave-holder. Nay, I have shown some self-denial in that
+matter. I emancipated slaves whose money-value would now be $40,000. In
+the providence of God, my riches have entirely passed from me. I do not
+mean that, like the widow, I gave all the living I had. My estate was then
+greater than that slave-property. I merely wish to show I have no selfish
+motive in giving, as I shall, the true Southern defence of slavery.
+(Applause.) I speak from Huntsville, Alabama, my present home. That gem of
+the South, that beautiful city where the mountain softens into the
+vale,--where the water gushes, a great fountain, from the rock,--where
+around that living stream there are streets of roses, and houses of
+intelligence and gracefulness and gentlest hospitality,--and, withal,
+where so high honor is ever given to the ministers of God.
+
+Speaking then from that region where "_Cotton is king_," I affirm,
+contrary as my opinion is to that most common in the South, that the
+slavery agitation has accomplished and will do great good. I said so, to
+ministerial and political friends, twenty-five years ago. I have always
+favored the agitation,--just as I have always countenanced discussion
+upon all subjects. I felt that the slavery question needed examination.
+I believed it was not understood in its relations to the Bible and human
+liberty. Sir, the light is spreading North and South. 'Tis said, I know,
+this agitation has increased the severity of slavery. True, but for a
+moment only, in the days of the years of the life of this noble problem.
+Farmers tell us that deep ploughing in poor ground will, for a year or
+two, give you a worse crop than before you went so deep; but that that
+deep ploughing will turn up the under-soil, and sun and air and rain will
+give you harvests increasingly rich. So, this moral soil, North and
+South, was unproductive. It needed deep ploughing. For a time the harvest
+was worse. Now it is becoming more and more abundant. The political
+controversy, however fierce and threatening, is only for power. But the
+moral agitation is for the harmony of the Northern and Southern mind, in
+the right interpretations of Scripture on this great subject, and, of
+course, for the ultimate union of the hearts of all sensible people, to
+fulfil God's intention,--to bless the white man and the black man in
+America. I am sure of this. I take a wide view of the progress of the
+destiny of this vast empire. I see God in America. I see him in the North
+and in the South. I see him more honored in the South to-day than he was
+twenty-five years ago; and that that higher regard is due, mainly, to the
+agitation of the slavery question. Do you ask how? Why, sir, this is the
+how. Twenty-five years ago the religious mind of the South was leavened
+by wrong Northern training, on the great point of the right and wrong of
+slavery. Meanwhile, powerful intellects in the South, following the mere
+light of a healthy good sense, guided by the common grace of God, reached
+the very truth of this great matter,--namely, that the relation of the
+master and slave is not sin; and that, notwithstanding its admitted
+evils, it is a connection between the highest and the lowest races of
+man, revealing influences which may be, and will be, most benevolent for
+the ultimate good of the master and the slave,--conservative on the
+Union, by preserving the South from all forms of Northern fanaticism, and
+thereby being a great balance-wheel in the working of the tremendous
+machinery of our experiment of self-government. This seen result of
+slavery was found to be in absolute harmony with the word of God. These
+men, then, of highest grade of thought, who had turned in scorn from
+Northern notions, now see, in the Bible, that these notions are false
+and silly. They now read the Bible, never examined before, with growing
+respect. God is honored, and his glory will be more and more in their
+salvation. These are some of the moral consummations of this agitation in
+the South. The development has been twofold in the North. On the one
+hand, some anti-slavery men have left the light of the Bible, and
+wandered into the darkness until they have reached the blackness of the
+darkness of infidelity. Other some are following hard after, and are
+throwing the Bible into the furnace,--are melting it into iron, and
+forging it, and welding it, and twisting it, and grooving it into the
+shape and significance and goodness and gospel of Sharpe's rifles. Sir,
+are you not afraid that some of your once best men will soon have no
+better Bible than that?
+
+But, on the other hand, many of your brightest minds are looking intensely
+at the subject, in the same light in which it is studied by the highest
+Southern reason. Ay, sir, mother-England, old fogy as she is, begins to
+open her eyes. What, then, is our gain? Sir, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in many of
+its conceptions, could not have been written twenty-five years ago. That
+book of genius,--over which I and hundreds in the world have freely
+wept,--true in all its facts, false in all its impressions,--yea, as false
+in the prejudice it creates to Southern social life as if Webster, the
+murderer of Parkman, may be believed to be a personification of the
+_elite_ of honor in Cambridge, Boston, and New England. Nevertheless,
+Uncle Tom's Cabin could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Dr.
+Nehemiah Adams's "_South-Side View_" could not have been written
+twenty-five years ago. Nor Dr. Nathan Lord's "_Letter of Inquiry_." Nor
+Miss Murray's book. Nor "_Cotton is King_". Nor Bledsoe's "_Liberty and
+Slavery"_. These books, written in the midst of this agitation, are all of
+high, some the highest, reach of talent and noblest piety; all give, with
+increasing confidence, the present Southern Bible reading on Slavery. May
+the agitation, then, go on! I know the New School Presbyterian church has
+sustained some temporary injury. But God is honored in his word. The
+reaction, when the first abolition-movement commenced, has been succeeded
+by the sober second thought of the South. The sun, stayed, is again
+travelling in the greatness of his strength, and will shine brighter and
+brighter to the perfect day.
+
+My only fear, Mr. Moderator, is that, as you Northern people are so prone
+to go to extremes in your zeal and run every thing into the ground, you
+may, perhaps, become _too pro-slavery;_ and that we may have to take
+measures against your coveting, over much, our daughters, if not our
+wives, our men-servants, our maid-servants, our houses, and our lands.
+(Laughter.)
+
+Sir, I come now to the Bible argument. I begin at the beginning of
+eternity! (Laughter.) WHAT is RIGHT AND WRONG? _That's the question of
+questions_.
+
+Two theories have obtained in the world. The one is, that right and wrong
+are eternal facts; that they exist _per se_ in the nature of things; that
+they are ultimate truths above God; that he must study, and does study, to
+know them, as really as man. And that he comprehends them more clearly
+than man, only because he is a better student than man. Now, sir, _this
+theory is atheism_. For if right and wrong are like mathematical
+truths--fixed facts--then I may find them out, as I find out mathematical
+truths, without instruction from God. I do not ask God to tell me that one
+and one make two. I do not ask him to reveal to me the demonstrations of
+Euclid. I thank him for the mind to perceive. But I perceive mathematical
+relations without his telling me, because they exist independent of his
+will. If, then, moral truths, if right and wrong, if rectitude and sin,
+are, in like manner, fixed, eternal facts,--if they are out from and above
+God, like mathematical entities,--then I may find them for myself. I may
+condescend, perhaps, to regard the Bible as a hornbook, in which God, an
+older student than I, tells _me_ how to _begin_ to learn what he had to
+study; or I may decline to be taught, through the Bible, how to learn
+right and wrong. I may think the Bible was good enough, may be, for the
+Israelite in Egypt and in Canaan; good enough for the Christian in
+Jerusalem and Antioch and Rome, but not good enough, even as a hornbook,
+for me,--the man of the nineteenth century,--the man of Boston, New York,
+and Brooklyn! Oh, no. I may think I need it not at all. What next? Why,
+sir, if I may think I need not God to teach me moral truth, I may think I
+need him not to teach me any thing. What next? The irresistible conclusion
+is, I may think I can live without God; that Jehovah is a myth,--a name; I
+may bid him stand aside, or die. Oh, sir, _I will be_ the fool to say
+there is no God. This is the result of the notion that right and wrong
+exist in the nature of things.
+
+The other theory is, that right and wrong are results brought into being,
+mere contingencies, means to good, made to exist solely by the will of
+God, expressed through his word; or, when his will is not thus known, he
+shows it in the human reason by which he rules the natural heart. This is
+so; because God, in making all things, saw that in the relations he would
+constitute between himself and intelligent creatures, and among
+themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass. In his benevolent
+wisdom, he then _willed_ LAW, to control this _natural good and evil_. And
+he thereby made _conformity_ to that law to be _right_, and
+_non-conformity_ to be _wrong_. Why? Simply because he saw it to be good,
+and made it to be right; not because _he saw it to be right_, but because
+he _made it to be right_.
+
+Hence, the ten specific commandments of the one moral law of love are just
+ten rules which God made to regulate the natural good and evil which he
+knew would be in the ten relations, which he himself constituted between
+himself and man, and between man and his neighbor. The Bible settles the
+question:--_sin is the transgression of the law, and where there is no law
+there is no sin_.
+
+I must-advance one step further. _What is sin_, as a mental state? Is
+it some quality--some concentrated essence--some elementary moral
+particle in the nature of things--something black, or red, like
+crimson, in the constitution of the soul, or the soul and body as
+amalgamated? No. Is it self-love? No. Is it selfishness? No. What is
+it? Just exactly, _self-will._ Just that. I, the creature, WILL _not
+submit_ to _thy_ WILL, God, the Creator. It is the I AM, _created_, who
+dares to defy and dishonor the I AM, not created,--the Lord God, the
+Almighty, Holy, Eternal.
+
+_That_ IS SIN, _per se_. And that is all of it,--so help me God! Your
+child there--John--says to his father, "I WILL _not to submit_ to your
+will." "Why not, John?" And he answers and says, "Because I WILL _not_."
+There, sir, John has revealed _all of sin_, on earth or in hell. Satan has
+never said--can never say--more. "I, Satan, WILL NOT, because I WILL _not
+to submit_ to thee, God; MY WILL, not thine, shall be."
+
+This beautiful theory is the ray of light which leads us from night, and
+twilight, and fog, and mist, and mystification, on this subject, to clear
+day. I will illustrate it by the law which has controlled and now
+regulates the most delicate of all the relations of life,--viz.: that of
+the intercourse between the sexes. I take this, because it presents the
+strongest apparent objections to my argument.
+
+Cain and Abel married their sisters. Was it wrong in the nature of things?
+[Here Dr. Wisner spoke out, and said, "Certainly."] I deny it. What an
+absurdity, to suppose that God could not provide for the propagation of
+the human race from one pair, without _requiring them to sin!_ Adam's sons
+and daughters must have married, had they remained in innocence. They must
+then have sinned in Eden, from the very necessity of the command upon the
+race:--"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." (Gen. i. 28).
+What pure nonsense! There, sir!--_that_, my one question, Dr. Wisner's
+reply, and my rejoinder, bring out, perfectly, the two theories of right
+and wrong. Sir, Abraham married his half-sister. And there is not a word
+forbidding such marriage, until God gave the law (Lev. xviii.) prohibiting
+marriage in certain degrees of consanguinity. That law made, then, such
+marriage _sin_. But God gave no such law in the family of Adam; because he
+made, himself, the marriage of brother and sister the way, and the only
+way, for the increase of the human race. _He commanded them thus to marry.
+They would have sinned had they not thus married_; for they would have
+transgressed his law. Such marriage was not even a natural evil, in the
+then family of man. But when, in the increase of numbers, it became a
+natural evil, physical and social, God placed man on a higher platform for
+the development of civilization, morals, and religion, and then made the
+law regulating marriages in the particulars of blood. But he still left
+polygamy untouched. [Here Dr. Wisner again asked if Dr. R. regarded the
+Bible as sustaining the polygamy of the Old Testament.] Dr. R.--Yes, sir;
+yes, sir; yes, sir. Let the reporters mark _that_ question, and my answer.
+(Laughter.) My principle vindicates God from unintelligible abstractions.
+I fearlessly tell what the Bible says. In its strength, I am not afraid of
+earth or hell. I fear only God. God made no law against polygamy, in the
+beginning. Therefore it was no sin for a man to have more wives than one.
+God sanctioned it, and made laws in regard to it. Abraham had more wives
+than one; Jacob had, David had, Solomon had. God told David, by the mouth
+of Nathan, when he upbraided him with his ingratitude for the blessings
+he had given him, and said, "And I gave thee thy master's house, and _thy
+master's wives_ into thy bosom." (2 Sam. xvii. 8.)
+
+God, in the gospel, places man on another platform, for the revelation of
+a nobler social and spiritual life. He now forbids polygamy. _Polygamy now
+is sin_--not because it is in itself sin. No; but because God forbids
+it,--to restrain the natural and social evil, and to bring out a higher
+humanity. And see, sir, how gently in the gospel the transition from the
+lower to the higher table-land of our progress upward is made. Christ and
+his apostles do not declare polygamy to be sin. The new law is so wisely
+given that nothing existing is rudely disturbed. The minister of God,
+unmarried, must have only one wife at the same time. This law, silently
+and gradually, by inevitable and fair inference of its meaning, and from
+the example of the apostles, passed over the Christian world. God, in the
+gospel, places us in this higher and holier ground and air of love. We
+sin, then, if we marry the sister, and other near of kin; and we sin if we
+marry, at the same time, more wives than one, not because there is sin in
+the thing itself, whatever of natural evil there might be, but because in
+so doing we transgress God's law, given to secure and advance the good of
+man. I might comment in the same way on every one of the ten commandments,
+but I pass on.
+
+The subject of slavery, in this view of _right and wrong_, is seen in the
+very light of heaven. And you, Mr. Moderator, know that, if the view I
+have presented be true, I have got you. (Great laughter.)
+
+[The Moderator said, very pleasantly--Yes--_if_--but it is a _long if_.]
+(Continued laughter.)
+
+Dr. R. touched the Moderator on the shoulder, and said, Yes, _if_--it is a
+_long if_; for it is this:--_if_ there is a God, he is not Jupiter, bowing
+to the Fates, but God, the sovereign over the universe he has created, in
+which he makes right, by making law to be known and obeyed by angels and
+men, in their varied conditions.
+
+He gave Adam _that_ command,--sublime in its simplicity, and intended to
+vindicate the principle I am affirming,--that there is no right and wrong
+in the nature of things. There was no right or wrong, _per se_, in eating
+or willing to eat of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
+
+But God made the law,--_Thou shall not eat of that tree_. As if he had
+said,--I seek to _test_ the submission of your will, freely, to my will.
+And, that your test may be perfect, I will let your temptation be
+nothing more than your natural desire for that fruit. Adam sinned. What
+was the sin?
+
+Adam said, in heart, MY WILL, _not thine_, SHALL BE. _That_ was the
+sin,--_the simple transgression of God's law_, when there was neither sin
+nor evil in the _thing_ which God forbade to be done.
+
+Man fell and was cursed. The law of the control of the superior over the
+inferior is now to begin, and is to go on in the depraved conditions of
+the fallen and cursed race. And, FIRST, God said to the woman, "_Thy
+desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." There,_ in
+that law, is _the beginning of government ordained of God. There_ is the
+beginning of the rule of the superior over the inferior, bound to obey.
+_There_, in the family of Adam, is the germ of the rule in the tribe,--the
+state. Adam, in his right, from God, to rule over his wife and his
+children, had _all the authority_ afterwards expanded in the patriarch and
+the king. This simple, beautiful fact, there, on the first leaf of the
+Bible, solves the problem, whence and how has man right to rule over man.
+In that great fact God gives his denial to the idea that government over
+man is the result of a social compact, in which each individual man living
+in a state of natural liberty, yielded some of that liberty to secure the
+greater good of government. Such a thing never was; such a thing never
+could have been. _Government was ordained and established before the first
+child was born:_--"HE SHALL RULE OVER THEE." Cain and Abel were born in a
+_state_ as perfect as the empire of Britain or the rule of these United
+States. All that Blackstone, and Paley, and Hobbs, or anybody else, says
+about the social compact, is flatly and fully denied and upset by the
+Bible, history, and common sense. Let any New York lawyer--or even a
+Philadelphia lawyer--deny this if he dares. _Life, liberty, and the
+pursuit of happiness_ never were the _inalienable_ right of the
+_individual_ man.
+
+His self-control, in all these particulars, _from the beginning_, was
+subordinate to the good of the family,--the empire. The command to Noah
+was,--"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
+(Gen. ix. 6.)
+
+This command to shed blood was, and is, in perfect harmony with the
+law,--"Thou shalt not kill." There is nothing right or wrong in _the
+taking of life_, per se, or in itself considered. It may or it may not be
+a natural good or evil. As a _general fact_, the taking of life is a
+natural evil. Hence, "Thou shalt not kill" is the general rule, to
+preserve the good there is in life. To take life under the forbidden
+conditions is sin, simply because God forbids it under those conditions.
+The sin is not in taking life, but in transgressing God's law.
+
+But _sometimes_ the taking of life will secure a greater good. God, then,
+commands that life be taken. Not to take life, under the commanded
+conditions, is sin,--solely because God then commands it.
+
+This power over life, for the good of the one great family of man, God
+_delegated_ to Noah, and through him to the tribe, the clan, the kingdom,
+the empire, the democracy, the republic, as they may be governed by chief,
+king, emperor, parliament, or congress. Had Ham killed Shem, Noah would
+have commanded Japheth to slay him. So much for the origin of the power
+over life: now for the power over liberty.
+
+The right to take life included the right over liberty. But God intended
+the rule of the superior over the inferior, in relations of service,
+should _exemplify human depravity, his curse and his overruling blessing_.
+
+The rule and the subordination which is essential to the existence of the
+family, God made commensurate with mankind; for _mankind is only the
+congeries of families_. When Ham, in his antediluvian recklessness,
+laughed at his father, God took occasion to give to the world the rule of
+the superior over the inferior. _He cursed him. He cursed him because he
+left him unblessed_. The withholding of the father's blessing, in the
+Bible, was curse. Hence Abraham prayed God, when Isaac was blessed, that
+Ishmael might not be passed by. Hence Esau prayed his father, when Jacob
+was blessed, that he might not be left untouched by his holy hands. Ham
+was cursed to render service, forever, to Shem and Japheth. The _special_
+curse on Canaan made the general curse on Ham conspicuous, historic, and
+explanatory, simply because his descendants were to be brought under the
+control of God's peculiar people. Shem was blessed to rule over Ham.
+Japheth was blessed to rule over both. God sent Ham to Africa, Shem to
+Asia, Japheth to Europe. Mr. Moderator, you have read Guyot's "_Earth and
+Man_." That admirable book is a commentary upon this part of Genesis. It
+is the philosophy of geography. And it is the philosophy of the rule of
+the higher races over the inferior, written on the very face of the earth.
+He tells you why the continents are shaped as they are shaped; why the
+mountains stand where they stand; why the rivers run where they run; why
+the currents of the sea and the air flow as they flow. And he tells you
+that the earth south of the Equator makes the inferior man. That the
+oceanic climate makes the inferior man in the Pacific Islands. That South
+America makes the inferior man. That the solid, unindented Southern Africa
+makes the inferior man. That the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent Asia
+makes the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent man. That Europe, indented by
+the sea on every side, with its varied scenery, and climate, and Northern
+influences, makes the varied intellect, the versatile power and life and
+action, of the master-man of the world. And it is so. Africa, with here
+and there an exception, has never produced men to compare with the men of
+Asia. For six thousand years, save the unintelligible stones of Egypt, she
+has had no history. Asia has had her great men and her name. But Europe
+has ever shown, and now, her nobler men and higher destiny. Japheth has
+now come to North America, to give us his past greatness and his
+transcendent glory. (Applause.) And, sir, I thank God our mountains stand
+where they stand; and that our rivers run where they run. Thank God they
+run not across longitudes, but across latitudes, from north to south. If
+they crossed longitudes, we might fear for the Union. But I hail the
+Union,--made by God, strong as the strength of our hills, and ever to live
+and expand,--like the flow and swell of the current of our streams.
+(Applause.)
+
+These two theories of Right and Wrong,--these two ideas of human
+liberty,--the right, in the nature of things, or the right as made by
+God,--the liberty of the individual man, of Atheism, of Red Republicanism,
+of the devil,--or the liberty of man, in the family, in the State, the
+liberty from God,--these two theories now make the conflict of the world.
+This anti-slavery battle is only part of the great struggle: God will be
+victorious,--and we, in his might.
+
+I now come to particular illustrations of the world-wide law that service
+shall be rendered by the inferior to the superior. The relations in which
+such service obtains are very many. Some of them are these:--husband and
+wife; parent and child; teacher and scholar; commander and
+soldier,--sailor; master and apprentice; master and hireling; master and
+slave. Now, sir, all these relations are ordained of God. They are all
+directly commanded, or they are the irresistible law of his providence, in
+conditions which must come up in the progress of depraved nature. The
+relations themselves are all good in certain conditions. And there may be
+no more of evil in the lowest than in the highest. And there may be in the
+lowest, as really as in the highest, the fulfilment of the commandment to
+love thy neighbor as thyself, and of doing unto him whatsoever thou
+wouldst have him to do unto thee.
+
+Why, sir, the wife everywhere, except where Christianity has given her
+elevation, is _the slave_. And, sir, I say, without fear of saying too
+strongly, that for every sigh, every groan, every tear, every agony of
+stripe or death, which has gone up to God from the relation of master and
+slave, there have been more sighs, more groans, more tears, and more agony
+in the rule of the husband over the wife. Sir, I have admitted, and do
+again admit, without qualification, that every fact in Uncle Tom's Cabin
+has occurred in the South. But, in reply, I say deliberately, what one of
+your first men told me, that he who will make the horrid examination will
+discover in New York City, in any number of years past, more cruelty from
+husband to wife, parent to child, _than in all the South from master to
+slave_ in the same time. I dare the investigation. And you may extend it
+further, if you choose,--to all the results of honor and purity. I fear
+nothing on this subject. I stand on rock,--the Bible,--and therefore, just
+before I bring the Bible, to which all I have said is introductory, I will
+run a parallel between the relation of master and slave and that of
+husband and wife. I will say nothing of the grinding oppression of capital
+upon labor, in the power of the master over the hireling--the crushed
+peasant--the chain-harnessed coal-pit woman, a thousand feet under ground,
+working in darkness, her child toiling by her side, and another child not
+born; I will say nothing of the press-gang which fills the navy of
+Britain--the conscription which makes the army of France--the terrible
+floggings--the awful court-martial--the quick sentence--the
+lightning-shot--the chain, and ball, and every-day lash--the punishment of
+the soldier, sailor, slave, who had run away. I pass all this by: I will
+run the parallel between the slave and wife.
+
+Do you say, The slave is held to _involuntary service?_ So is the wife.
+Her relation to her husband, in the immense majority of cases, is made for
+her, and not by her. And when she makes it for herself, how often, and how
+soon, does it become involuntary! How often, and how soon, would she
+throw off the yoke if she could! O ye wives, I know how superior you are
+to your husbands in many respects,--not only in personal attraction,
+(although in that particular, comparison is out of place,) in grace, in
+refined thought, in passive fortitude, in enduring love, and in a heart to
+be filled with the spirit of heaven. Oh, I know all this. Nay, I know you
+may surpass him in his own sphere of boasted prudence and worldly wisdom
+about dollars and cents. Nevertheless, he has authority, from God, to rule
+over you. You are under service to him. You are bound to obey him _in all
+things_. Your service is very, very, very often involuntary from the
+first, and, if voluntary at first, becomes hopeless necessity afterwards.
+I know God has laid upon the husband to love you as Christ loved the
+church, and in that sublime obligation has placed you in the light and
+under the shadow of a love infinitely higher, and purer, and holier than
+all talked about in the romances of chivalry. But the husband may not so
+love you. He may rule you with the rod of iron. What can you do? Be
+divorced? God forbids it, save for crime. Will you say that you are
+free,--that you will go where you please, do as you please? Why, ye dear
+wives, your husbands may forbid. And listen, you cannot leave New York,
+nor your palaces, any more than your shanties. No; you cannot leave your
+parlor, nor your bedchamber, nor your couch, if your husband commands you
+to stay there! What can you do? Will you run away, with your stick and
+your bundle? He can advertise you!! What can you do? You can, and I fear
+some of you do, wish him, from the bottom of your hearts, at the bottom of
+the Hudson. Or, in your self-will, you will do just as you please. (Great
+laughter.)
+
+[A word on the subject of divorce. One of your standing denunciations on
+the South is the terrible laxity of the marriage vow among the slaves.
+Well, sir, what does your Boston Dr. Nehemiah Adams say? He says, after
+giving eighty, sixty, and the like number of applications for divorce, and
+nearly all granted at individual quarterly courts in New England,--he says
+he is not sure but that the marriage relation is as enduring among _the
+slaves in the South_ as it is among white people in New England. I only
+give what Dr. Adams says. I would fain vindicate the marriage relation
+from this rebuke. But one thing I will say: you seldom hear of a divorce
+in Virginia or South Carolina.]
+
+But to proceed:--
+
+Do you say the slave is _sold and bought?_ So is the wife the world over.
+Everywhere, always, and now as the general fact, however done away or
+modified by Christianity. The savage buys her. The barbarian buys her. The
+Turk buys her. The Jew buys her. The Christian buys her,--Greek, Armenian,
+Nestorian, Roman Catholic, Protestant. The Portuguese, the Spaniard, the
+Italian, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the New
+England man, the New Yorker,--especially the upper ten,--_buy the
+wife_--in many, very many cases. She is seldom bought in the South, and
+never among the slaves themselves; for they always marry for love.
+(Continued laughter.) Sir, I say the wife is bought in the highest
+circles, too often, as really as the slave is bought. Oh, she is not sold
+and purchased in the public market. But come, sir, with me, and let us
+take the privilege of spirits out of the body to glide into that gilded
+saloon, or into that richly comfortable family room, of cabinets, and
+pictures, and statuary: see the parties, there, to sell and buy that human
+body and soul, and make her a chattel! See how they sit, and bend towards
+each other, in earnest colloquy, on sofa of rosewood and satin,--_Turkey_
+carpet (how befitting!) under feet, sunlight over head, softened through
+stained windows: or it is night, and the gas is turned nearly off, and the
+burners gleam like stars through the shadow from which the whisper is
+heard, in which that old ugly brute, with gray goatee--how fragrant!--bids
+one, two, five, ten hundred thousand dollars, and _she_ is knocked off to
+him,--that beautiful young girl asleep up there, amid flowers, and
+innocent that she is sold and bought. Sir, that young girl would as soon
+permit a baboon to embrace her, as that old, ignorant, gross, disgusting
+wretch to approach her. Ah, has she not been sold and bought for money?
+But--But what? But, you say, she freely, and without parental authority,
+accepted him. Then she sold herself for money, and was guilty of _that_
+which is nothing better than legal prostitution. I know what I say; you
+know what I say. Up there in the gallery you know: you nod to one another.
+Ah! you know the parties. Yes, you say: All true, true, true. (Laughter.)
+
+Now, Mr. Moderator, I will clinch all I have said by nails sure, and
+fastened from the word of God.
+
+There is King James's English Bible, with its magnificent dedication. I
+bring the English acknowledged translation. And just one word more to
+push gently aside--for I am a kind man to those poor, deluded anti-slavery
+people--their last argument. It is _that_ this English Bible, in those
+parts which treat of slavery, don't give the ideas which are found in the
+original Hebrew and Greek. Alas for the common people!--alas for this good
+old translation! Are its days numbered? No, sir; no, sir. The Unitarian,
+the Universalist, the Arminian, the Baptist, when pressed by this
+translation, have tried to find shelter for their false isms by making or
+asking for a new rendering. And now the anti-slavery men are driving hard
+at the same thing. (Laughter.) Sir, shall we permit our people everywhere
+to have their confidence in this noble translation undermined and
+destroyed by the isms and whims of every or any man in our pulpits? I
+affirm, whatever be our perfect liberty of examination into God's meaning
+in all the light of the original languages, that there is a respect due to
+this received version, and that great caution should be used, lest we
+teach the people to doubt its true rendering from the original word of
+God. I protest, sir, against having a Doctor-of-Divinity _priest_, Hebrew
+or Greek, to tell the people what God has spoken on the subject of
+slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin
+priest,--I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,--I would as soon go to
+Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,--I would as soon have the Pope at once in
+his fallible infallibility,--as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery
+Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible
+rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet
+produced this Bible, in its plain unanswerable authority, for the relation
+of master and slave, but the anti-slavery man ran away into the fog of
+_his_ Hebrew or Greek, (laughter,) or he jabbered the nonsense that God
+permitted the _sin_ of slaveholding among the Jews, but that he don't do
+it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it
+right, they know, then and now. Having thus taken the last puff of wind
+out of the sails of the anti-slavery phantom ship, turn to the
+twenty-first chapter of Exodus, vs. 2-5. God, in these verses, gave the
+Israelites his command how they should buy and hold the Hebrew
+servant,--how, under certain conditions, he went free,--how, under other
+circumstances, he might be held to service forever, with his wife and her
+children. There it is. Don't run into the Hebrew. (Laughter.)
+
+But what have we here?--vs. 7-11:--"And if a man sell his daughter to be a
+maid-servant, she shall not go out as the men-servants do. If she please
+not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her
+be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power,
+seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he hath betrothed her
+unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he
+take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage
+shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall
+she go out free without money." Now, sir, the wit of man can't dodge that
+passage, unless he runs away into the Hebrew. (Great laughter.) For what
+does God say? Why, this:--that an Israelite might sell his own daughter,
+not only into servitude, but into polygamy,--that the buyer might, if he
+pleased, give her to his son for a wife, or take her to himself. If he
+took her to himself, and she did not please him, he should not sell her
+unto a strange nation, but should allow her to be redeemed by her family.
+But, if he took him another wife before he allowed the first one to be
+redeemed, he should continue to give the first one _food_, her _raiment_,
+and her _duty of marriage_; that is to say, _her right to his bed_. If he
+did not do _these three things_, she should go out free; _i.e._ cease to
+be his slave, without his receiving any money for her. There, sir, God
+sanctioned the Israelite father in selling his daughter, and the Israelite
+man to buy her, into slavery and into polygamy. And it was then right,
+because God made it right. In verses 20 and 21, you have these
+words:--"And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die
+under his hand, he shall be surely punished; notwithstanding, if he
+continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."
+What does this passage mean? Surely this:--if the master gave his slave a
+hasty blow with a rod, and he died under his hand, he should be punished.
+But, if the slave lived a day or two, it would so extenuate the act of the
+master he should not be punished, inasmuch as he would be in that case
+sufficiently punished in losing his money in his slave. Now, sir, I affirm
+that God was more lenient to the degraded Hebrew master than Southern laws
+are to the higher Southern master in like cases. But there you have what
+was the divine will. Find fault with God, ye anti-slavery men, if you
+dare. In Leviticus, xxv. 44-46, "Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which
+thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them
+shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the
+strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their
+families that are with you, which they beget in your land: and they shall
+be your 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."
+
+Sir, I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command
+his people to buy slaves from the heathen round about them, and from the
+stranger, and of their families sojourning among them. The passage has no
+other meaning. Did God merely permit sin?--did he merely tolerate a
+dreadful evil? God does not say so anywhere. He gives his people law to
+buy and hold slaves of the heathen forever, on certain conditions, and to
+buy and hold Hebrew slaves in variously-modified particulars. Well, how
+did the heathen, then, get slaves to sell? Did they capture them in
+war?--did they sell their own children? Wherever they got them, they sold
+them; and God's law gave his people the right to buy them.
+
+God in the New Testament made no law prohibiting the relation of master
+and slave. But he made law regulating the relation under Greek and Roman
+slavery, which was the most oppressive in the world.
+
+God saw that these regulations would ultimately remove the evils in the
+Greek and Roman systems, and do it away entirely from the fitness of
+things, as there existing; for Greek and Roman slaves, for the most part,
+were the equals in all respects of their masters. Æsop was a slave;
+Terence was a slave. The precepts in Colossians iv. 18, 23, 1 Tim. vi.
+1-6, and other places, show, unanswerably, that God as really sanctioned
+the relation of master and slave as those of husband and wife, and parent
+and child; and that all the obligations of the moral law, and Christ's law
+of love, might and must be as truly fulfilled in the one relation as in
+the other. The fact that he has made the one set of relations permanent,
+and the other more or less dependent on conditions of mankind, or to pass
+away in the advancement of human progress, does not touch the question. He
+sanctioned it under the Old Testament and the New, and ordains it now
+while he sees it best to continue it, and he now, as heretofore, proclaims
+the duty of the master and the slave. Dr. Parker's admirable explanation
+of Colossians, and other New Testament passages, saves me the necessity of
+saying any thing more on the Scripture argument.
+
+One word on the Detroit resolutions, and I conclude. Those resolutions of
+the Assembly of 1850 decide that slavery is sin, unless the master holds
+his slave as a guardian, or under the claims of humanity.
+
+Mr. Moderator, I think we had on this floor, yesterday, proof conclusive
+that those resolutions mean any thing or nothing; that they are a fine
+specimen of Northern skill in platform-making; that it put in a plank
+here, to please this man,--a plank there, to please that man,--a plank for
+the North, a broad board for the South. It is Jackson's judicious tariff.
+It is a gum-elastic conscience, stretched now to a charity covering all
+the multitude of our Southern sins, contracted now, giving us hardly a
+fig-leaf of righteousness. It is a bowl of punch,--
+
+  A little sugar to make it sweet,
+    A little lemon to make it sour,
+  A little water to make it weak,
+    A little brandy to give it power. (Laughter.)
+
+As a Northern argument against us, it is a mass of lead so heavy that it
+weighed down even the strong shoulders of Judge Jessup. For, sir, when he
+closed his speech, I asked him a single question I had made ready for him.
+It was this:--"Do you allow that Mr. Aiken, of South Carolina, may, under
+the claims of humanity, hold three thousand slaves, or must he emancipate
+them?" The Judge staggered, and stammered, and said, "No man could rightly
+hold so many." I then asked, "How many may he hold, in humanity?" The
+Judge saw his fatal dilemma. He recovered himself handsomely, and fairly
+said, "Mr. Aiken might hold three thousand slaves, in harmony with the
+Detroit action." I replied, "Then, sir, you have surrendered the whole
+question of Southern slavery." And, sir, the Judge looked as if he felt he
+had surrendered it. And every man in this house, capable of understanding
+the force of that question, felt it had shivered the whole anti-slavery
+argument, on those resolutions, to atoms. Why, sir, if a man can hold
+three slaves, with a right heart and the approbation of God, he may hold
+thirty, three hundred, three thousand, or thirty thousand. It is a mere
+question of heart, and capacity to govern. The Emperor of Russia holds
+sixty millions of slaves: and is there a man in this house so much of a
+fool as to say that God regards the Emperor of Russia a sinner because he
+is the master of sixty millions of slaves? Sir, that Emperor has certainly
+a high and awful responsibility upon him. But, if he is good as he is
+great, he is a god of benevolence on earth. And so is every Southern
+master. His obligation is high, and great, and glorious. It is the same
+obligation, in kind, he is under to his wife and children, and in some
+respects immensely higher, by reason of the number and the tremendous
+interests involved for time and eternity in connection with this great
+country, Africa, and the world. Yes, sir, _I know_, whether Southern
+masters fully know it or not, that _they hold from God_, individually and
+collectively, _the highest and the noblest responsibility ever given by
+Him to individual private men on all the face of the earth._ For God has
+intrusted to them to train millions of the most degraded in form and
+intellect, but, at the same time, the most gentle, the most amiable, the
+most affectionate, the most imitative, the most susceptible of social and
+religious love, of all the races of mankind,--to train them, and to give
+them civilization, and the light and the life of the gospel of Jesus
+Christ. And I thank God he has given this great work to that type of the
+noble family of Japheth best qualified to do it,--to the Cavalier
+stock,--the gentleman and the lady of England and France, born to command,
+and softened and refined under our Southern sky. May they know and feel
+and fulfil their destiny! Oh, may they "know that they also have a Master
+in heaven."
+
+
+
+
+Letter from Dr. Ross.
+
+
+
+I need only say, in reference to this letter, that my friends
+having questioned my position as to the good of the agitation, I
+wrote the following letter to vindicate that point, as given, in
+the New York speech:--
+
+HUNTSVILLE, ALA., July 14, 1856.
+
+_Brother Blackburn_:--I affirmed, in my New York speech, that the Slavery
+agitation has done, and will accomplish, good.
+
+Your very kind and courteous disagreement on that point I will make the
+occasion to say something more thereon, without wishing you, my dear
+friend, to regard what I write as inviting any discussion.
+
+I said _that_ agitation has brought out, and would reveal still more
+fully, the Bible, in its relation to slavery and liberty,--also the
+infidelity which long has been, and is now, leavening with death the whole
+Northern mind. And that it would result in the triumph of the _true_
+Southern interpretation of the Bible; to the honor of God, and to the
+good of the master, the slave, the stability of the Union, and be a
+blessing to the world. To accomplish this, the sin _per se_ doctrine will
+be utterly demolished. That doctrine is the difficulty in every _Northern
+mind,_ (where there is any difficulty about slavery,) whether they confess
+it or not. Yes, the difficulty with every Northern man is, that _the
+relation of_ master and slave is felt _to be_ sin. I know that to be the
+fact. I have talked with all grades of Northern men, and come in contact
+with all varieties of Northern mind on this subject. And I know that the
+man who says and tries to believe, and does, partially in sober judgment,
+believe, that slavery is not sin, yet, _in his feelings, in his educated
+prejudices_, he feels that slavery is sin.
+
+Yes, _that_ is the difficulty, and _that_ is the whole of the difficulty,
+_between the North and the South_, so far as the question is one of the
+Bible and morals. Now, I again say, that that _sin per se_ doctrine will,
+in this agitation, be utterly demolished. And when that is done,--when the
+North will know and feel fully, perfectly, that the relation of master and
+slave is not sin, but sanctioned of God,--then, and not till then, the
+North and South can and will, without anger, consider the following
+questions:--Whether slavery, as it exists in the United States, all
+things considered, be or be not a great good, and the greatest good for a
+time, notwithstanding its admitted evils? Again, whether these evils can
+or cannot be modified and removed? Lastly, whether slavery itself can or
+cannot pass away from this land and the world? Now, sir, the moment the
+sin question is settled, then all is peace. For these other questions
+belong entirely to another category of morals. They belong entirely to the
+category of _what is_ wise _to realize_ good. This agitation will bring
+this great result. And therefore I affirm the agitation to be good.
+
+There is another fact also, the result, in great measure, of this
+agitation, which in my view proves it to have been and to be of great
+good. I mean the astonishing rise and present stability of the slave-power
+of the United States. This fact, when examined, is undeniable. And it is
+equally undeniable that it has been caused, in great part, by the slavery
+question in all its bearings. It is a wonderful development made by God.
+And I must believe he intends thereby either to destroy or bless this
+great Union. But, as I believe he intends to bless, therefore I am
+fortified in affirming the good there has been and is in this agitation.
+Let me bring out to view this astonishing fact.
+
+1. Twenty-five years ago, and previously, the whole slave-holding South
+and West had a strong tendency to emancipation, in some form. But the
+abolition movement then began, and arrested that Southern and Western
+leaning to emancipation. Many people have said, and do say, that that
+_arrest_ was and is a great evil. I say it was and is a great good. Why?
+Answer: It was and would now be premature. Had it been carried out, it
+would have been and would now be evil, immense, inconceivable,--to master,
+slave, America, Africa, and the world; because neither master, slave,
+America, Africa, the world, were, or are, ready for emancipation. God has
+a great deal to do before he is ready for emancipation. He tells us so by
+this _arrest_ put upon that tendency to emancipation years ago. For He put
+it into the hearts of abolitionists _to make the arrest_. And He stopped
+the Southern movement all the more perfectly by permitting Great Britain
+to emancipate Jamaica, and letting that experiment prove, as it has, a
+perfect failure and a terrible warning. JAMAICA IS DESTROYED. And now,
+whatever be done for its negroes must be done with the full admission that
+what has been attempted was in violation of the duty Britain owed to
+those negroes. But her failure in seeing and doing her duty, God has given
+to us to teach us knowledge; and, through us, to instruct the world in the
+demonstration of the problem of slavery.
+
+2. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to give Texas to the South. Texas, a territory so vast that
+a bird, as Webster said, can't fly over it in a week. Many in the South
+did not want Texas. But many longer-headed ones did want it. And Northern
+men voted and gave to the South exactly what these longer-headed Southern
+statesmen wanted. This, I grant, was Northern anti-slavery fatuity,
+utterly unaccountable but that God made them do it.
+
+3. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to vote for Polk, Dallas, and Texas. This gave us the
+Mexican War; and that immense territory, its spoil,--a territory which,
+although it may not be favorable for slave-labor, has increased, and will,
+in many ways, extend the slave-power.
+
+4. This leads me to say that God put it into the hearts of many Northern
+men--especially abolitionists--to believe what Great Britain
+said,--namely, that _free trade_ would result in slave-emancipation. _But
+lo! the slave-holder wanted free trade_. So Northern abolitionists helped
+to destroy the _tariff policy_, and thus to expand the demand for, and the
+culture of, cotton. Now, see, the gold of California has _perpetuated free
+trade_ by enabling our merchants to meet the enormous demand for specie
+created by free trade. So California helps the slave-power. But the
+abolitionists gave us Polk, the Mexican War, and California.
+
+5. God put it into the hearts of the North, and especially abolitionists,
+to stimulate the settlement of new free States, and to be the ardent
+friends of an immense foreign emigration. The result has been to send down
+to the South, with railroad speed and certainty, corn, wheat, flour, meal,
+bacon, pork, beef, and every other imaginable form of food, in quantity
+amazing, and so cheap that the planter can spread wider and wider the
+culture of cotton.
+
+6. God has, by this growth of the Northwest, made the demand for cotton
+enormous in the North and Northwest. Again, he has made English and French
+experiments to procure cotton somewhere else than from the United States
+_dead failures_,--in the East Indies, Egypt, Algeria, Brazil. God has
+thus given to the Southern planter an absolute monopoly. A monopoly so
+great that he, the Southern planter, sits now upon his throne of cotton
+and wields the commercial sceptre of the world. Yes, it is the Southern
+planter who says to-day to haughty England, Go to war, if you dare;
+dismiss Dallas, if you dare. Yes, he who sits on the throne of the
+cotton-bag has triumphed at last over him who sits on the throne of the
+wool-sack. England is prostrate at his feet, as well as the abolitionists.
+
+7. God has put it into the hearts of abolitionists to prevent half a
+million of free negroes from going to Liberia; and thereby the
+abolitionists have made them consumers of slave-products to the extension
+of the slave-power. And, by thus keeping them in America, the
+abolitionists have so increased their degradation as to prove all the more
+the utter folly of emancipation in the United States.
+
+8. God has permitted the anti-slavery men in the North, in England, in
+France, and everywhere, so to blind themselves in hypocrisy as to give the
+Southern slave-holder his last perfect triumph over them; for God tells
+the planter to say to the North, to England, to France, to all who buy
+cotton, "Ye men of Boston, New York, London, Paris,--ye hypocrites,--ye
+brand me as a pirate, a kidnapper, a murderer, a demon, fit only for hell,
+and yet ye buy my blood-stained cotton. O ye hypocrites!--ye Boston
+hypocrites! why don't ye throw the cotton in the sea, as your fathers did
+the tea? Ye Boston hypocrites! ye say, _if we had been in the days of our
+fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the
+slave-trade!_ Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the
+children of them who, in fact, kidnapped and bought in blood, and sold the
+slave in America! for now, ye hypocrites, ye buy the blood-stained cotton
+in quantity so immense, that _ye_ have run up the price of slaves to
+be more than a thousand dollars,--the average of old and young! O ye
+hypocrites! ye denounce slavery; then ye bid it live, and not die,--in
+that ye buy sugar, rice, tobacco, and, above all, cotton! Ye hypocrites!
+ye abuse the devil, and then fall down and worship him!--ye
+hypocrites,--ye New England hypocrites,--ye Old England hypocrites,--ye
+French hypocrites,--ye Uncle Tom's Cabin hypocrites,--ye Beecher
+hypocrites,--ye Rhode Island Consociation hypocrites! Oh, your holy
+twaddle stinks in the nostrils of God, and he commands me to lash you
+with my scorn, and his scorn, so long as ye gabble about the sin of
+slavery, and then bow down to me, and buy and spin cotton, and thus work
+for me as truly as my slaves! O ye fools and blind, fill ye up the measure
+of your folly, and blindness, and shame! And this ye are doing. Ye have,
+like the French infidels, made _reason_ your goddess, and are exalting her
+above the Bible; and, in your unitarianism and neology and all modes of
+infidelity, ye are rejecting and crucifying the Son of God."
+
+Now, my brother, this controlling slave-power is a world-wide fact. Its
+statistics of bales count by millions; its tonnage counts by hundreds of
+thousands; its manufacture is reckoned by the workshops of America and
+Europe; its supporters are numbered by all who must thus be clothed in the
+world. This tremendous power has been developed in great measure by the
+abolition agitation, controlled by God. I believe, then, as I have already
+said, that God intends one of two things. He either intends to destroy the
+United States by this slave-power, or he intends to bless my country and
+the world by the unfoldings of his wisdom in this matter. I believe he
+will bless the world in the working out of this slavery. I rejoice, then,
+in the agitation which has so resulted, and will so terminate, to reveal
+the Bible, and bless mankind.
+
+Your affectionate friend,
+
+F.A. Ross.
+
+REV. A. BLACKBURN.
+
+
+
+
+What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?
+
+
+
+My position as to this all-important question, in my New York speech, was
+made subject of remark in the "Presbyterian Herald," Louisville, Kentucky,
+to which I replied at length in the "Presbyterian Witness," Knoxville,
+Tennessee. No rejoinder was ever made to that reply. But, recently, an
+extract from the younger Edwards was submitted to me. To that I gave the
+following letter. The subject is of the first and the last importance, and
+bears directly, as set forth in my New York speech, on infidelity, and, of
+course, the slavery question:--
+
+Mr. Editor:--In your paper of Tuesday, 24th ult., there is an article,
+under this head, giving the argument of Edwards (the son) against my views
+as to _the foundation of moral obligation_.
+
+I thank the writer for his argument, and his courteous manner of
+presenting it. In my third letter to Mr. Barnes, I express my preparation
+to meet "_all comers_" on this question; and I am pleased to see this
+"_comer_". If my views cannot be refuted by Edwards, I may wait long
+for an "_uglier customer_."
+
+A word, introductory, to your correspondent. He says, "His [Dr. Ross's]
+theory was advanced and argued against in a former age." By this, I
+understand him to express his belief that my theory has been rejected
+heretofore. Well. It may, nevertheless, be the true theory. The Copernican
+astronomy was argued against in a former age and rejected; yet it has
+prevailed. Newton's law of gravitation was argued against and rejected by
+a whole generation of philosophers on the continent of Europe; yet it has
+prevailed. And now all school-boys and girls would call anybody a fool who
+should deny it. Steam, in all its applications, was argued against and
+rejected; yet it has prevailed. So the electric telegraph; and, to go back
+a little, the theory of vaccination,--the circulation of the blood,--a
+thousand things; yea, Edwards's (the father) theory of virtue, although
+received by many, has been argued against, and by many rejected; yet it
+will prevail. Yea, his idea of the unity of the race in Adam was and is
+argued against and rejected; yet it will prevail. I feel, therefore, no
+fear that my theory of moral obligation will not be acknowledged because
+it was argued against and rejected by many in a former age, and may be
+now. Nay; facts to prove it are accumulating,--facts which were not
+developed in Edwards's day,--facts showing, irresistibly, that Edwards's
+theory, which is _that_ most usually now held, is what I say it is,--_the
+rejection of revelation, infidelity, and atheism_. The evidence amounts to
+demonstration.
+
+The question is in a nutshell; it is this:--_Shall man submit to the
+revealed will of God_, or _to his own will?_ That is the naked question
+when the fog of confused ideas and unmeaning words is lifted and
+dispersed.
+
+My position, expressed in the speech delivered in the General Assembly,
+New York, May, 1856, is this:--"God, in making all things, saw that, in
+the relations he would constitute between himself and intelligent
+creatures, and among themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass.
+In his benevolent wisdom, he then _willed_ LAW to control this _good_ and
+_evil_; and he thereby made _conformity_ to that law to be _right_, and
+_non-conformity_ to be _wrong_. Why? Simply because he saw it to be
+_good_, and _made it to be_ RIGHT; not because _he saw it to be right_,
+but because _he made it to be right_."
+
+Your correspondent replies to this theory in the following words of
+Edwards:--"Some hold that the foundation of moral obligation is
+primarily in the will of God. But the will of God is either benevolent
+or not. If it be benevolent, and on that account the foundation of moral
+obligation, it is not the source of obligation merely because it is the
+will of God, but because it is benevolent, and is of a tendency to
+promote happiness; and this places the foundation of obligation in a
+tendency to happiness, and not primarily in the will of God. But if the
+will of God, and that which is the expression of it, the divine law, be
+allowed to be not benevolent, and are foundation of obligation, we are
+obliged to conform to them, whatever they be, however malevolent and
+opposite to holiness and goodness the requirements be. But this, I
+presume, none will pretend." Very fairly and strongly put; that's to say,
+if I understand Edwards, he supposes, if God was the devil and man what
+he is, then man would not be under obligation to obey the devil's will!
+That's it! Well, I suppose so too; and I reckon most _Christians_ would
+agree to that statement, Nay, more: I presume nobody ever taught that the
+mere naked _will_, abstractly considered, if it could be, from the
+_character_ of God, was the ground of moral obligation? Nay, I think
+nobody ever imagined that the notion of an infinite Creator presupposes
+or includes the idea that he is a malevolent Being! I agree, then, with
+Edwards, that the ultimate ground of obligation _is_ in the _fact_ that
+God is benevolent, or is a good God. I said _that_ in my speech quoted
+above. I formally stated that "_God, in his benevolent wisdom, willed law
+to control the natural good and evil_," &c. What, then, is the point of
+disagreement between my view and Edwards's? It is in _the different ways
+by which we_ GET AT _the_ FACT _of divine benevolence_. I hold that the
+REVEALED WORD _tells us who God is and what he does_, and is, therefore,
+the ULTIMATE GROUND OF OBLIGATION. But Edwards holds that HUMAN REASON
+_must tell us who God is and what he does_, and IS, therefore, the
+PRIMARY GROUND OF OBEDIENCE. _That_ is my issue with Edwards and others;
+and it is as broad an issue as _faith in revelation_, or the REJECTION OF
+IT. I do not charge that Edwards did, or that all who hold with him do,
+deny the word of God; but I do affirm that their argument does. The
+matter is plain. For what is revelation? It is that God has appeared in
+person, and _told_ man in WORD that he is GOD; and _told_ him first in
+WORD (to be expanded in studying _creation_ and _providence_) that God is
+a Spirit, eternal, infinite in power, wisdom, goodness, holiness,--the
+Creator, Preserver, Benefactor. That WORD, moreover, he proved by
+highest evidence--namely, supernatural evidence--to be _absolute,
+perfect_ TRUTH as to all FACT affirmed _of him_ and _what_ he _does_.
+REVELATION, as claimed in the Bible, was and is THAT THING.
+
+Man, then, having this revelation; is under obligation ever to believe
+every jot and tittle of that WORD. He at first, no doubt, knew little of
+the meaning of some _facts_ declared; nay, he may have comprehended
+nothing of the sense or scope of many _facts_ affirmed. Nay, he may now,
+after thousands of years, know most imperfectly the meaning of that WORD.
+But he was and he is, notwithstanding, to believe with absolute faith the
+WORD,--that God _is_ all he says he is, and _does_ all he says he
+does,--however that WORD may _go beyond_ his reason, or _surprise_ his
+feelings, or _alarm_ his conscience, or _command_ his will.
+
+This statement of what revelation is, settles the whole question as
+presented by Edwards. For REVELATION, as explained, does FIX _forever the
+foundation of man's moral obligation in the benevolence of God_,
+PRIMARILY, as it is _expressed_ in the word of God. REVELATION does then,
+in that sense, FIX _obligation in the_ MERE WILL OF GOD; for, the moment
+you attempt to establish the foundation _somewhere else_, you have
+abandoned the ground of revelation. You have left the WILL OF GOD _in his
+word_, and you have made your rule of right to be the WILL OF MAN _in the_
+SELF _of the_ HEART. The proof of what I here say is so plain, even as the
+writing on the tables of Habakkuk's vision, that he may run that readeth
+it. Read, then, even as on the _tables_.
+
+God _says_ in his WORD, "I am all-powerful, all-wise, the Creator." "You
+may be," says Edwards, "but I want _primary foundation_ for my faith; and
+I can't take your _word_ for it. I must look first into _nature_ to see if
+evidence of infinite power and wisdom is there,--to see if evidence of a
+Creator is there,--and if thou art he!"
+
+Again, God _says_ in his word, "I am benevolent, and _my will_ in my law
+is expression of that benevolence." "You may tell the truth," Edwards
+replies, "but I want _primary ground_ for my belief, and I must hold your
+word suspended until I examine into my reason, my feelings, my conscience,
+my will,--to see if your WORD _harmonizes_ with my HEART,--to see if what
+you reveal tends to _happiness_ IN MY NOTION OF HAPPINESS; _or tends to
+right_ IN MY NOTION OF RIGHT!" That's it. That's the theory of Edwards,
+Barnes, and others.
+
+And what is this but the attempt to know the divine attributes and
+character in _some other way_ than through the divine WORD? And what is
+this but the denial of the divine WORD, except so far as it agrees with
+the knowledge of the attributes and character of God, obtained in THAT
+_some other way?_ And what is this but to make the word of God
+_subordinate_ to the teaching of the HUMAN HEART? And what is this but to
+make the WILL _of God_ give place to the WILL _of man?_ And what is this
+but the REJECTION OF REVELATION? Yet this is the result (though not
+intended by him) of the whole scheme of obligation, maintained by Edwards
+and by all who agree with him.
+
+Carry it out, and what is the progress and the end of it? This. Human
+reason--the human heart--will be supreme. Some, I grant, will hold to a
+revelation of some sort. A thing more and more transcendental,--a thing
+more and more of fog and moonshine,--fog floating in German cellars from
+fumes of lager-beer, and moonshine gleaming from the imaginations of the
+drinkers. Some, like Socrates and Plato, will have a God supreme,
+personal, glorious, somewhat like the true; and with him many inferior
+deities,--animating the stars, the earth, mountains, valleys, plains, the
+sea, rivers, fountains, the air, trees, flowers, and all living things.
+Some will deny a personal God, and conceive, instead, the intelligent mind
+of the universe, without love. Some will contend for mere law,--of
+gravitation and attraction; and some will suggest that all is the result
+of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Here, having passed through the
+shadows and the darkness, we have reached the blackness of
+infidelity,--blank atheism. No God--yea, all the way the "_fools_" were
+saying in their hearts, no God. What now is man? Alas! some, the Notts and
+Gliddons, tell us, man was indeed _created_ millions of ages ago, the Lord
+only knows when, in swarms like bees to suit the zones of the
+earth,--while other some, the believers in the _vestiges of creation_, say
+man is the result of development,--from fire, dust, granite, grass, the
+creeping thing, bird, fish, four-footed beast, monkey. Yea, and some of
+these last philosophers are even now going to Africa to try to find men
+they have heard tell of, who still have tails and are jumping and climbing
+somewhere in the regions around the undiscovered sources of the Nile.
+
+This is the progress and the result of the Edwards theory; because, deny
+or hesitate about revelation, and man cannot prove, _absolutely_, any of
+the things we are considering. Let us see if he can. Edwards writes, "On
+the supposition that the will or law of God is the primary foundation,
+reason, and standard of right and virtue, every attempt _to prove the
+moral perfection or attributes of God is absurd_." Here, then, Edwards
+believes, that, to reach the primary foundation of right and virtue, he
+must not take God's word as to his perfection or attributes, no matter how
+fully _God_ may have _proved_ his word: no; but he, Edwards, he, man, must
+first _prove_ them in _some other way_. And, of course, he believes he can
+reach such primary foundation by such other proof. Well, let us see how he
+goes about it. I give him, to try his hand, the easiest
+attribute,--"POWER." I give him, then, all creation, and providence
+besides, as his _black-board_, on which to work his demonstration. I give
+him, then, the lifetime of Methuselah, in which to reach his conclusion of
+proof.--Well, I will now suppose we have all lived and waited that long
+time: what is his _proof_ OF INFINITE POWER? Has he found the EXHIBITION
+of _infinite power?_ No. He has found _proof_ of GREAT POWER; but he has
+not reached the DISPLAY of _infinite power_. What then is his _faith_ in
+infinite power after such _proof?_ Why, just this: he INFERS _only_, that
+THE POWER, _which did the things he sees, can go on, and on, and on, to
+give greater, and greater, and greater manifestations of itself!_ VERY
+GOOD: _if so be, we can have no better proof_. But _that_ PROOF is
+infinitely below ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. And all
+manifestations of power to a _finite creature_, even to the archangel
+Michael, during countless millions of ages, never gives, because it never
+can give to him, ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. But the word of GOD
+gives the PROOF ABSOLUTE, _and in a moment of time!_ "I AM THE ALMIGHTY!"
+The _perfect proof_ is in THAT WORD OF GOD.
+
+I might set Edwards to work to prove the _infinite wisdom_, the _infinite
+benevolence_, the _infinite holiness_--yea, the EXISTENCE--of God. And he,
+finite man, in any examination of creation or providence, must fall
+infinitely below the PERFECT PROOF.
+
+So then I tell Edwards, and all agreeing with him, that _it is absurd_ to
+attempt to _prove_ the moral perfection and attributes of God, if he
+thereby seeks to reach the HIGHEST EVIDENCE, _or if he thereby means to
+find the_ PRIMARY GROUND _of moral obligation_.
+
+Do I then teach that man should not seek the _proof_ there is, of the
+perfection and attributes of God, in _nature and providence_? No. I hold
+that such proof unfolds the _meaning_ of the FACTS declared in the WORD of
+God, and is all-important, as such expansion of meaning. But I say, by
+authority of the Master, that _the highest proof, the absolute proof, the
+perfect proof_, of the FACTS as to _who God is, and what he does_, and the
+PRIMARY OBLIGATION _thereupon, is in the_ REVEALED WORD.
+
+FRED. A. ROSS.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., April 3, 1857.
+
+N.B.--In notice of last Witness's extract from Erskine, I remark that
+Thomas Erskine was, and may yet be, a lawyer of Edinburgh. He wrote
+_three works_:--_one_ on the _Internal Evidences_, the _next_ on
+_Faith_, the _last_ on the _Freeness of the Gospel_. They are all
+written with great ability, and contain much truth. But all have in them
+fundamental _untruths_. There is least in the Evidences; more in the
+essay on Faith; most in the tract on the Freeness of the Gospel,--which
+last has been utterly refuted, and has passed away. His _Faith_ is,
+also, not republished. The Evidences is good, like good men,
+notwithstanding the evil.
+
+
+
+
+Letters to Rev. A. Barnes.
+
+
+
+
+Introduction.
+
+
+
+As part of the great slavery discussion, Rev. A. Barnes, of Philadelphia,
+published, in October, 1856, a pamphlet, entitled, "The CHURCH and
+SLAVERY." In this tract he invites every man to utter his views on the
+subject. And, setting the example, he speaks his own with the greatest
+freedom and honesty.
+
+In the same freedom of speech, I have considered his views unscriptural,
+false, fanatical, and infidel. Therefore, while I hold him in the highest
+respect, esteem, and affection, as a divine and Christian gentleman, and
+cherish his past relations to me, yet I have in these letters written to
+him, and of him, just as I would have done had he lived in France or
+Germany, a stranger to me, and given to the world the refined scoff of the
+one, or the muddy transcendentalism of the other.
+
+My first letter is merely a glance at some things in his pamphlet, in
+which I show wherein I agree and disagree with him,--_i.e._ in our
+estimate of the results of the agitation; in our views of the Declaration
+of Independence; in our belief of the way men are made infidels; and in
+our appreciation of the testimonies of past General Assemblies.
+
+The other letters I will notice in similar introductions.
+
+These letters first appeared as original contributions to the Christian
+Observer, published and edited by Dr. A. Converse, Philadelphia.
+
+I take this occasion to express my regard for him, and my sense of the
+ability with which he has long maintained the rights and interests of the
+Presbyterian body, to which we both belong; and the wise and masterly way
+in which he has vindicated, from the Bible, the truth on the slavery
+question. To him, too, the public is indebted for the first exhibition of
+Mr. Barnes's errors in his recent tract which has called forth my reply.
+
+
+
+
+No. I.
+
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+_Dear Sir_:--You have recently published a tract:--"The Church and
+Slavery."
+
+"The opinion of each individual," you remark, "contributes to form public
+sentiment, as the labor of the animalcule in the ocean contributes to the
+coral reefs that rise above the waves."
+
+True, sir, and beautifully expressed. But while, in harmony with your
+intimation, I must regard you one of the animalcules, rearing the coral
+reef of public opinion, I cannot admit your disclaimer of "special
+influence" among them in their work. Doubtless, sir, you have "special
+influence,"--and deserve to have. I make no apology for addressing you. I
+am one of the animalcules.
+
+I agree, and I disagree, with you. I harmonize in your words,--"The
+present is eminently a time when the views of every man on the subject of
+slavery should be uttered in unambiguous tones." I agree with you in this
+affirmation; because the subject has yet to be fully understood; because,
+when understood, if THE BIBLE does _not_ sanction the system, the MASTER
+must cease to be the master. The SLAVE must cease to be the slave. He must
+be _free_, AND EQUAL IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE. _That_ is your
+"_unambiguous tone_". Let it be heard, if _that_ is the word of God.
+
+But if THE BIBLE _does_ sanction the system, then _that_ "unambiguous
+tone" will silence abolitionists who admit the Scriptures; it will satisfy
+all good men, and give peace to the country. That is the "_tone_" I want
+men to hear. Listen to it in the past and present speech of providence.
+The time was when _you_ had the very _public sentiment_ you are now trying
+to form. From Maine to Louisiana, the American mind was softly yielding to
+the impress of emancipation, in some hope, however vague and imaginary.
+Southern as well as Northern men, in the church and out of it, not having
+sufficiently studied the word of God, and, under our own and French
+revolutionary excitement, looking only at the evils of slavery, wished it
+away from the land. It was a _mistaken_ public sentiment. Yet, such as it
+was, you had it, and it was doing your work. It was Quaker-like, mild and
+affectionate. It did not, however, work fast enough for you. You thought
+that the negro, with his superior attributes of body and mind and higher
+advantages of the nineteenth century, might reach, in a day, the liberty
+and equality which the Anglo-American had attained after the struggle of
+his ancestors during a thousand years! You got up the agitation. You got
+it up in the Church and State. You got it up over the length and breadth
+of this whole land. Let me show you some things you have secured, as the
+results of your work.
+
+
+
+_First Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+1. The most consistent abolitionists, affirming the sin of slavery, on the
+maxim of created equality and unalienable right, after torturing the Bible
+for a while, to make it give the same testimony, felt they could get
+nothing from the book. They felt that the God of the Bible disregarded the
+thumb-screw, the boot, and the wheel; that he would not speak for them,
+but against them. These consistent men have now turned away from the
+word, in despondency; and are seeking, somewhere, an abolition Bible, an
+abolition Constitution for the United States, and an abolition God.
+
+This, sir, is the _first result_ of your agitation:--the very van of your
+attack repulsed, and driven into infidelity.
+
+
+
+_A Second Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+2. Many others, and you among them, are trying in exactly the same way
+just mentioned to make the Bible speak against slave-holding. You get
+nothing by torturing the English version. People understand English. Nay,
+you get little by applying the rack to the Hebrew and Greek; even before a
+tribunal of men like you, who proclaim beforehand that Moses, in Hebrew,
+and Paul, in Greek, _must_ condemn slavery because "_it is a violation of
+the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence_." You find it
+difficult to persuade men that Moses and Paul were moved by the Holy Ghost
+to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson! You find it hard to make
+men believe that Moses saw in the mount, and Paul had vision in heaven,
+that this future _apostle of Liberty_ was inspired by Jesus Christ.
+
+You torture very severely. But the muscles and bones of those old men are
+tough and strong. They won't yield under your terrible wrenchings. You get
+only groans and mutterings. You claim these voices, I know, as testimony
+against slavery. But you cannot torture in secret as in olden times. When
+putting the question, you have to let men be present,--who tell us that
+Moses and Paul won't speak for you,--that they are silent, like Christ
+before Pilate's scourging-men; or, in groans and mutterings,--the voices
+of their sorrow and the tones of their indignation,--they rebuke your
+pre-judgment of the Almighty when you say if the Bible sanctions slavery,
+"it neither ought to be nor could be received by mankind as a divine
+revelation."
+
+This, sir, is the _second result_ you have gained by your agitation. You
+have brought a thousand Northern ministers of the gospel, with yourself,
+to the verge of the same denial of the word of God which they have made,
+who are only a little ahead of you in the road you are travelling.
+
+
+
+_A Third Result of Agitation._
+
+
+3. Meanwhile, many of your most pious men, soundest scholars, and
+sagacious observers of providence, have been led to study the Bible more
+faithfully in the light of the times. And they are reading it more and
+more in harmony with the views which have been reached by the highest
+Southern minds, to wit:--That the relation of master and slave is
+sanctioned by the Bible;--that it is a relation belonging to the same
+category as those of husband and wife, parent and child, master and
+apprentice, master and hireling;--that the relations of husband and wife,
+parent and child, _were ordained in Eden for man, as man_, and _modified
+after the fall_, while the relation of slavery, as a system of labor, is
+_only one form of the government ordained of God over fallen and degraded
+man_;--that the _evils_ in the system are _the same evils_ of OPPRESSION
+we see in the relation of husband and wife, and all other forms of
+government;--that slavery, as a relation, suited to the more degraded or
+the more ignorant and helpless types of a sunken humanity, is, like all
+government, intended _as the proof of the curse of such degradation, and
+at the same time to elevate and bless_;--that the relation of husband and
+wife, being for man, as man, _will ever be over him_, while slavery will
+remain so long as God sees it best, as a controlling power over the
+ignorant, the more degraded and helpless;--and that, when he sees it for
+the good of the country, he will cause it to pass away, if the slave can
+be elevated to liberty and equality, political and social, with his
+master, _in_ that country; or _out of_ that country, if such elevation
+cannot be given therein, but may be realized in some other land: all which
+result must be left to the unfoldings of the divine will, _in harmony with
+the Bible_, and not to a newly-discovered dispensation. These facts are
+vindicated in the Bible and Providence. In the Old Testament, they stare
+you in the face:--in the family of Abraham,--in his slaves, bought with
+his money and born in his house,--in Hagar, running away under her
+mistress's hard dealing with her, and yet sent back, as a fugitive slave,
+by the angel,--in the law which authorized the Hebrews to hold their
+brethren as slaves for a time,--in which parents might sell their children
+into bondage,--in which the heathen were given to the Hebrews as their
+slaves forever,--in which slaves were considered so much the money of
+their master, that the master who killed one by an unguarded blow was,
+under certain circumstances, sufficiently punished in his slave's death,
+because he thereby lost his money,--in which the difference between
+_man-stealing_ and _slave-holding_ is, by law, set forth,--in which the
+runaway from heathen masters may not be restored, because God gave him
+the benefits of an adopted Hebrew. In the New Testament:--wherein the
+slavery of Greece and Rome was recognised,--in the obligations laid on
+master and slave,--in the close connection of this obligation with the
+duties of husband and wife, parent and child,--in the obligation to return
+the fugitive slave to his master,--and _in the condemnation of every
+abolition principle_, "AS DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH." (1 Tim. vi. 1-5.)
+
+This view of slavery is becoming more and more, not only the settled
+decision of the Southern but of the best Northern mind, with a movement so
+strong that you have been startled by it to write the pamphlet now lying
+before me.
+
+This is the _third result_ you have secured:--to make many of the best men
+in the North see the infidelity of your philosophy, falsely so called, on
+the subject of slavery, in the clearer and clearer light of the
+Scriptures.
+
+
+
+_Another Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+4. The Southern slave-holder is now satisfied, as never before, that the
+relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible; and he feels, as
+never before, the obligations of the word of God. He no longer, in his
+ignorance of the Scriptures, and afraid of its teachings, will seek to
+defend his common-sense opinions of slavery by arguments drawn from "Types
+of Mankind," and other infidel theories; but he will look, in the light of
+the Bible, on all the good and evil in the system. And when the North, as
+it will, shall regard him holding from God this high power for great
+good,--when the North shall no more curse, but bid him God-speed,--then he
+will bless himself and his slave, in nobler benevolence. With no false
+ideas of created equality and unalienable right, but with the Bible in his
+heart and hand, he will do justice and love mercy in higher and higher
+rule. Every evil will be removed, and the negro will be elevated to the
+highest attainments he can make, and be prepared for whatever destiny God
+intends. This, sir, is the _fourth result_ of your agitation:--to make the
+Southern master _know_, from the Bible, his right to be a master, and his
+duty to his slave.
+
+These _four results_ are so fully before you, that I think you must see
+and feel them. You have brought out, besides, tremendous political
+consequences, giving astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on
+these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of
+the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep
+of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I
+rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly
+purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long
+latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and
+South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of
+God and to speak it to the land. I rejoice that all the South now know
+that God gives the right to hold slaves, and, with that right,
+obligations they must fulfil. I rejoice that the day has dawned in which
+the North and South will think and feel and act together on the subject
+of slavery. I thank God for the agitation. May he forgive the folly and
+wickedness of many who have gotten it up! May he reveal more and more,
+that surely the wrath of man shall praise him, while the remainder of
+wrath he will restrain!
+
+
+
+_Declaration of Independence_.
+
+
+I agree with you, sir, that _the second paragraph_ of the Declaration of
+Independence contains _five affirmations_, declared to be self-evident
+truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every
+thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to
+liberty,--to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to
+their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident
+truth, or a truth at all. On the contrary, that each one is contrary to
+the Bible; that each one, separately, is denied; and that all five,
+collectively, are denied and upset by the Bible, by the natural history of
+man, and by providence, in every age of the world. I say this now. In a
+subsequent communication, I will prove what I affirm. For the present I
+merely add, that the Declaration of Independence stands in no need of
+these false affirmations. It was, and is, a beautiful whole without them.
+It was, and is, without these imaginary maxims, the simple statement of
+the grievances the colonies had borne from the mother-country, and their
+right _as colonies_, when thus oppressed, to declare themselves
+independent. That is to say, the right given of God to oppressed children
+to seek protection in another family, or to set up for themselves somewhat
+before _twenty-one_ or natural maturity; right belonging to them _in the
+British family;_ right sanctioned of God; right blessed of God, in the
+resistance of the colonies _as colonies_--not as individual men--to the
+attempt of the mother-country to consummate her tyranny. But God gives no
+sanction to the affirmation that he has _created all men equal_; that this
+is _self-evident,_ and that he has given them _unalienable rights;_ that
+he has made government to _derive its power solely from their consent_,
+and that he has given them _the right to change that government in their
+mere pleasure_. All this--every word of it, every jot and tittle--is the
+liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times
+in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if
+Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed
+it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as
+time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru
+Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, Garrison, or Barnes.
+
+Sir, that paragraph is an _excrescence_ on the tree of our liberty. I pray
+you take it away. Worship it if you will, and in a manner imitate the
+Druid. He gave reverence to the _mistletoe_, but first he removed the
+_parasite_ from the noble tree. Do you the same. Cut away _this mistletoe_
+with golden knife, as did the Druid; enshrine its imaginary divinity in a
+grove or cave; then retire there, and leave our oak to stand in its glory
+in the light of heaven. Men have been afraid to say all this for years,
+just as they have been timid to assert that God has placed master and
+slave in the same relation as husband and wife. Public sentiment, which
+you once had and have lost, suppressed this utterance as the other. But
+now, men speak out; and I, for one, will tell you what the Bible reveals
+as to that part of the Declaration of Independence, as fearlessly as I
+tell you what it says of the system of slavery.
+
+
+
+_How Men are made Infidels_.
+
+
+I agree with you that some men have been, are, and will be, made infidels
+by hearing that God has ordained slavery as one form of his government
+over depraved mankind. But how does this fact prove that the Bible does
+not sanction slavery? Why, sir, you have been all your life teaching that
+some men are made infidels by hearing any truth of the Bible;--that some
+men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement,
+Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. True: and these men
+find "_great laws of their nature,--instinctive feelings_"--just such as
+you find against slavery, and not more perverted in them than in you,
+condemning all this Bible. And they hold now, with your sanction, that a
+book affirming such facts "_cannot be from God_."
+
+Sir, some men are made infidels by hearing the Ten Commandments, and they
+find "_great laws of their nature_," as strong in them as yours in you
+against slavery, warring against every one of these commandments. And
+they declare now, with your authority, that a book imposing such
+restraints upon human nature, "_cannot be from God_" Sir, what is it
+makes infidels? You have been wont to answer, "They _will not_ have God
+_to rule over them_. They _will not_ have the BIBLE _to control the great
+laws of their nature."_ Sir, that is the true answer. And you know that
+_the great instinct of liberty_ is only one of _three great laws_,
+needing special teaching and government:--that is to say, _the instinct
+to rule; the instinct to submit to be ruled; and the instinct for
+liberty._ You know, too, that the instinct _to submit_ is the strongest,
+the instinct _to rule_ is next, and that the _aspiration for liberty_ is
+the weakest. Hence you know the overwhelming majority of men have ever
+been willing to be slaves; masters have been next in number; while the
+few have struggled for freedom.
+
+The Bible, then, in proclaiming God's will _as to these three great
+impulses_, will be rejected by men, exactly as they have yielded forbidden
+control to the one or the other of them. The Bible will make infidels of
+_masters_, when God calls to them to rule right, or to give up rule, if
+they have allowed _the instinct of power_ to make them hate God's
+authority. Pharaoh spoke for all infidel rulers when he said, "_Who is the
+Lord that I should obey his voice?_"
+
+The Bible will make infidels of _slaves_, when God calls to them to aspire
+to be free, if they have permitted _the instinct of submission to_ make
+them hate his commands. The Israelites in the wilderness revealed ten
+times, in their murmuring, _the slave-instinct_ in all ages:--"_Would to
+God we had died in the wilderness!_"
+
+You know all this, and you condemn these infidels. Good.
+
+But, sir, you know equally well that the Bible will make infidels of men
+_affirming the instinct of liberty,_ when God calls them to learn of him
+how _much liberty_ he gives, and _how_ he gives it, and _when_ he gives
+it, if they have so yielded to this law of their nature as to make them
+despise the word of the Lord. Sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram spoke out
+just what the liberty-and-equality men have said in all time:--"_Ye, Moses
+and Aaron, take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy,
+every one of them: wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the
+congregation?"_ Verily, sir, these men were intensely excited by "_the
+great law of our nature,--the great instinct of freedom."_ Yea, they told
+God to his face they had looked within, and found the _higher law of
+liberty and equality--the eternal right--in their intuitional
+consciousness_; and that they would not submit to his will in the
+elevation of Moses and Aaron _above them_.
+
+Verily, sir, you, in the spirit of Korah, now proclaim and say, "Ye
+masters, and ye white men who are not masters, North and South, ye take
+too much upon you, seeing the negro is created your equal, and, by
+unalienable right, is as free as you, and entitled to all your political
+and social life. Ye take, then, too much upon you in excluding him from
+your positions of wealth and honor, from your halls of legislation, and
+from your palace of the nation, and from your splendid couch, and from
+your fair women with long hair on that couch and in that gilded chariot:
+wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the negro?"
+
+Verily, sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram said all we have ever heard from
+abolition-platforms or now listen to from you. But the Lord made the
+earth swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram!
+
+I agree with you then, sir, fully, that some men have been, are, and will
+be, made infidels by hearing that God, in the Bible, has ordained slavery.
+But I hold this to be no argument against the fact that the Bible does so
+teach, because men are made infidels by any other doctrine or precept they
+hate to believe.
+
+Sir, no man has said all this better than you. And I cannot express my
+grief that you--in the principle now avowed, _that every man must
+interpret the Bible as he chooses to reason and feel_--sanction all the
+infidelity in the world, obliterate your "_Notes_" on the Bible, and deny
+the preaching of your whole life, so far as God may, in his wrath, permit
+you to expunge or recall the words of the wisdom of your better day.
+
+
+
+_Testimonies of General Assemblies_.
+
+
+I agree with you that the Presbyterian Church, both before and since its
+division, has testified, after a fashion, against slavery. But some of its
+action has been very curious testimony. I know not how the anti-slavery
+resolutions of 1818 were gotten up; nor how in some Assemblies since. I
+can guess, however, from what I do know, as to how such resolutions passed
+in Buffalo in 1853, and in New York in 1856. I know that in Buffalo they
+were at first voted down by a large majority. Then they were reconsidered
+in mere courtesy to men who said they wanted to speak. So the resolutions
+were passed after some days, in which the _screws_ were applied and
+turned, in part, _by female hands_, to save the chairman of the committee
+from _the effects_ of the resolutions being finally voted down!
+
+I know that, in New York, the decision of the Assembly to spread the
+minority report on the minutes was considered, in the body and out of it,
+as a Southern victory; for it revealed, however glossed over, that many in
+the house, who could not vote directly for the minority report, did in
+fact prefer it to the other.
+
+I was not in Detroit in 1850; but I think it was established in New York
+last May that that Detroit testimony was so admirably worded that both
+Southern and Northern men might vote for it with clear consciences!
+
+I need not pursue the investigation. I admit that, after this sort, you
+have the stultified abstractions of the New School Presbyterian
+Church,--while I have its common sense; you have its Delphic words,--I
+have its actions; you have the traditions of the elders making void the
+word of God,--I have the providence of God restraining the church from
+destroying itself and our social organization under folly, fanaticism, and
+infidelity.
+
+You, sir, seem to acknowledge this; for, while you appear pleased with the
+testimony of the New School Presbyterian Church, such as it is, you lament
+that the Old School have not been true to the resolutions of 1818,--that,
+in that branch of the church, it is questionable whether those resolutions
+could now be adopted. You lament the silence of the Episcopal, the
+Southern Methodist, and the Baptist denominations; you might add the
+Cumberland Presbyterian Church. And you know that in New England, in New
+York, and in the Northwest, many testify against _us_ as a pro-slavery
+body. You lament that so many members of the church, ministers of the
+gospel, and editors of religious papers, defend the system; you lament
+that so large a part of the religious literature of the land, though
+having its seat North and sustained chiefly by Northern funds, shows a
+perpetual deference to the slave-holder; you lament that, after fifty
+years, nothing has been done to arrest slavery; you lament and ask, "Why
+should this be so?" In saying this, you acknowledge that, while you have
+been laboring to get and have reached the abstract testimony of the
+church, all diluted as it is, the common-sense fact has been and is more
+and more brought out, in the providence of God, that _the slave-power has
+been and is gaining ground in the United States_. In one word, you have
+contrived to get, in confused utterance, the voice of the Sanhedrim; while
+Christ himself has been preaching in the streets of our Jerusalem the true
+meaning of slavery as one form of his government over fallen men.
+
+These, then, are some of the things I promised to show as the results of
+your agitation. This is the "_tone_" of the past and present speech of
+Providence on the subject of slavery. You seem disturbed. I feel sure
+things are going on well as to that subject. Speak on, then, "in
+unambiguous tones." But, sir, when you desire to go from words to
+actions,--when you intimate that the constitution of the Presbyterian
+Church may be altered to permit such action, or that, without its
+alteration, the church can detach itself from slavery by its existing laws
+or the modification of them,--then I understand you to mean that you
+desire to deal, in fact, with slave-holders as _offenders_. Then, sir,
+_you mean to exscind the South_; for it is absurd to imagine that you
+suppose the South will submit to such action. You mean, then, to _exscind
+the South, or to exscind yourself and others_, or to _compel the South to
+withdraw_. Your tract, just published, is, I suppose, intended by you to
+prepare the next General Assembly for such movement? What then? Will you
+make your "American Presbyterian," and your Presbyterian House, effect
+that great change in the religious literature of the land whereby the
+subject of slave-holding shall be approached _precisely_ as you deal with
+"theft, highway-robbery, or piracy?" Will you, then, by act of Assembly,
+Synod, Presbytery, Session, deny your pulpits, and communion-bread and
+wine, to slave-holding ministers, elders, and members? Will you, then,
+tell New England, and especially little Rhoda, We have purified our skirts
+from the blood: forgive us, and take us again to your love? What then?
+Will you then ostracize the South and compel the abolition of slavery?
+Sir, do you bid us fear these coming events, thus casting their shadow
+before from the leaves of your book?
+
+Sir, you may destroy the integrity of the New School Presbyterian Church.
+So much evil you may do; but you will hereby only add immensely to the
+great power and good of the Old School; and you will make disclosures of
+Providence, unfolding a consummation of things very different from the end
+you wish to accomplish for your country and the world.
+
+I write as one of the animalcules contributing to the coral reef of
+public opinion.
+
+F. A. Ross.
+
+
+
+
+No. II.
+
+Government Over Man a Divine Institute.
+
+
+
+This letter is the examination and refutation of the infidel theory of
+human government foisted into the Declaration of Independence.
+
+I had written this criticism in different form for publication, before Mr.
+Barnes's had appeared. I wrote it to vindicate my affirmation in the
+General Assembly which met in New York, May last, on this part of the
+Declaration. My views were maturely formed, after years of reflection, and
+weeks--nay months--of carefully-penned writing.
+
+And thus these truths, from the Bible, Providence, and common sense, were
+like rich freight, in goodly ship, waiting for the wind to sail; when lo,
+Mr. Barnes's abolition-breath filled the canvas, and carried it out of
+port into the wide, the free, the open sea of American public thought.
+There it sails. If pirate or other hostile craft comes alongside, the good
+ship has guns.
+
+I ask that this paper be carefully read more than once, twice, or three
+times. Mr. Barnes, I presume, will not so read it. He is committed.
+Greeley may notice it with his sparkling wit, albeit he has too much sense
+to grapple with its argument. The Evangelist-man will say of it, what he
+would say if Christ were casting out devils in New York,--"He casteth
+out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils." Yea, this
+Evangelist-man says that my version of the golden rule is "diabolical;"
+when truly that version is the _word_ of the Spirit, as Christ's casting
+out devils was the _work_ of the Holy Ghost.
+
+Gerrett Smith, Garrison, Giddings, do already agree with me, that they are
+right if Jefferson spoke the truth. Yea, whether the Bible be true, is no
+question with them no more than with him. Yea, they hold, as he did, that
+whether there be one God or twenty, it matters not: the fact either way,
+in men's minds, neither breaks the leg nor picks the pocket. (See
+Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.) Messrs. Beecher and Cheever will find
+nothing in me to aid them in speaking to the mobs of Ephesus and Antioch.
+They are making shrines, and crying, Great is Diana. Mrs. Stowe is on the
+Dismal Swamp, with Dred for her Charon, to paddle her light canoe, by the
+fire-fly lamps, to the Limbo of Vanity, of which she is the queen. None of
+these will read with attention or honesty, if at all, this examination of
+what Randolph long ago said was a _fanfaronade of nonsense_. These are all
+wiser "than seven men that can render a reason."
+
+But there are thousands, North and South, who will read this refutation,
+and will feel and acknowledge that in the light of God's truth the notion
+of created equality and unalienable right is falsehood and infidelity.
+
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--In my first letter I promised to prove that the paragraph in
+the Declaration of Independence, which contains the affirmation of
+created equality and unalienable rights, has no sanction from the word of
+God. I now meet my obligation.
+
+The time has come when civil liberty, as revealed in the Bible and in
+Providence, must be re-examined, understood, and defended against infidel
+theories of human rights. The slavery question has brought on this
+conflict; and, strange as it may seem, the South, the land of the slave,
+is summoned by God to defend the liberty he gives; while the North, the
+clime of the free, misunderstands and changes the truth of God into a
+lie,--claiming a liberty he does not give. Wherefore is this? I reply:---
+
+God, when he ordained government over men, gave to the individual man
+RIGHTS, _only_ as he is under government. He first established the family;
+hence all other rule is merely the family expanded. The _good_ of the
+family limited the _rights_ of every member. God required the family, and
+then the state, so to rule as to give to every member the _good_ which is
+his, in harmony with the welfare of the whole; and he commanded the
+individual to seek _that good_, and NO MORE.
+
+Now, mankind being depraved, government has ever violated its obligation
+to rule for the benefit of the entire community, and has wielded its
+power in oppression. Consequently, the governed have ever struggled to
+secure the good which was their right. But, in this struggle, they have
+ever been tempted to go beyond the limitation God had made, and to seek
+supposed good, not given, in rights, prompted by _self-will_, destructive
+of the state.
+
+Government thus ever existing in oppression, and people thus ever rising
+up against despotism, have been the history of mankind.
+
+The Reformation was one of the many convulsions in this long-continued
+conflict. In its first movements, men claimed the liberty the Bible
+grants. Soon they ran into licentiousness. God then stayed the further
+progress of emancipation in Europe, because the spread of the asserted
+liberty would have made infidelity prevail over that part of the
+continent where the Reformation was arrested. God preferred Romanism,
+and other despotisms, modified as they were by the struggle, to rule for
+a time, than have those countries destroyed under the sway of a
+licentious freedom.
+
+In this contest the North American colonies had their rise, and they
+continued the strife with England until they declared themselves
+independent.
+
+That "Declaration" affirmed not only the liberty sanctioned of the Bible,
+but also the liberty constituting infidelity. Its first paragraph, to the
+word "_separation_," is a noble introduction. Omit, then, what follows,
+to the sentence beginning "_Prudence will dictate_," and the paper, thus
+expurgated, is complete, and is then simply the complaint of the colonies
+against the government of England, which had oppressed them beyond
+further submission, and the assertion of their right to be free and
+independent States.
+
+This declaration was, in that form, nothing more than the affirmation of
+the right God gives to children, in a family, applied to the colonies, in
+regard to their mother-country. That is to say, children have, from God,
+RIGHT, AS CHILDREN, when cruelly treated, to secure the good to which they
+are entitled, as children, IN THE FAMILY. They may secure _this_ good by
+becoming part of another family, or by setting up for themselves, if old
+enough. So the colonies had, from God, _right_ as colonies, when oppressed
+beyond endurance, to exchange the British family for another, or, if of
+sufficient age, to establish their own household. The Declaration, then,
+in that complaint of oppression and affirmation of right, in the colonies,
+to be independent, asserts liberty sanctioned by the word of God. And
+therefore the pledge to _that_ Declaration, of "lives, fortune, and sacred
+honor," was blessed of Heaven, in the triumph of their cause.
+
+But the Declaration, in the part I have omitted, affirms other things, and
+very different. It asserts facts and rights as appertaining to man, not in
+the Scriptures, but contrary thereto. Here is the passage:--
+
+  "We hold these truths to be self-evident,--that all men are created
+  equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
+  unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
+  pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are
+  instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
+  the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
+  destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
+  abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation
+  on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to
+  them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
+
+_This is the affirmation of the liberty claimed by infidelity._ It teaches
+as a fact _that_ which is not true; and it claims as right _that_ which
+God has not given. It asserts nothing new, however. It lays claim to that
+individual right beyond the limitation God has put, which man has ever
+asserted when in his struggle for liberty he has refused to be guided and
+controlled by the word and providence of his Creator.
+
+The paragraph is a chain of four links, each of which is claimed to be a
+self-evident truth.
+
+The _first_ and controlling assertion is, "that ALL MEN ARE CREATED
+EQUAL;" which proposition, as I understand it, is, that _every man and
+woman on earth is created with equal attributes of body and mind_.
+
+_Secondly_, and consequently, that every individual has, by virtue of his
+or her being created the equal of each and every other individual, the
+right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, _so in his or her
+own keeping that that right is unalienable without his or her consent_.
+
+_Thirdly_, it follows, that government among men must derive its just
+powers only from the _consent_ of the governed; and, as the governed are
+the aggregate of individuals, _then each person must consent to be thus
+controlled before he or she can be rightfully under such authority_.
+
+_Fourthly_, and finally, that whenever any form of government becomes
+destructive of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+_as each such individual man or woman may think_, then each such person
+may rightly set to work to alter or abolish such form, and institute a new
+government, on such principles and in such form as to them shall seem most
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.
+
+This is the celebrated averment of created equality, and unalienable right
+to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, with the necessary
+consequences. I have fairly expanded its meaning. It is the old infidel
+averment. It is not true in any one of its assertions.
+
+
+
+_All Men not created equal_.
+
+
+It is not a truth, _self-evident,_ that all men are created equal.
+Webster, in his dictionary, defines "Self-evident--Evident without proof
+or reason: clear conviction upon a bare presentation to the mind, as that
+two and three make five."
+
+Now, I affirm, and you, I think, will not contradict me, that the
+position, "_all men are created equal"_ is _not_ self-evident; that the
+nature of the case makes it impossible for it to be self-evident. For the
+created nature of man is not in the class of things of which such
+self-evident propositions can by possibility be predicated. It is equally
+clear and beyond debate, that it is not _self-evident_ that all men have
+_unalienable rights_, that governments derive their just powers from the
+_consent_ of the governed, and may be altered or abolished whenever _to
+them_ such rights may be better secured. All these assertions can be known
+to be true or false only from revelation of the Creator, or from
+examination and induction of reasoning, covering the nature and the
+obligations of the race on the whole face of the earth. What revelation
+and examination of facts do teach, I will now show. The whole
+battle-ground, as to the truth of this series of averments, is on the
+first affirmation, "_that all men are created equal_." Or, to keep up my
+first figure, the strength of the chain of asserted truths depend on
+_that_ first link. It must then stand the following perfect trial.
+
+God reveals to us that he created man in his image, _i.e._ a spirit
+endowed with attributes resembling his own,--to reason, to form rule of
+right, to manifest various emotions, to will, to act,--and that he gave
+him a body suited to such a spirit, (Gen. i. 26, 27, 28;) that he created
+MAN "_male and female_," (Gen. i. 27;) that he made the woman "_out of the
+man_," (Gen. ii. 23;) that he made "_the man the image and glory of God_,
+but the woman _the glory of the man_. For the man is not of the woman, but
+the woman of the man. Neither was the man _created for the woman_, but the
+woman _for the man_," (1 Cor. xi.;) that he made the woman to be the
+weaker vessel, (1 Pet. iii. 7.) Here, then, God created _the race_ to be
+in the beginning TWO,--a male and a female MAN; one of them _not equal_ to
+the other _in attributes of body and mind_, and, as we shall see
+presently, not equal in rights as to government. Observe, this inequality
+was fact as to the TWO, in the perfect state wherein they were _created_.
+
+But these two fell from that perfect state, became depraved, and began to
+be degraded in body and mind. This statement of the original inequality in
+which man was created controls all that comes after, in God's providence
+and in the natural history of the race.
+
+_Providence_, in its comprehensive teaching, "says that God, soon after
+the flood, subjected the races to all the influences of the different
+zones of the earth;"--"That he hath made of one blood all nations of men
+for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times
+before appointed and the bounds of their habitation; that they should
+seek the Lord if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he
+be not far from every one of us." (Acts xvii. 26, 27.)
+
+These "bounds of their habitation" have had much to do in the natural
+history of man; for "_all men_" have been "_created_," or, more
+correctly, _born_, (since the race was "created" once only at the first,)
+with attributes of body and mind derived from the TWO unequal parents,
+and these attributes, in every individual, the combined result of the
+parental natures. "_All men_," then, come into the world under influences
+upon the amalgamated and transmitted body and mind, from depravity and
+degradation, sent down during all the generations past; and, therefore,
+under causes of inequality, acting on each individual from climate, from
+scenery, from food, from health, from sickness, from love, from hatred,
+from government, inconceivable in variety and power. Under such causes,
+to produce infinite shades of inequality, physical and mental, in
+birth--if "all men" were created equal (_i.e._ born equal) in attributes
+of body and mind--such "creation" would be a violation of all the known
+analogies in the world of life.
+
+Do, then, the facts in man's natural history exhibit this departure from
+the laws of life and spirit? Do they prove that "all men are created
+equal"? Do they show that every man and every woman of Africa, Asia,
+Europe, America, and the islands of the seas, is created each one equal in
+body and mind to each other man or woman on the face of the earth, and
+that this has always been?
+
+Need I extend these questions? Methinks, sir, I hear you say, what others
+have told me, that the "Declaration" is not to be understood as affirming
+what is so clearly false, but merely asserts that all men are "created
+equal" in _natural rights._
+
+I reply that _that_ is _not_ the meaning of the clause before us; for
+_that_ is the meaning of the next sentence,--the _second_ in the series we
+are considering.
+
+There are, as I have said, four links to the chain of thought in this
+passage:--1. That all men are created equal. 2. That they are endowed by
+the Creator with certain unalienable rights. 3. That government derives
+its just powers from the consent of the governed. 4. That the people may
+alter and abolish it, &c.
+
+These links are logical sequences. All men--man and woman--are created
+equal,--equal in _attributes of body and mind_; (for _that_ is the only
+sense in which they could be _created_ equal;) _therefore_ they are
+endowed with right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,
+unalienable, except in their consent; _consequently_ such consent is
+essential to all rightful government; and, _finally_ and _irresistibly_,
+the people have supreme right to alter or abolish it, &c.
+
+The meaning, then, I give to that first link, and to the chain following,
+_is_ the sense, because, if you deny that meaning to the _first link_,
+then the others have no logical truth whatever. Thus:--
+
+If all men are _not_ created equal in attributes of body and mind, then
+the _inequality_ may be _so great_ that such men cannot be endowed with
+right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, unalienable save in
+their _consent_; then government over such men cannot rightfully rest upon
+their _consent_; nor can they have right to alter or abolish government in
+their mere determination.
+
+Yea, sir, you concede every thing if you admit that the "Declaration"
+does _not_ mean to affirm that all men are "_created_" _equal in body
+and mind_.
+
+I will suppose in the Alps a community of Cretins,--_i.e._ deformed and
+helpless idiots,--but among them many from the same parents, who, in body
+and mind, by birth are comparatively _Napoleons_. Now, this _inequality_,
+physical and mental, by birth, makes it impossible that the government
+over these Cretins can be in their "_consent_." _The Napoleons must rule_.
+The Napoleons must absolutely control their "life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness," for the good of the community. Do you reply that I have taken
+an extreme case? that everybody admits sensible people must govern natural
+fools? Ay, sir, there is the rub. _Natural fools_! Are some men, then,
+"_created_" natural fools? Very well. Then you also admit that some men
+are _created_ just a degree above natural fools!--and, consequently, that
+men are "_created_" in all degrees, gradually rising in the scale of
+intelligence. Are they not "_created_" just above the brute, with savage
+natures along with mental imbecility and physical degradation? Must the
+Napoleons govern the Cretins without their "consent"? Must they not also
+govern without their "consent" these types of mankind, whether one, two,
+three, thirty, or three hundred degrees above the Cretins, if they are
+still greatly inferior by nature? Suppose the Cretins removed from the
+imagined community, and a colony of Australian ant-catchers or California
+lizard-eaters be in their stead: must not the Napoleons govern these? And,
+if you admit inequality to be in birth, then that inequality is the very
+ground of the reason why the Napoleons must govern the ant-catchers and
+lizard-eaters. Remove these, and put in their place an importation of
+African negroes. Do you admit _their inferiority by_ "CREATION?" Then the
+same control over them must be the irresistible fact in common sense and
+Scripture of God. _The Napoleons must govern_. They must govern without
+asking "consent,"--if the inequality be such that "_consent_" would be
+evil, and not good, in the family--the state.
+
+Yea, sir, if you deny that the "Declaration" asserts "all men are created
+equal" in body and mind, then you admit the inequality may be such as to
+make it impossible that in such cases men have rights unalienable save in
+their "consent;" and you admit it to be impossible that government in such
+circumstances can exist in such "_consent_" But, if you affirm the
+"Declaration" _does_ mean that men are "_created_ equal" in attributes of
+body and mind, then you hold to an equality which God, in his word, and
+providence, and the natural history of man, denies to be truth.
+
+I think I have fairly shown, from Scripture and facts, that the first
+averment is not the truth; and have reduced it to an absurdity. I will now
+regard the second, third, and fourth links of the chain.
+
+I know they are already broken; for, the whole chain being but an electric
+current from a vicious imagination, I have destroyed the whole by breaking
+the first link. Or was it but a cluster from a poisonous vine, then I have
+killed the branches by cutting the vine. I will, however, expose the other
+three sequences by a distinct argument covering them all.
+
+
+
+_Authority Delegated to Adam_.
+
+
+God gave to Adam sovereignty over the human race, in his first
+decree:--"_He shall rule over thee_." _That_ was THE INSTITUTION OF
+GOVERNMENT. It was not based on the "_consent_" of Eve, the governed. It
+was from God. He gave to Adam like authority to rule his children. It was
+not derived from their "_consent_". It was from God. He gave Noah the same
+sovereignty, with express power over life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness. It was not founded in "_consent_" of Shem, Ham, and Japheth,
+and their wives. It was from God. He then determined the habitations of
+men on all the face of the earth, and _indicated_ to them, in every clime,
+the _form_ and _power_ of their governments. He gave, directly, government
+to Israel. He just as truly gave it to Idumea, to Egypt, and to Babylon,
+to the Arab, to the Esquimaux, the Caffre, the Hottentot, and the negro.
+
+God, in the Bible, decides the matter. He says, "Let every soul be subject
+unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that
+be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
+the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
+damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.
+Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou
+shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for
+good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid, for he beareth not the
+sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath
+upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for
+wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also:
+for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
+Render, therefore, to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due;
+custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor." (Rom.
+xiii. 1-7.)
+
+Here God reveals to us that he has _delegated to government his own_ RIGHT
+_over life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness_; and that that RIGHT is
+not, in any sense, from the "_consent_" of the governed, but is directly
+from him. Government over men, whether in the family or in the state, is,
+then, as directly from God as it would be if he, in visible person, ruled
+in the family or in the state. I speak not only of the RIGHT simply to
+govern, but the _mode_ of the government, and the _extent_ of the power.
+Government _can do_ ALL which God _would do,--just_ THAT,--_no more, no
+less_. And it is _bound to do just_ THAT,--_no more, no less_. Government
+is responsible to God, if it fails to do _just_ THAT which He himself
+would do. It is under responsibility, then, to rule in righteousness. It
+must not oppress. It must _give_ to every individual "_life, liberty, and
+pursuit of happiness_," in harmony with the _good_ of the family,--the
+state,--_as God himself would give it_,--_just_ THAT, _no more, no less_.
+
+This passage of Scripture settles the question, From whence has
+government RIGHT to rule, and what is the _extent_ of its power? The
+RIGHT is from God, and the EXTENT of the power is _just_ THAT to which
+God would exercise it if he were personally on the earth. God, in this
+passage, and others, settles, with equal clearness, from whence is the
+OBLIGATION to _submit_ to government, and what is the _extent_ of the
+duty of obedience? The OBLIGATION to submit is not from individual RIGHT
+to consent or not to consent to government,--but the OBLIGATION _to
+submit_ is directly from God.
+
+The EXTENT of the duty of obedience is equally revealed--in this wise: so
+long as the government rules in righteousness, the duty is perfect
+obedience. So soon, however, as government requires _that_ which God, in
+his word, _forbids the subject to do_, he must obey God, and not man. He
+must refuse to obey man. But, inasmuch as the obligation to submit to
+authority of government is so great, the subject must _know_ it is the
+will of God, that he shall refuse to obey, before he assumes the
+responsibility of resistance to the powers that be. His _conscience_ will
+not justify him before God, if he mistakes his duty. _He may be all the
+more to blame for having_ SUCH A CONSCIENCE. Let him, then, be CERTAIN he
+can say, like Peter and John, "Whether it be right, in the sight of God,
+to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
+
+But, when government requires _that_ which God _does not forbid_ the
+subject to do, although _in that_ the government may have transcended the
+line of its righteous rule, the subject must, nevertheless,
+submit,--_until_ oppression has gone to _the point_ at which _God makes_
+RESISTANCE _to be duty._ And _that point_ is when RESISTANCE will clearly
+be _less of evil, and more of good_, TO THE COMMUNITY, than further
+submission.
+
+_That_ is the rule of _duty_ God gives to the _whole_ people, or to the
+_minority_, or to the _individual_, to guide them in resistance to the
+powers that be.
+
+It is irresistibly _certain_ that _He who ordains_ government _has, alone,
+the right to alter or abolish it_,--that He who institutes the powers that
+be has, alone, the right to say when and how the people, in whole or in
+part, may resist. So, then, the people, in whole, or in part, have no
+right to resist, to alter, or abolish government, simply because _they_
+may deem it destructive of the end for which it was instituted; but they
+may resist, alter, or abolish, _when it shall be seen that God so regards
+it_. This places the great fact where it must be placed,--_under the_
+CONTROL _of the_ BIBLE _and_ PROVIDENCE.
+
+
+
+_Illustrations_.
+
+
+I will conclude with one or two illustrations. God, in his providence,
+ordains the Russian form of government,--_i.e._ He places the sovereignty
+in one man, because He sees that such government can secure, for a time,
+more good to that degraded people than any other form. Now, I ask, Has the
+emperor _right_, from God, to change at once, in his mere "_consent_," the
+_form_ of his government to _that_ of the United States? No. God forbids
+him. Why? Because he would thereby destroy the good, and bring immense
+evil in his empire. I ask again, Have the Russian serfs and nobles,--yea,
+all,--"consenting," the right, from God, to make that change? No. For the
+government of the United States is not suited to them. And, in such an
+attempt, they would deprive themselves of the blessings they now have, and
+bring all the horrors of anarchy.
+
+Do you ask if I then hold, that God ordains the Russian type of rule to be
+perpetual over that people? No. The emperor is bound to secure all of
+"_life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness_," to each individual,
+consistent with the good of the nation. And he is to learn his obligation
+from the Bible, and faithfully apply it to the condition of his subjects.
+_He will thus gradually elevate them_; while they, on their part, are
+bound to strive for this elevation, in all the ways in which God may show
+them the good, and the right, which, more and more, will belong to them in
+their upward progress. The result of such government and such obedience
+would be that of a father's faithful training, and children's
+corresponding obedience. The Russian people would thus have, gradually,
+that measure of liberty they could bear, under the one-man power,--and
+then, in other forms, as they might be qualified to realize them. This
+development would be without convulsion,--as the parent gives place, while
+the children are passing from the lower to their higher life. It would be
+the exemplification of Carlyle's illustration of the snake. He says, A
+people should change their government only as a snake sheds his skin: the
+new skin is gradually formed under the old one,--and then the snake
+wriggles out, with just a drop of blood here and there, where the old
+jacket held on rather tightly.
+
+God ordains the government of the United States. And _He places_ the
+_sovereignty_ in the _will_ of the majority, because He has trained the
+people, through many generations in modes of government, to such an
+elevation in moral and religious intelligence, that such sovereignty is
+best suited to confer on them the highest right, as yet, to "life,
+liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But God requires that _that will
+of the majority_ be in perfect submission to Him. Once more then I
+inquire,--Whether the people of this country, yea all of them consenting,
+have right from God, to abolish now, at this time, our free institutions,
+and set up the sway of Russia? No. But why? There is one answer only. He
+tells us that our happiness is in this form of government, and in it, its
+developed results.
+
+
+
+_The "Social Compact" not recognised in the Divine Institute_.
+
+
+Here I pause. So, then, God gives no sanction to the notion of a SOCIAL
+COMPACT. He never gave to man individual, isolated, natural rights,
+unalienably in his keeping. He never made him a Caspar Hauser, in the
+forest, without name or home,--a Melchisedek, in the wilderness, without
+father, without mother, without descent,--a Robinson Crusoe, on his
+island, in skins and barefooted, waiting, among goats and parrots, the
+coming of the canoes and the savages, to enable him to "_consent_" if he
+would, to the relations of social life.
+
+And, therefore, those five sentences in that second paragraph of the
+Declaration of Independence are not the truth; so, then, it is not
+_self-evident_ truth that all men are created equal. So, then, it is not
+the truth, in fact, that they are created equal. So, then, it is not the
+truth that God has endowed all men with unalienable right to life,
+liberty, and pursuit of happiness. So, then, it is not the truth that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So,
+then, it is not the truth that the people have right to alter or abolish
+their government, and institute a new form, whenever to them it shall seem
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.
+
+The manner in which these unscriptural dogmas have been modified or
+developed in the United States, I will examine in another paper.
+
+I merely add, that the opinions of revered ancestors, on these questions
+of right and their application to American slavery, must now, as never
+before, be brought to the test of the light of the Bible. F.A. Ross.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 1857.
+
+
+
+
+Man-Stealing.
+
+
+
+This argument on the abolition charge, against the slave-holder,--that he
+is a man-stealer,--covers the whole question of slavery, especially as it
+is seen in the Old Testament. The headings in the letter make the subject
+sufficiently clear.
+
+
+
+No. III.
+
+
+
+Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--In my first letter, I merely touched some points in your tract,
+intending to notice them more fully in subsequent communications. I have,
+in my second paper, sufficiently examined the imaginary maxims of created
+equality and unalienable rights.
+
+In this, I will test your views by Scripture more directly. "To the law
+and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is
+because there is no light in them." (Isaiah viii. 20).
+
+The abolitionist charges the slave-holder with being a _man-stealer_. He
+makes this allegation in two affirmations. First, that the slave-holder
+is thus guilty, because, the negro having been kidnapped in Africa,
+therefore those who now hold him, or his children, in bondage, lie under
+the guilt of that first act. Secondly, that the slave-holder, by the very
+fact that he is such, is guilty of stealing from the negro his unalienable
+right to freedom.
+
+This is the charge. It covers the whole subject. I will meet it in all
+its parts.
+
+
+
+_The Difference between Man-Stealing and Slave-Holding, as set forth in
+the Bible_.
+
+
+The Bible reads thus: (Exodus xxi. 16:)--"He that stealeth a man
+and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be
+put to death."
+
+What, then, is it to kidnap or steal a man? Webster informs us--To kidnap
+is "to steal a human being, a man, woman, or child; or to seize and
+forcibly carry away any person whatever, from his own country or state
+into another." The idea of "_seizing and forcibly carrying away"_ enters
+into the meaning of the word in all the definitions of law.
+
+The crime, then, set forth in the Bible was not _selling_ a man: but
+selling a _stolen_ man. The crime was not having a man _in his hand as a
+slave_; but......in _his_ hand, as a slave, a _stolen_ man. And hence, the
+penalty of _death_ was affixed, not to selling, buying, or holding man, as
+a slave, but to the specific offence of _stealing and selling, or holding_
+a man _thus stolen, contrary to this law_. Yea, it was _this law_, and
+this law _only_, which made it _wrong_. For, under some circumstances, God
+sanctioned the seizing and forcibly carrying away a man, woman, or child
+from country or state, into slavery or other condition. He sanctioned the
+utter destruction of every male and every married woman, and child, of
+Jabez-Gilead, and the seizure, and forcibly carrying away, four hundred
+virgins, unto the camp to Shiloh, and there, being given as wives to the
+remnant of the slaughtered tribe of Benjamin, in the rock Rimmon. Sir,
+how did that destruction of Jabez-Gilead, and the kidnapping of those
+young women, differ from the razing of an African village, and forcibly
+seizing, and carrying away, those not put to the sword? The difference is
+in this:--God commanded the Israelites to seize and bear off those young
+women. But he forbids the slaver to kidnap the African. Therefore, the
+Israelites did right; therefore, the trader does wrong. The Israelites,
+it seems, gave wives, in that way, to the spared Benjamites, because they
+had sworn not to give their daughters. But there were six hundred of these
+Benjamites. Two hundred were therefore still without wives. What was done
+for them? Why, God authorized the elders of the congregation to tell the
+two hundred Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of
+Shiloh, when they came out to dance, in the feast of the Lord, on the
+north side of Bethel. And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them
+wives, "whom they caught:" (Judges xxi.) God made it right for those
+Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of Shiloh. But he
+makes it wrong for the trader to catch his slaves of the sons or daughters
+of Africa. Lest you should try to deny that God authorized this act of the
+children of Israel, although I believe he did order it, let me remind you
+of another such case, the authority for which you will not question.
+
+Moses, by direct command from God, destroyed the Midianites. He slew all
+the males, and carried away all the women and children. He then had all
+the married women and male children killed; but all the virgins,
+thirty-two thousand, were divided as spoil among the people. And
+_thirty-two_ of these virgins, _the Lord's tribute_, were given unto
+Eleazar, the priest, "as the Lord commanded Moses." (Numbers xxxi.)
+
+Sir, Thomas Paine rejected the Bible on this fact among his other
+objections. Yea, _his_ reason, _his_ sensibilities, _his_ great law of
+humanity, _his_ intuitional and eternal sense of right, made it impossible
+for him to honor such a God. And, sir, on your now avowed principles of
+interpretation, which are those of Paine, you sustain him in his rejection
+of the books of Moses and all the word of God.
+
+God's command _made it right_ for Moses to destroy the Midianites and make
+slaves of their daughters; and I have dwelt upon these facts, to reiterate
+what I hold to be THE FIRST TRUTH IN MORALS:--that a thing is right, not
+because it is ever so _per se_, but because God _makes it right_; and, of
+course, a thing is wrong, not because it is so in the nature of things,
+but because God makes it wrong. I distinctly have taken, and do take, that
+ground in its widest sense, and am prepared to maintain it against all
+comers. He made it right for the sons of Adam to marry their sisters. He
+made it right for Abraham to marry his half-sister. He made it right for
+the patriarchs, and David and Solomon, to have more wives than one. He
+made it right when he gave command to kill whole nations, sparing none. He
+made it right when he ordered that nations, or such part as he pleased,
+should be spared and enslaved. He made it right that the patriarchs and
+the Israelites should hold slaves in harmony with the system of servile
+labor which had long been in the world. He merely modified that system to
+suit his views of good among his people. So, then, when he saw fit, they
+might capture men. So, then, when he forbade the individual Israelite to
+steal a man, he made it crime, and the penalty death. So, then, that crime
+was not the mere _stealing_ a man, nor the _selling_ a man, nor the
+_holding_ a man,--but the _stealing and selling_, or _holding_, a man
+_under circumstances thus forbidden of God_.
+
+
+
+_Was the Israelite Master a Man-Stealer?_
+
+
+I now ask, Did God intend to make man-stealing and slave-holding the same
+thing? Let us see. In that very chapter of Exodus (xxi.) which contains
+the law against man-stealing, and only four verses further on, God says,
+"If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his
+hand, he shall be surely punished: notwithstanding, if he continue a day
+or two he shall not be punished; for he is his money." (Verses 20, 21.)
+
+Sir, that man was not a hired servant. He was bought with money. He was
+regarded by God _as the money_ of his master. He was his slave, in the
+full meaning of a slave, then, and now, bought with money. God, then, did
+not intend the Israelites to understand, and not one of them ever
+understood, from that day to this, that Jehovah in his law to Moses
+regarded the slave-holder as a man-stealer. Man-stealing was a specific
+offence, with its specific penalty. Slave-holding was one form of God's
+righteous government over men,--a government he ordained, with various
+modifications, among the Hebrews themselves, and with sterner features in
+its relation to heathen slaves.
+
+In Exodus xxi. and Leviticus xxv., various gradations of servitude were
+enacted, with a careful particularity which need not be misunderstood.
+Among these, a Hebrew man might be a slave for six years, and then go free
+with his wife, if he were married when he came into the relation; but if
+his master had given him a wife, and she had borne him sons or daughters,
+the wife and her children should be her master's, and he should go out by
+himself. That is, the man by the law became free, while his wife and
+children remained slaves. If the servant, however, plainly said, "I love
+my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his
+master brought him unto the judges, also unto the doorpost, and his master
+bored his ear through with an awl, and he served him forever." (Ex. xxi.
+1-6.) Sir, you have urged discussion:--give us then your views of that
+passage. Tell us how that man was separated from his wife and children
+according to _the eternal right_. Tell us what was the condition of the
+woman in case the man chose to "go out" without her? Tell us if the Hebrew
+who thus had his ear bored by his master with an awl was not a slave for
+life? Tell us, lastly, whether those children were not slaves? And, while
+on that chapter, tell us whether in the next verses, 7-11, God did not
+allow the Israelite father to sell his own daughter into bondage and into
+polygamy by the same act of sale?
+
+I will not dwell longer on these milder forms of slavery, but read to you
+the clear and unmistakable command of the Lord in Leviticus xxv. 44,
+46:--"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be
+of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and
+bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn
+among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you,
+which they beget in your land: and they shall be your possession: and ye
+shall take them for an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit
+them for a possession; and they shall be your bondmen forever."
+
+Sir, the sun will grow dim with age before that Scripture can be tortured
+to mean any thing else than just what it says; that God commanded the
+Israelites to be slave-holders in the strict and true sense over the
+heathen, in manner and form therein set forth. Do you tell the world that
+this cannot be the sense of the Bible, because it is "a violation of the
+first principles of the American Declaration of Independence;" because it
+grates upon your "instinct of liberty;" because it reveals God in
+opposition to the "spirit of the age;" because, if it be the sense of the
+passage, then "the Bible neither ought to be, nor can be, received by
+mankind as a divine revelation"? _That_ is what you say: _that_ is what
+Albert Barnes affirms in his philosophy. But what if God in his word says,
+"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have shall be of the
+heathen that are round about you"? What if we may then choose between
+Albert Barnes's philosophy and God's truth?
+
+Or will you say, God, under the circumstances, _permitted_ the Israelites
+_to sin_ in the matter of slave-holding, just as he permitted them _to
+sin_ by living in polygamy. _Permitted_ them _to sin!_ No, sir; God
+_commanded_ them to be slave-holders. He _made it_ the law of their social
+state. He _made it_ one form of his ordained government among them.
+Moreover, you take it for granted all too soon, that the Israelites
+committed sin in their polygamy. God sanctioned their polygamy. It was
+therefore not sin in them. It was right. But God now forbids polygamy,
+under the gospel; and now it is sin.
+
+Or will you tell us the iniquity of the Canaanites was then full, and
+God's time to punish them had come? True; but the same question comes
+up:--Did God punish the Canaanites by placing them in the relation of
+slaves to his people, by express command, which compelled them to sin?
+That's the point. I will not permit you to evade it. In plainer
+words:--Did God command the Hebrews to make slaves of their fellow-men, to
+buy them and sell them, to regard them as their money? He did. Then, did
+the Hebrews sin when they obeyed God's command? No. Then they did what was
+right, and it was right because God made it so. Then _the Hebrew
+slave-holder was not a man-stealer_. But, you say, the Southern
+slave-holder is. Well, we shall see presently.
+
+Just here, the abolitionist who professes to respect the Scriptures is
+wont to tell us that the whole subject of bondage among the Israelites was
+so peculiar to God's ancient dispensation, that no analogy between that
+bondage and Southern slavery can be brought up. Thus he attempts to raise
+a dust out of the Jewish institutions, to prevent people from seeing that
+slaveholding then was the same thing that it is now. But, to sustain my
+interpretation of the plain Scriptures given, I will go back five hundred
+years before the existence of the Hebrew nation.
+
+I read at that time, (Gen. xiv. 14:)--"And when Abraham heard that his
+brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own
+house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them even unto Damascus,"
+&c. (Gen. xvii. 27:)--"And all the men of his house, born, in the house,
+and bought with the money of the stranger, were circumcised." (Gen. xx.
+14:)--"And Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and men-servants and
+women-servants, and gave them unto Abraham." (Gen. xxiv. 34, 35:)--"And he
+said, I am Abraham's servant; and the Lord hath blessed my master greatly,
+and he is become great; and he hath given him flocks and herds, and silver
+and gold, and men-servants and maid-servants, and camels and asses."
+
+
+
+_Was Abraham a Man-Stealer?_
+
+
+Sir, what is the common sense of these Scriptures? Why, that the
+slave-trade existed in Abraham's day, as it had long before, and has ever
+since, in all the regions of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, in which
+criminals and prisoners of war were sold,--in which parents sold their
+children. Abraham, then, it is plain, bought, of the sellers in this
+traffic, men-servants and maid-servants; he had them born in his house; he
+received them as presents.
+
+Do you tell me that Abraham, by divine authority, made these servants part
+of his family, social and religious? Very good. But still he regarded them
+as his slaves. He took Hagar as a wife, but he treated her as his
+slave,--yea, as Sarah's slave; and as such he gave her to be chastised,
+for misconduct, by her mistress. Yea, he never placed Ishmael, the son of
+the bondwoman, on a level with Isaac, the son of the freewoman. If, then,
+he so regarded Hagar and Ishmael, of course he never considered his other
+slaves on an equality with himself. True, had he been childless, he would
+have given his estate to Eliezer: but he would have given it to his slave.
+True, had Isaac not been born, he would have given his wealth to Ishmael;
+but he would nave given it to the son of his bondwoman. Sir, every
+Southern planter is not more truly a slave-holder than Abraham. And the
+Southern master, by divine authority, may, to-day, consider his slaves
+part of his social and religious family, just as Abraham did. His relation
+is just that of Abraham. He has slaves of an inferior type of mankind from
+Abraham's bondmen; and he therefore, for that reason, as well as from the
+fact that they are his slaves, holds them lower than himself. But,
+nevertheless, he is a slave-holder in no other sense than was Abraham. Did
+Abraham have his slave-household circumcised? Every Southern planter may
+have his slave-household baptized. I baptized, not long since, a
+slave-child,--the master and mistress offering it to God. What was done
+in the parlor might be done with divine approbation on every plantation.
+
+So, then, Abraham lived in the midst of a system of slave-holding exactly
+the same in nature with that in the South,--a system ordained of God as
+really as the other forms of government round about him. He, then, with
+the divine blessing, made himself the master of slaves, men, women, and
+children, by buying them,--by receiving them in gifts,--by having them
+born in his house; and he controlled them as property, just as really as
+the Southern master in the present day. I ask now, _was Abraham a
+man-stealer?_ Oh, no, you reiterate: but the Southern master is. Why?
+
+
+
+_Is the Southern Master a Man-Stealer_?
+
+
+Do you, sir, or anybody, contend that the Southern master seized his slave
+in Africa, and forcibly brought him away to America, contrary to law?
+That, and that alone, was and is kidnapping in divine and human statute.
+No. What then? Why, the abolitionist responds, The African man-stealer
+sold his victim to the slave-holder; he, to the planter; and the negro has
+been ever since in bondage: therefore _the guilt_ of the man-stealer has
+cleaved to sellers, buyers, and inheritors, to this time, and will
+through all generations to come. That is the charge.
+
+And it brings up the question so often and triumphantly asked by the
+abolitionist; _i.e._ "You," he says to the slave-holder,--"you admit it
+was wrong to steal the negro in Africa. Can the slave-holder, then, throw
+off wrong so long as he holds the slave at any time or anywhere
+thereafter?" I answer, yes; and my reply shall be short, yet conclusive. It
+is this:--_Guilt_, or criminality, is that state of a moral agent which
+results from _his_ actual commission of a crime or offence knowing it to
+be crime or violation of law. _That_ is the received definition of
+_guilt_, and _you_, I know, do accept it. The _guilt_, then, of kidnapping
+_terminated_ with the man-stealer, the seller, the buyer, and holders,
+who, knowingly and intentionally, carried on the traffic contrary to the
+divine law. THAT GUILT attaches in no sense whatever, as a personal, moral
+responsibility, to the present slave-holder. Observe, I am here
+discussing, _not the question of mere slave-holding,_ but whether the
+master, who has had nothing to do with the slave-trade, can _now_ hold the
+slave without the moral guilt of the man-stealer? I have said that _that_
+guilt, in no sense whatever, rests upon him; for he neither stole the
+man, nor bought him from the kidnapper, nor had any _complicity_ in the
+traffic. Here, I know, the abolitionist insists that the master _is_
+guilty of this _complicity_, unless he will at once emancipate the slave;
+because, so long as he holds him, he thereby, personally and _voluntarily,
+assumes the same relation which the original kidnapper or buyer held to
+the African_.
+
+This is Dr. Cheever's argument in a recent popular sermon. He thinks it
+unanswerable; but it has no weight whatever. It is met perfectly by adding
+_one_ word to his proposition. Thus:--_The master does_ NOT _assume the
+same relation which the original man-stealer or buyer held to the
+African_. The master's _relation_ to God and to his slave is now _wholly
+changed_ from that of the man-stealer, and those engaged in the trade; and
+his obligation is wholly different. What is his relation? and what is his
+obligation? They are as follows:----
+
+The master finds himself, with no taint of personal concern in the African
+trade, in a Christian community of white Anglo-Americans, holding control
+over his black fellow-man, who is so unlike himself in complexion, in
+form, in other peculiarities, and so unequal to himself in attributes of
+body and mind, that it is _impossible, in every sense_, to place him on a
+level with himself in the community. _This is his relation to the negro_.
+What, then, does God command him to do? Does God require him to send the
+negro back to his heathen home from whence he was stolen? That home no
+longer exists. But, if it did remain, does God command the master to send
+his Christianized slave into the horrors of his former African heathenism?
+No. God has placed the master under law entirely different from his
+command to the slave-trader. God said to the trader, _Let the negro
+alone_. But he says to the present master, _Do unto the negro all the good
+you can; make him a civilized man; make him a Christian man; lift him up
+and give him all he has a right to claim in the good of the whole
+community_. This the master can do; this he must do, and then leave the
+result with the Almighty.
+
+We reach the same conclusion by asking, What does God say to the
+negro-slave?
+
+Does he tell him to ask to be sent back to heathen Africa? No. Does he
+give him authority to claim a created equality and unalienable right to
+be on a level with the white man in civil and social relations? No. To
+ask the first would be to ask a great evil; to claim the second is to
+demand a natural and moral impossibility. No. God tells him to seek none
+of these things. But he commands him to know the facts in his case as
+they are in the Bible, and have ever been, and ever will be in
+Providence:--that he is not the white man's equal,--that he can never
+have his level--that he must not claim it; but that he can have, and
+ought to have, and must have, all of good, in his condition as a slave,
+until God may reveal a higher happiness for him in some other relation
+than that _he must ever_ have to the Anglo-American. The present
+slave-holder, then, by declining to emancipate his bondman, does not
+place himself in _the guilt_ of the man-stealer or of those who had
+complicity with him; but he stands _exactly_ in that NICK _of time and
+place_, in the course of Providence, where _wrong_, in the transmission
+of African slavery, _ends_, and _right begins_.
+
+I have, sir, fairly stated this, your strongest argument, and fully met
+it. _The Southern master is not a man-stealer._ The abolitionist--repulsed
+in his charge that the slave-owner is a kidnapper, either in fact or by
+voluntarily assuming any of the relations of the traffic--then makes his
+impeachment on his second affirmation, mentioned at the opening of this
+letter. That the slave-holder is, nevertheless, thus _guilty_, because,
+in the simple fact of being a master, he _steals_ from the negro his
+unalienable right to freedom.
+
+This, sir, looks like a new view of the subject. The crime forbidden in
+the Bible was stealing and selling a man; _i.e._ seizing and forcibly
+carrying away, from country or State, a human being--man, woman, or
+child--contrary to law, and selling or holding the same. But the
+abolitionist gives us to understand this crime rests on the slave-holder
+in another sense:--namely, that he steals from the negro a metaphysical
+attribute,--his unalienable right to liberty!
+
+This is a new sort of kidnapping. This is, I suppose, _stealing the man
+from himself_, as it is sometimes elegantly expressed,--_robbing him of
+his body and his soul_. Sir, I admit this is a strong figure of speech, a
+beautiful personification, a sonorous rhetorical flourish, which must make
+a deep impression on Dr. Cheever's people, Broadway, New York, and on your
+congregation, Washington Square, Philadelphia; but it is certainly not the
+Bible crime of man-stealing. And whether the Southern master is _guilty_
+of this sublimated thing will be understood by us when you prove that the
+negro, or anybody else, has such metaphysical right to be stolen,--such
+transcendental liberty not in subordination to the good of the whole
+people. In a word, sir, this refined expression is, after all, just the
+old averment that the slave-holder is guilty of _sin per se!_ That's it.
+
+I have given you, in reply, the Old Testament. In my next, I propose to
+inquire what the New Testament says in the light of the _Golden Rule_.
+
+F.A. Ross.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 31, 1857.
+
+
+
+
+The Golden Rule.
+
+
+
+This view of the Golden Rule is the only exposition of that great text
+which has ever been given in words sufficiently clear, and, with practical
+illustrations, to make the subject intelligible to every capacity. The
+explanation is the truth of God, and it settles forever the slavery
+question, so far as it rests on this precept of Jesus Christ.
+
+
+
+
+No. IV.
+
+
+
+Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--The argument against slave-holding, founded on the Golden Rule,
+is the strongest which can be presented, and I admit that, if it cannot be
+perfectly met, the master must give the slave liberty and equality. But if
+it can be absolutely refuted, then the slave-holder in this regard may
+have a good conscience; and the abolitionist has nothing more to say. Here
+is the rule.
+
+"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to
+you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets."
+(Matt. vii. 12.)
+
+In your "_Notes_," on this passage you thus write:--"This command has been
+usually called the Savior's _Golden Rule_; a name given to it on account
+of its great value.--_All that you_ EXPECT or DESIRE _of others, in
+similar circumstances_, DO TO THEM."
+
+This, sir, is your exposition of the Savior's rule of right. With all due
+respect, I decline your interpretation. You have missed the meaning by
+leaving out ONE word. Observe,--you do not say, All that you OUGHT to
+_expect_ or _desire_, &c., THAT _do to them_. No. But you make the
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE, _which every man_ ACTUALLY HAS _in similar
+circumstances_, THE MEASURE _of his_ DUTY _to every other man_. Or, in
+different words, you make, without qualification or explanation, the MERE
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE which every man,--with no instruction, or any sort
+of training,--wise or simple, good or bad, heathen, Mohammedan, nominal
+Christian,--WOULD HAVE _in similar circumstances_, THE LAW OF OBLIGATION,
+_always binding_ upon him TO DO THAT SAME THING _unto his neighbor!_
+
+Sir, you have left out _the very idea_ which contains the sense of that
+Scripture. It is this: Christ, in his rule, _presupposes_ that the man to
+whom he gives it _knows_, and from the Bible, (or providence, or natural
+conscience, _so far as in harmony_ with the Bible,) the _various
+relations_ in which God has placed him; and the _respective duties_ in
+those relations; _i.e._ The rule _assumes_ that he KNOWS what he OUGHT to
+_expect_ or _desire_ in similar circumstances.
+
+I will test this affirmation by several and varied illustrations. I will
+show how Christ, according to your exposition of his rule, speaks on the
+subject,--of _revenge, marriage, emancipation_,--_the fugitive from
+bondage_. And how he truly speaks on these subjects.
+
+
+
+_Revenge--Right according to your view of the Golden Rule_.
+
+
+Indian and Missionary--Prisoner tied to a tree, stuck over with burning
+splinters.
+
+Here is an Indian torturing his prisoner. The missionary approaches and
+beseeches him to regard _the Golden Rule_. "Humph!" utters the savage:
+"Golden Rule! what's that?" "Why" says the good man, "all that you
+_expect_ or _desired_ other Indians, in similar circumstances, do you
+even so to them." "Humph!" growls the warrior, with a fierce
+smile,--"Missionary--good: that's what I do now. If I was tied to that
+tree, I would _expect_ and _desire him_ to have _his_ revenge,--to do to
+me as I do to him; and I would sing my death-song, as he sings his.
+Missionary, your rule is Indian rule,--good rule, missionary. Humph!"
+And he sticks more splinters into his victim, brandishes his tomahawk,
+and yells.
+
+Sir, what has the missionary to say, after this perfect proof that you
+have mistaken the great law of right? Verily, he finds that the rule,
+with your explanation, tells the Indian to torture his prisoner. Verily,
+he finds that the wild man has the best of the argument. He finds he had
+left out the word OUGHT; and that he can't put it in, until he teaches
+the Indian things which as yet he don't know. Yea, he finds he gave the
+commandment too soon; for that he must begin back of that commandment,
+and teach the savage God's ordination of the relations in which he is to
+his fellow-men, before he can make him comprehend or apply the rule as
+Christ gives it.
+
+
+
+_Marriage--Void under your Interpretation of the Golden Rule_.
+
+
+Lucy Stone, and Moses--Lady on sofa, having just divorced herself--Moses,
+with the Tables of the Law, appears: she falls at his feet, and covers her
+face with her hands.
+
+This woman, everybody knows, was married some time since, after a fashion;
+that is to say, protesting publicly against all laws of wedlock, and
+entering into the relation so long only as she, or her husband, might
+continue pleased therewith.
+
+Very well. Then I, without insult to her or offense to my readers, suppose
+that about this time she has shown her unalienable right to liberty and
+equality by giving her husband a bill of divorcement. Free again, she
+reclines on her couch, and is reading the Tribune. It is mid-day. But
+there is a light, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about
+her. And _he_, who saw God on Sinai, stands before her, the glory on his
+face, and the tables of stone in his hands. The woman falls before him,
+veils her eyes with her trembling fingers, and cries out, "Moses, oh, I
+believed till now that thou practised deception, in claiming to be sent of
+God to Israel. But now, I know thou didst see God in the burning bush,
+and heard him speak that law from the holy mountain. Moses, I know ... I
+confess.".... And Moses answers, and says unto her, "Woman, thou art one
+of a great class in this land, who claim to be more just than God, more
+pure than their Maker, who have made their inward light their God. Woman,
+thou in '_convention_' hast uttered _Declaration of Independence_ from
+man. And, verily, thou hast asserted this claim to equality and
+unalienable right, even now, by giving thy husband his bill of
+divorcement, in thy sense of the Golden Rule. Yea, verily, thou hast done
+unto him all that thou _expectedst_ or _desiredst_ of him, in similar
+circumstances. And now thou thinkest thyself free again. Woman, thou art a
+sinner. Verily, thine inward light, and declaration of independence, and
+Golden Rule, do well agree the one with the other. Verily, thou hast
+learned of Jefferson, and Channing, and Barnes. But, woman,
+notwithstanding thou hast sat at the feet of these wise men, I, Moses, say
+thou art a sinner before the law, and the prophets, and the gospel. Woman,
+thy light is darkness; thy declaration of equality and right is vanity and
+folly; and thy Golden Rule is license to wickedness.
+
+"Woman, hast thou ears? Hear: I, by authority of God, ordained that the
+man should rule over thee. I placed thee, and children, and men-servants,
+and maid-servants, under the same law of subjection to the government
+ordained of God in the family,--the state. I for a time sanctioned
+polygamy, and made it right. I, for the hardness of men's hearts, allowed
+them, and made it right, to give their wives a bill of divorcement.
+Woman, hear. Paul, having the same Spirit of God, confirms my word. He
+commands _wives_, and children, and servants, after this manner:--'Wives,
+submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord;
+children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto
+the Lord; servants, obey in all things your masters according to the
+flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but in singleness of heart,
+fearing God.' Woman, Paul makes _that rule_ the same, and _that
+submission_, the same. The _manner_ of the rule he varies with the
+relations. He requires it to be, in the _love_ of the husband, even as
+Christ loved the church,--in the _mildness_ of the father, not provoking
+the children to anger, lest they be discouraged,--in _the justice and
+equity_ of the master, knowing that he also has a master in heaven:
+(Colossians.) Woman, hear. Paul says to thee, the man _now_ shall have
+one wife, and he _now_ shall not give her a bill of divorcement, save for
+crime. Woman, thou art not free from thy husband. Christ's Golden Rule
+must not be interpreted by thee as A. Barnes has rendered it; Christ
+_assumes_ that thou _believest_ God's truth,--that thou _knowest_ the
+relation of husband and wife, and the _obligations and rights_ of the
+same, _as in the Bible; then_, in the light of this _knowledge_, verily,
+thou art required to do what God says thou _oughtest_ to do. Woman, thou
+art a sinner. Go, sin no more. Go, find thy husband; see to it that he
+takes thee back. Go, submit to him, and honor him, and obey him."
+
+
+
+_Emancipation--Ruin--Golden Rule, in your meaning, carried out_.
+
+
+Island in the Tropics--Elegant houses falling to decay--Broad fields
+abandoned to the forest--Wharves grass-grown--Negroes relapsing into the
+savage state--A dark cloud over the island, through which the lightning
+glares, revealing, in red writing, these words:--"_Redeemed, regenerated,
+and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal
+emancipation"_.--[Gospel--according to Curran--and the British
+Parliament.]
+
+Jamaica, sir, to say nothing of St. Domingo, is illustration of your
+theory of the Golden Rule, in negro emancipation. You tell the Southern
+master that all he would _expect_ or _desire_, if he were a slave, he must
+do unto his bondman; that he must not pause to ask whether the relation of
+master and slave be ordained of God or not. No. You tell him, _if_ he
+would _expect_ or _desire_ liberty were he a slave, _that_ settles the
+question as to what he is to do! He must let his bondman go free. Yea,
+_that_ is what you teach: because the moment you put in the word OUGHT,
+and say, all that you OUGHT to _expect_ or _desire_,--_i.e._ all that you
+_know_ God commands you to _expect _ or _desire_ in your relations to men,
+_as established by him,_--THAT _do to them_. Sir, when you thus explain
+the Golden Rule, then your argument against slave-holding, so far as
+founded on this rule, is at once arrested; it is stopped short, in full
+career; it has to wait for reinforcement of FACT, which may never come up.
+For, suppose the FACT to be, that the relation of master and slave is one
+mode of the government ordained of God. Then, sir, the master, _knowing
+that_ FACT, and _knowing_ what the slave, _as a slave_, OUGHT to _expect_
+or _desire_, he, the master, then FULFILS THE GOLDEN RULE when he does
+that unto his slave which, in similar circumstances, he OUGHT to expect
+_to be done unto himself_. Now comes the question, OUGHT he then to
+_expect_ or _desire_ liberty and equality? THAT is the question of
+questions on this subject. And without hesitation I reply, The Golden Rule
+DECIDES _that question_ YEA or NAY, _absolutely_ and _perfectly_, as God's
+word or providence shows that the GOOD _of the family, the community, the
+state_, REQUIRES that the slave IS or IS NOT _to be set free and made
+equal_. THAT GOOD, _as God reveals it_, SETTLES THE QUESTION.
+
+Let the master then see to it, how he hears God's word as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, how he understands God's providence as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, that he makes no mistake as to THAT GOOD. For God will
+not hold him guiltless, if he will not hear what he tells him as to THAT
+GOOD. God will not justify him, if he has a bad conscience or blunders in
+his philosophy. God will punish him, if he fails to bless his land by
+letting the bond go free when, he OUGHT to emancipate. And God will punish
+him, if he brings a curse upon his country by freeing his slave when he
+OUGHT NOT to give him liberty.
+
+So, then, _the Golden Rule does not_, OF ITSELF, _reveal to man at all
+what are his_ RELATIONS _to his fellow-men; but it tells him what he is
+to_ DO, _when he_ ALREADY KNOWS THEM.
+
+So, then, you, sir, cannot be permitted to tell the world that this rule
+must emancipate all the negro slaves in the United States,--no matter how
+unprepared they may be,--no matter how degraded,--no matter how unlike and
+unequal to the white man by creation,--no matter if it be a natural and
+moral impossibility,--no matter: the Golden Rule must emancipate by
+authority of the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, and
+by obligation of the great law of liberty,--the intuitional consciousness
+of the eternal right!
+
+No. The Rule, as said, _presupposes_ that he who is required to obey it
+does already _know_ the relations in which God has placed him, and the
+respective duties in those conditions. Has God, then, established the
+relations of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave? Yes.
+Then the command comes. It says to the husband, To aid you in your known
+obligations to your wife,--to give you a lively sense of it,--suppose
+yourself to be the wife: whatsoever, therefore, you OUGHT, in that
+condition, to _expect_ or _desire_, that, as husband, do unto your wife.
+It says to the parent, Imagine yourself the child; and whatsoever, as
+such, you OUGHT to _expect_ or _desire, that_, as parent, do unto your
+child. It says to the master, Put yourself in the place of your slave;
+and whatsoever you OUGHT, in that condition, to _expect_ or _desire,
+that_, as master, do unto your slave. Let husband, parent, master, _know_
+his obligations from God, and obey the Rule.
+
+
+
+_Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule under your version_.
+
+
+Honorable Joshua R. Giddings and the Angel of the Lord--Hon. Gentleman at
+table--Nine runaway negroes dining with him--The Angel, uninvited, comes
+in and disturbs the feast.
+
+Giddings has boasted in Congress of having had nine fugitive slaves to
+break bread with him at one time. I choose, then, to imagine that, during
+the dinner, the angel who found Hagar by the fountain stands suddenly in
+the midst, and says to the negroes, "Ye slaves, whence came ye, and
+whither will ye go?" And they answer and say, "We flee from the face of
+our masters. This abolitionist told us to kill, and steal, and run away
+from bondage; and we have murdered and stolen and escaped. He, thou seest,
+welcomes us to liberty and equality. We _expect_ and _desire_ to be
+members of Congress, Governors of States, to marry among the great, and
+one of us to be President. Giddings, and all abolitionists, tell us that
+these honors belong to us equally as to white people, and will be given
+under the Golden Rule." And the angel of the Lord says to them, "Ye
+slaves, return unto your masters, and submit yourselves under their hands.
+I sent your fathers, and I send you, into bondage. I mean it unto good,
+and I will bring it to pass to save much people alive." Then, turning to
+the tempter, he says, "Thou, a statesman! thou, a reader of my word and
+providence! why hast thou not understood my speech to Hagar? I gave her, a
+slave, to Sarah. She fled from her mistress. I sent her back. Why hast
+thou not understood my word four thousand years ago,--that _the slave
+shall not flee from his master?_ Why hast thou also perverted my law in
+Deuteronomy, (xxiii. 15, 16?) I say therein, 'Thou shalt not deliver unto
+his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he
+shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall
+choose, in one of thy gates where it liketh him best: thou shalt not
+oppress him.' Why hast thou not known that I meant the _heathen slave_ who
+escaped from his _heathen master?_ I commanded, Israel, in such case, not
+to hold _him_ in bondage. I made this specific law for this specific fact.
+Why hast thou taught that, in this commandment, I gave license to all
+men-servants and maid-servants in the whole land of Israel to run away
+from their masters? Why hast thou thus made me, in one saying, contradict
+and make void all my laws wherein I ordained that the Hebrews should be
+slave-owners over their brethren during years, and over the heathen
+forever? Why hast thou in all this changed my Golden Rule? I, in that
+rule, _assume_ that men _know_ from revelation and providence the
+relations in which I have placed them, and their duties therein. I then
+command them to do unto others what they thus _know_ they _ought_ to do
+unto them in these relations; and I make the obligation quick and
+powerful, by telling every man to imagine himself in such conditions, and
+then he will _the better_ KNOW '_whatsoever_' he should do unto his
+neighbor. Why hast thou made void my law, by making me say, 'All that thou
+_expectest_ or _desirest_ of others, in similar circumstances, do to
+them'? I never imagined to give such license to folly and sin. Why hast
+thou imagined such license to iniquity? Verily, thou tempter, thou hast in
+thy Golden Rule made these slaves thieves and murderers, and art now
+eating with them the bread of sin and death.
+
+"Why hast thou tortured my speech wherein I say that I have made of _one
+blood_ all nations of men, to mean that I have created all men equal and
+endowed them with rights unalienable save in their consent? I never said
+that thing! I said that I made all men to descend from _one parentage!_
+That is what I say in that place! Why hast thou tortured that plain truth?
+Thou mightest as well teach that all 'the moving creatures that have life,
+and fowl that fly above the earth, in the open firmament of heaven,' are
+_created equal_, because I said I brought them forth _of the water_. Thou
+mightest as well say that 'all cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the
+earth, _are created equal_, because I said I brought them forth _of the
+earth_, as to affirm the _equality of men_ because I say they are _of one
+blood_. Nay, I have made men unequal as the leaves of the trees, the sands
+of the sea, the stars of heaven. I have made them so, in harmony with the
+infinite variety and inequality in every thing in my creation. And I have
+made them unequal in my _mercy_. Had I made all men equal in attributes of
+body and mind, then _unfallen man_ would never have realized the varied
+glories of his destiny. And had I given _fallen man_ equality of nature
+and unalienable rights, then I had made the earth an Aceldama and Valley
+of Gehenna. For what would be the _strife_ in all the earth among men
+equal in body and mind, equal in power, equal in depravity, equal in will,
+each one maintaining rights unalienable? When would the war end? Who would
+be the victors where all are giants? Who would sue for peace where none
+will submit? What would be _human social life?_ Who would be the weak, the
+loving? Who would seek or need forbearance, compassion, self-denying
+benevolence? Who would be the grateful? Who would be the humble, the meek?
+What would be _human_ virtue, what _human_ vice, what _human_ joy or
+sorrow? Nay, I have made men _unequal_ and given them _alienable rights_,
+that I might INSTITUTE HUMAN GOVERNMENT and reveal HUMAN CHARACTER.
+
+"Why hast thou been willingly ignorant of these first principles of the
+oracles of God, which would have made thee truly a Christian philosopher
+and statesman?"
+
+
+
+_Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule as Christ gave it_
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes and the Apostle Paul--Minister of the gospel in his
+study--Fugitive slave, converted under his preaching, inquiring whether it
+is not his duty to return to his master--Paul appears and rebukes the
+minister for wresting his Gospel.
+
+With all respect and affection for you, sir, I imagine a slave, having run
+away from his master and become a Christian under your preaching, might,
+with the Bible in his hands and the Holy Spirit in his heart, have,
+despite your training, question of conscience, whether he did right to
+leave his master, and ought not to go back. And I think how Paul would
+listen, and what he would say, to your interpretation of his Epistle to
+Philemon. I think he would say,--
+
+"I withstand thee to thy face, because thou art to be blamed. Why hast
+thou written, in thy '_Notes_,' that the word I apply to Onesimus may
+mean, not _slave_, but _hired servant?_ Why hast thou said this in
+unsupported assertion? Why hast thou given no respect to Robinson, and all
+thy wise men, who agree that the word wherein I express Onesimus's
+relation to Philemon never means a hired servant, but a _slave_,--the
+property of his master,--a living possession?
+
+"Why hast thou called in question the fact that Philemon was a
+slave-holder? Why hast thou taught that, if he was a slave-holder when he
+became a Christian, he could not _continue, consistently_, to be a
+slave-owner and a Christian,--that if he did so _continue_, he would not
+be in _good standing_, but an _offender_ in the church? (See Notes.)
+
+"I say Philemon was the master of Onesimus, in the real sense of a
+slave-owner, under Roman law, in which he had the right of life and death
+over him,--being thereby a master in possession of power unknown in the
+United States. And yet I call Philemon 'our dearly beloved and
+fellow-laborer,' I tell him that I send to him again Onesimus, who had
+been unprofitable to him in time past; but now, being a Christian, he
+would be profitable. I tell him, I send him again, not a slave, (only,)
+but above a slave, a Christian brother, beloved, specially to me, but how
+much more unto him, both _in the flesh_ and in the Lord. Dost thou know,
+Albert Barnes, what I mean by that word, _in the flesh?_ Verily, I knew
+the things wherein the master and the slave are beloved, the one of the
+other, in the best affections of human nature, and in the Lord! therefore
+I say to Philemon that he, _as master_, could receive Onesimus _as his
+slave_, and yet as a _brother_, MORE _beloved, by reason of his relation
+to him as master_, than I could regard him! Yea, verily,--and I say to
+thee, Albert Barnes, thou hast never been in the South, and thou dost not
+understand, and canst not understand, the force, or even the meaning, of
+my words _in the flesh_; i.e. _in the love of the master and the slave to
+one another_. But Philemon I knew would feel its power, and so I made that
+appeal to him.
+
+"Why hast thou said, that I did not send Onesimus back _by authority?_ I
+did send him back by authority,--yea, by authority of the Lord Jesus
+Christ? For it was my duty to send him again to Philemon, whether he had
+been willing to go or not; and it was his duty to go. But he was willing.
+So we both felt our obligations; and, when I commanded, he cheerfully
+obeyed. What else was my duty and his? Had I not said, in line upon line
+and in precept upon precept, 'Servants, obey in all things your masters
+according to the flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in
+singleness of heart, pleasing God'? (Coloss. iii. 22.) Had not Peter
+written, 'Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to
+the good and gentle, but also to the froward'? (1 Pet. ii. 18.) Onesimus
+had broken these commandments when he fled from his master. Was it not
+then of my responsibility to send him again to Philemon? And was it not
+Christ's law to him to return and submit himself under his master's hand?
+
+"Why, then, hast thou not understood my speech? Has it been even because
+thou couldst not _hear_ my word? What else has hindered? What more could I
+have said, than (in 1 Tim. vi. 1-5) I do say, to rebuke all abolitionists?
+Yea, I describe them--I show their principles--as fully as if I had called
+them by name in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, and said they would
+live in 1857.
+
+"And yet thou hast, in thy commentary on my letter to Timothy, utterly
+distorted, maimed, and falsified my meaning. Thou hast mingled truth and
+untruth so together as to make me say what was not and is not in my mind.
+For thou teachest the slave, while professing not so to teach him, that I
+tell him that he is _not_ to count his master worthy of all honor; that he
+_is_ to _despise_ him; that he is _not_ to do him service as to a
+Christian faithful and beloved. _No_. But thou teachest the slave, in my
+name, to regard his Christian master an _offender_ in the sight of
+Christ, if he _continues_ a slave-owner.
+
+"Thou tellest him to obey _only_ in the sense in which he is to submit to
+injustice, oppression, and cruelty; and that he is ever to seek to throw
+off the yoke in his created equality and unalienable right to liberty.
+(See Notes.)
+
+"This is what thou hast taught as my gospel. But I commanded thee to
+teach and exhort _just the contrary_. I commanded thee to say after this
+way:--'Let as many servants as are under the yoke, count their own
+masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not
+blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise
+them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they
+are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach
+and exhort.'
+
+"Thou, in thy 'Notes,' art compelled, though most unwillingly, to confess
+that I do mean _slaves_ in this place, in the full and proper sense; yea,
+slaves under the Roman law. Good. Then do I here tell slaves to count
+their masters, even when not Christians, worthy of all honor; and, when
+Christians, to regard them as faithful and beloved, and not to despise
+them, and to do them service? Yet, after all this, do I say to these same
+slaves that they have a created equality and unalienable right to liberty,
+under which, whenever they think fit, I command them to dishonor their
+masters, despise them, and run away! Sir, I did never so instruct slaves;
+nay, I did never command thee so to teach them. But I did and do exhort
+thee not so to train them; for I said then and say now to thee, 'If any
+man teach [slaves] otherwise, [than to honor their masters as faithful and
+beloved, and to do them service,] and consent not to wholesome words, even
+the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according
+to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and
+strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
+perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH,
+supposing that gain is godliness; from such withdraw thyself,'
+
+"What more could I have said to the abolitionists of my day? What more can
+I say to them in this day? _That_ which was true of them two thousand
+years ago, is true now. I rebuked abolitionists then, and I rebuke them
+now. I tell them the things in their hearts,--the things on their
+tongues,--the things in their hands,--are contrary to wholesome words,
+even the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. Canst thou _hear_ my words in
+this place without feeling how faithfully I have given the head, and the
+heart, and the words, and the doings of the men, from whom thou hast not
+withdrawn thyself?
+
+"Verily, thou canst not _hear_ my speech, and therefore thou canst not
+interpret my gospel. Thou believest it is impossible that I sanction
+slavery! Hence it is impossible for thee to understand my words: for I do
+sanction slavery. How? Thus:--
+
+"I found slavery in Asia, in Greece, in Rome. I saw it to be one mode of
+the government ordained of God. I regarded it, in most conditions of
+fallen mankind, necessarily and irresistibly part of such government, and
+therefore as natural, as wise, as good, in such conditions, as the other
+ways men are ruled in the state or the family.
+
+"I took up slavery, then, as such ordained government,--wise, good, yea
+best, in certain circumstances, until, in the elevating spirit and power
+of my gospel, the slave is made fit for the liberty and equality of his
+master, if he can be so lifted up. Hence I make the RULE of magistrate,
+subject, master and servant, parent and child, husband and wife, THE SAME
+RULE; _i.e._ I make it THE SAME RIGHT in the _superior_ to control the
+_obedience_ and the _service_ of the _inferior_, bound to obey, whatever
+the difference in the relations and service to be rendered. Yea, I give
+_exactly the same command_ to all in these relations; and thus, in all my
+words, I make it plainly to be understood that I regard slavery to be as
+righteous a mode of government as that of magistrate and subject, parent
+and child, husband and wife, during the circumstances and times in which
+God is pleased to have it continue. I saw all the injustice, the
+oppression, the cruelty, masters might be guilty of, and were and are now
+guilty of; but I saw no more injustice, oppression, and cruelty, in the
+relation of master and slave, than I saw in all other forms of rule,--even
+in that of husband and wife, parent and child. In my gospel I condemn
+wrong in all these states of life, while I fully sanction and sustain the
+relations themselves. I tell the magistrate, husband, father, master, how
+to rule; I tell the subject, wife, child, servant, how to submit. Hence, I
+command the slave not to flee from bondage, just as I require the subject,
+the wife, the child, not to resist or flee from obedience. I warn the
+slave, if he leaves his master he has sinned, and must return; and I make
+it the duty of all men to see to it, that _he shall go back_. Hence, I
+myself did what I command others to do: I sent Onesimus back to his
+master.
+
+"Thus I sanction slavery everywhere in the New Testament. But it is
+impossible for thee, with thy principles,--thy law of reason,--thy law of
+created equality and unalienable right,--thy elevation of the Declaration
+of Independence above the ordinance of God,--to sustain slavery. Nay, it
+is impossible for thee, with thy interpretation of Christ's Golden Rule,
+to recognise the system of servile labor; nay, it is impossible for thee
+to tell _this_ slave to return to his master as I sent Onesimus back;
+nay, thou art guarded by thy Golden Rule. Thou tellest him that, if thou
+hadst been in his place, thou wouldst have _expected, desired_ freedom,
+that thou wouldst have run away, and that thou wouldst not now return;
+that thou wouldst have regarded thy created equality and unalienable
+right as thy supreme law, and have disregarded and scorned all other
+obligations as _pretended revelation from God_. Therefore thou now doest
+unto him '_whatsoever_' thou wouldst _expect_ or _desire_ him to do unto
+thee in similar circumstances; _i.e._ thou tellest him he did right to
+run away, and will do right not to return! This is thy Golden Rule. But
+I did not instruct thee so to learn Christ. Nay, this slave knows thou
+hast not not given him the mind of Christ; nay, he knows that Christ
+commands thee to send him to his master again. And thus do what thou
+OUGHTEST to _expect_ or _desire_ in similar circumstances; yea, _do_ now
+_thy duty_, and this slave, like Onesimus, will bless thee for giving him
+a good conscience whenever he will return to his obedience. Thus Paul,
+the aged, speaks to thee."
+
+So, then, the Golden Rule is the whole Bible; yea, Christ says it is-"the
+law and the prophets;" yea, it is the Old Testament and the New condensed;
+and with ever-increasing glory of Providence in one sublime aphorism,
+which can be understood and obeyed only by those who _know_ what the
+Bible, or Providence, reveals as to man's varied conditions and his
+obligations therein.
+
+I think, sir, I have refuted your interpretation of the Golden Rule, and
+have given its true meaning.
+
+The slave-holder, then, may have a good conscience under this commandment.
+Let him so exercise himself as to have a conscience void of offence
+towards God and towards men.
+
+Yours, &c. F.A. Ross.
+
+
+
+
+Conclusion.
+
+
+
+I intended to, and may yet, in a subsequent edition, write two more
+letters to A. Barnes. The _one_, to show how infidelity has been passing
+off from the South to the North,--especially since the _Christian death_
+of Jackson; the other, to meet Mr. Barnes's argument founded on the spirit
+of the age.
+
+
+The End.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
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+<title>An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance, by John Foster</title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Slavery Ordained of God
+
+Author: Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
+Posting Date: April 6, 2014 [EBook #9171]
+Release Date: October, 2005
+First Posted: September 10, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>Slavery Ordained of God.</h1>
+
+<p align="center" class="smallcaps">By</p>
+
+<h2>Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.</h2>
+
+
+<p align="center">"The powers that be are ordained of God."<br />Romans xiii. 1.</p>
+
+
+<p align="center">TO<br />
+The Men<br />
+NORTH AND SOUTH, <br />
+WHO HONOR THE WORD OF GOD<br />
+AND<br />
+LOVE THEIR COUNTRY.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Preface.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>The book I give to the public, is not made up of isolated articles. It is
+one harmonious demonstration--that slavery is part of the government
+ordained in certain conditions of fallen mankind. I present the subject in
+the form of speeches, actually delivered, and letters written just as
+published. I adopt this method to make a readable book.</p>
+
+<p>I give it to the North and South--to maintain harmony among Christians,
+and to secure the integrity of the union of this great people.</p>
+
+<p>This harmony and union can be preserved only by the view presented in this
+volume,--<i>i.e.</i> that <i>slavery is of God</i>, and to continue for the good of
+the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family,
+until another and better destiny may be unfolded.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>one great idea</i>, which I submit to North and South, is expressed in
+the speech, first in order, delivered in the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, May 27, 1853. I therein say:--</p>
+
+<p>"Let us then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend <i>two
+ideas</i>, and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern
+philanthropist learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave
+is not sin <i>per se</i>. Let him learn that God says nowhere it is sin. Let
+him learn that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no
+law there is no sin, and that <i>the Golden Rule</i> may exist in the
+relations of slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil <i>in
+certain circumstances</i>. Let him learn that <i>equality</i> is only the highest
+form of social life; that <i>subjection</i> to authority, even <i>slavery</i>, may,
+in <i>given conditions</i>, be <i>for a time</i> better than freedom to the slave
+of any complexion. Let him learn that <i>slavery</i>, like <i>all evils</i>, has
+its <i>corresponding</i> and <i>greater good</i>; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded <i>compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa</i>. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself: And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+<i>God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual</i>.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny."</p>
+
+<p>All which comes after, in the speech delivered in New York, 1856, and in
+the letters, is just the expansion of this one controlling thought, which
+must be understood, believed, and acted out North and South.</p>
+
+<p>The Author.</p>
+
+<p>Written in Cleveland, Ohio, May 28, 1857.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Contents.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p><a href="#01">Speech Before the General Assembly at Buffalo</a><br />
+<a href="#02">Speech Before the General Assembly at New York</a><br />
+<a href="#03">Letter to Rev. A. Blackburn</a><br />
+<a href="#04">What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation? </a></p>
+
+<p><b><a href="#letters">Letters to Rev. A. Barnes</a>:--</b></p>
+
+<p>  No. I.--<a href="#05">Results of the slavery agitation--Declaration of Independence--The way men are made infidels--Testimonies of General Assemblies</a><br />
+     II.--<a href="#06">Government over man a divine institute</a><br />
+    III.--<a href="#07">Man-stealing</a><br />
+     IV.--<a href="#08">The Golden Rule</a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="01"></a>Speech Delivered at Buffalo, Before the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>To understand the following speech, the reader will be pleased to
+learn--if he don't know already--that the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, before its division in 1838, and since,--both Old
+School and New School,--has been, for forty years and more, bearing
+testimony, after a fashion, against the system of slavery; that is to say,
+affirming, in one breath, that slave-holding is a "blot on our holy
+religion," &amp;c. &amp;c.; and then, in the next utterance, making all sorts of
+apologies and justifications for the slave-holder. Thus: this august body
+has been in the habit of telling the Southern master (especially in the
+Detroit resolutions of 1850) that he is a <i>sinner</i>, hardly meet to be
+called a <i>Christian</i>; but, nevertheless, if he will only sin "from
+unavoidable necessity, imposed by the laws of the States,"--if he will
+only sin under the "obligations of guardianship,"--if he will only sin
+"from the demands of humanity,"--why, then, forsooth, he may be a
+slave-holder as long as <i>he has a mind to</i>. Yea, he may hold one slave,
+one hundred or one thousand slaves, and till the day of judgment.</p>
+
+<p>Happening to be in attendance, as a member of the body, in Buffalo, May,
+1853, when, as usual, the system of slavery was touched, in a series of
+questions sent down to the church courts below, I made the following
+remarks, in good-natured ridicule of such preposterous and stultifying
+testimony; and, as an argument, opening the views I have since reproduced
+in the second speech of this volume, delivered in the General Assembly
+which convened in New York, May, 1856, and also in the letters
+following:--</p>
+
+<p>BUFFALO, FRIDAY, May 27, 1853.</p>
+
+<p>The order of the day was reached at a quarter before eleven, and the
+report read again,--viz.:</p>
+
+<p>"1. That this body shall reaffirm the doctrine of the second resolution
+adopted by the General Assembly, convened in Detroit, in 1850, and,</p>
+
+<p>"2. That with an express disavowal of any intention to be impertinently
+inquisitorial, and for the sole purpose of arriving at the truth, so as to
+correct misapprehensions and allay all causeless irritation, a committee
+be appointed of one from each of the synods of Kentucky, Tennessee,
+Missouri, and Virginia, who shall be requested to report to the next
+General Assembly on the following points:--1. The number of slave-holders
+in connection with the churches, and the number of slaves held by them. 2.
+The extent to which slaves are held from an unavoidable necessity imposed
+by the laws of the States, the obligations of guardianship, and the
+demands of humanity. 3. Whether the Southern churches regard the
+sacredness of the marriage relation as it exists among the slaves; whether
+baptism is duly administered to the children of the slaves professing
+Christianity, and in general, to what extent and in what manner provision
+is made for the religious well-being of the slave," &amp;c. &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Ross moved to amend the report by substituting the following,--with
+an express disavowal of being impertinently inquisitorial:--that a
+committee of <i>one</i> from each of the Northern synods of ---- be appointed,
+who shall be requested to report to the next General Assembly,--</p>
+
+<p>1. The number of Northern church-members concerned, directly or
+indirectly, in building and fitting out ships for the African slave-trade,
+and the slave-trade between the States.</p>
+
+<p>2. The number of Northern church-members who traffic with slave-holders,
+and are seeking to make money by selling them negro-clothing, handcuffs,
+and cowhides.</p>
+
+<p>3. The number of Northern church-members who have sent orders to New
+Orleans, and other Southern cities, to have slaves sold, to pay debts
+owing them from the South. [See Uncle Tom's Cabin.]</p>
+
+<p>4. The number of Northern church-members who buy the cotton, sugar, rice,
+tobacco, oranges, pine-apples, figs, ginger, cocoa, melons, and a thousand
+other things, raised by slave-labor.</p>
+
+<p>5. The number of Northern church-members who have intermarried with
+slave-holders, and have thus become slave-owners themselves, or enjoy the
+wealth made by the blood of the slave,--especially if there be any
+Northern ministers of the gospel in such a predicament.</p>
+
+<p>6. The number of Northern church-members who are the descendants of the
+men who kidnapped negroes in Africa and brought them to Virginia and New
+England in former years.</p>
+
+<p>7. The aggregate and individual wealth of members thus descended, and what
+action is best to compel them to disgorge this blood-stained gold, or to
+compel them to give dollar for dollar in equalizing the loss of the South
+by emancipation.</p>
+
+<p>8. The number of Northern church-members, ministers especially, who have
+advocated <i>murder</i> in resistance to the laws of the land.</p>
+
+<p>9. The number of Northern church-members who own stock in under-ground
+railroads, running off fugitive slaves, and in Sabbath-breaking railroads
+and canals.</p>
+
+<p>10. That a special commission be sent up Red River, to ascertain whether
+Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to death, (and who was a Northern
+<i>gentleman</i>,) be not still in connection with some Northern church in good
+and regular standing.</p>
+
+<p>11. The number of Northern church-members who attend meetings of
+Spiritual Rappers,--or Bloomers,--or Women's-Rights Conventions.</p>
+
+<p>12. The number of Northern church-members who are cruel husbands.</p>
+
+<p>13. The number of Northern church-members who are hen-pecked husbands.</p>
+
+<p>[As it is always difficult to know the temper of speaker and audience from
+a printed report, it is due alike to Dr. R., to the whole Assembly, and
+the galleries, to say, that he, in reading these resolutions, and
+throughout his speech, evinced great good-humour and kindness of feeling,
+which was equally manifested by the Assembly and spectators, repeatedly,
+while he was on the floor.]</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Ross then proceeded:--Mr. Moderator, I move this amendment in the best
+spirit. I desire to imitate the committee in their refinement and delicacy
+of distinction. I disavow all intention to be <i>impertinently</i>
+inquisitorial. I intend to be inquisitorial, as the committee say they
+are,--but not <i>impertinently</i> so. No, sir; not at all; not at all.
+(Laughter.) Well, sir, we of the South, who desire the removal of the evil
+of slavery, and believe it will pass away in the developments of
+Providence, are grieved when we read your graphic, shuddering pictures of
+the "middle passage,"--the slave-ship, piling up her canvas, as the shot
+pours after her from English or American guns,--see her again and again
+hurrying hogshead after hogshead, filled with living slaves, into the
+deep, and, thus lightened, escape. Sir, what horror to believe that
+clipper-ship was built by the hands of Northern, noisy Abolition
+church-members! ["Yes, I know some in New York and Boston," said one in
+the crowd.] Again, sir, when we walk along your <i>Broadways</i>, and see, as
+we do, the soft hands of your church-members sending off to the South, not
+only clothing for the slave, but manacles and whips, manufactured
+expressly for him,--what must we think of your consistency of character?
+[True, true.] And what must we think of your self-righteousness, when we
+know your church-members order the sale of slaves,--yes, slaves such as
+St. Clair's,--and under circumstances involving all the separations and
+all the loathsome things you so mournfully deplore? Your Mrs. Stowe says
+so, and it is so, without her testimony. I have read that splendid, bad
+book. Splendid in its genius, over which I have wept, and laughed, and got
+mad, (here some one said, "All at the same time?") yes--all at the same
+time. Bad in its theology, bad in its morality, bad in its temporary evil
+influence here in the North, in England, and on the continent of Europe;
+bad, because her isolated cruelties will be taken (whether so meant by her
+or not) as the general condition of Southern life,--while her Shelbys, and
+St. Clairs, and Evas, will be looked upon as angel-visitors, lingering for
+a moment in that earthly hell. The <i>impression made by the book is a
+falsehood</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Sir, why do your Northern church-members and philanthropists buy Southern
+products at all? You know you are purchasing cotton, rice, sugar,
+sprinkled with blood, literally, you say, from the lash of the driver! Why
+do you buy? What's the difference between my filching this blood-stained
+cotton from the outraged negro, and your standing by, taking it from me?
+What's the difference? You, yourselves, say, in your abstractions, there
+is no difference; and yet you daily stain your hands in this horrid
+traffic. You hate the traitor, but you love the treason. Your ladies,
+too,--oh, how they shun the slave-owner <i>at a distance</i>, in <i>the
+abstract</i>! But alas, when they see him in the <i>concrete</i>,--when they see
+the slave-owner <i>himself</i>, standing before them,--not the brutal driver,
+but the splendid gentleman, with his unmistakable grace of carriage and
+ease of manners,--why, lo, behold the lady says, "Oh, fie on your
+slavery!--what a <i>wretch</i> you are! But, indeed, sir, I love your
+sugar,--and truly, truly, sir, <i>wretch</i> as you are, I love you too." Your
+gentlemen talk just the same way when they behold our matchless women. And
+well for us all it is, that your good taste, and hearts, can thus
+appreciate our genius, and accomplishments, and fascinations, and
+loveliness, and sugar, and cotton. Why, sir, I heard this morning, from
+one pastor only, of two or three of his members thus intermarried in the
+South. May I thus give the mildest rebuke to your inconsistency of
+conduct? (Much good-natured excitement.)</p>
+
+<p>Sir, may we know who are the descendants of the New England kidnappers?
+What is their wealth? Why, here you are, all around me. You, gentlemen,
+made the best of that bargain. And you have kept every dollar of your
+money from the charity of emancipating the slave. You have left us,
+unaided, to give millions. Will you now come to our help? Will you give
+dollar for dollar to equalize our loss? [Here many voices cried out, "Yes,
+yes, we will."]</p>
+
+<p>Yes, yes? Then pour out your millions. Good. I may thank you personally.
+My own emancipated slaves would to-day be worth greatly more than
+$20,000. Will you give me back $10,000? Good. I need it now.</p>
+
+<p>I recommend to you, sirs, to find out your advocates of <i>murder</i>,--your
+owners of stock in under-ground railroads,--your Sabbath-breakers for
+money. I particularly urge you to find Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to
+death. He is a Northern <i>gentleman</i>, although having a somewhat Southern
+name. Now, sir, you know the Assembly was embarrassed all yesterday by
+the inquiry how the Northern churches may find their absent members, and
+what to do with them. Here then, sir, is a chance for you. Send a
+committee up Red River. You may find Legree to be a Garrison, Phillips,
+Smith, or runaway husband from some Abby Kelly. [Here Rev. Mr. Smith
+protested against Legree being proved to be a Smith. Great laughter.
+[Footnote: This gentleman was soon after made a D.D., and I think in part
+for that witticism.]] I move that you bring him back to lecture on the
+<i>cuteness</i> there is in leaving a Northern church, going South, changing
+his name, buying slaves, and calculating, without <i>guessing</i>, what the
+profit is of killing a negro with inhuman labor above the gain of
+treating him with kindness.</p>
+
+<p>I have little to say of spirit-rappers, women's-rights conventionists,
+Bloomers, cruel husbands, or hen-pecked. But, if we may believe your own
+serious as well as caricature writers, you have things up here of which we
+down South know very little indeed. Sir, we have no young Bloomers, with
+hat to one side, cigar in mouth, and cane tapping the boot, striding up to
+a mincing young gentleman with long curls, attenuated waist, and soft
+velvet face,--the boy-lady to say, "May I see you home, sir?" and the
+lady-boy to reply, "I thank ye--no; pa will send the carriage." Sir, we of
+the South don't understand your women's-rights conventions. Women have
+their wrongs. "The Song of the Shirt,"--Charlotte Elizabeth,--many, many
+laws,--tell her wrongs. But your convention ladies despise the Bible. Yes,
+sir; and we of the South are afraid <i>of them</i>, and <i>for you</i>. When women
+despise the Bible, what next? <i>Paris,--then the City of the Great Salt
+Lake,--then Sodom, before</i> and <i>after the Dead Sea</i>. Oh, sir, if slavery
+tends in any way to give the <i>honour of chivalry</i> to Southern young
+gentlemen towards ladies, and the exquisite delicacy and heavenly
+integrity and love to Southern maid and matron, it has then a glorious
+blessing with its curse.</p>
+
+<p>Sir, your inquisitorial committee, and the North so far as represented by
+them, (a small fraction, I know,) have, I take it, caught a Tartar this
+time. Boys say with us, and everywhere, I <i>reckon</i>, "You worry my dog, and
+I'll worry your cat." Sir, it is just simply a <i>fixed fact: the South will
+not submit to these questions</i>. No, not for an instant. We will not permit
+you to approach us at all. If we are morbidly sensitive, you have made us
+so. But you are directly and grossly violating the Constitution of the
+Presbyterian Church. The book forbids you to put such questions; the book
+forbids <i>you to begin discipline</i>; the book forbids your sending this
+committee to help common fame bear testimony against us; the book guards
+the honour of our humblest member, minister, church, presbytery, against
+all this impertinently-inquisitorial action. Have you a <i>prosecutor</i>, with
+his definite charge and witnesses? Have you <i>Common Fame</i>, with her
+specified charges and witnesses? Have you a request from the South that
+you send a committee to inquire into slanders? No. Then hands off. As
+gentlemen you may ask us these questions,--we will answer you. But,
+ecclesiastically, you cannot speak in this matter. You have no power to
+move as you propose.</p>
+
+<p>I beg leave to say, just here, that Tennessee [Footnote: At that time I
+resided in Tennessee.] will be more calm under this movement than any
+other slave-region. Tennessee has been ever high above the storm, North
+and South,--especially we of the mountains. Tennessee!--"there she
+is,--look at her,"--binding this Union together like a great, long,
+broad, deep stone,--more splendid than all in the temple of Baalbec or
+Solomon. Tennessee!--there she is, in her calm valour. I will not lower
+her by calling her unconquerable, for she has never been assailed; but I
+call her ever-victorious. King's Mountain,--her pioneer
+battles:--Talladega, Emucfau, Horse-shoe, New Orleans, San Jacinto,
+Monterey, the Valley of Mexico. Jackson represented her well in his
+chivalry from South Carolina,--his fiery courage from Virginia and
+Kentucky,--all tempered by Scotch-Irish Presbyterian prudence from
+Tennessee. We, in his spirit, have looked on this storm for years
+untroubled. Yes, Jackson's old bones rattled in their grave when that
+infamous disunion convention met in Nashville, and its members turned
+pale and fled aghast. Yes, Tennessee, in her mighty million, feels
+secure; and, in her perfect preparation to discuss this question,
+politically, ecclesiastically, morally, metaphysically, or physically,
+with the extreme North or South, she is willing and able <i>to persuade
+others to be calm</i>. In this connection, I wish to say, for the South to
+the North, and to the world, that we have no fears from our
+slave-population. There might be a momentary insurrection and bloodshed;
+but destruction to the black man would be inevitable. The Greeks and
+Romans controlled immense masses of white slaves,--many of them as
+intelligent as their lords. Schoolmasters, fabulists, and poets were
+slaves. Athens, with her thirty thousand freemen, governed half a
+million of bondmen. Single Roman patricians owned thirty thousand. If,
+then, the phalanx and the legion mastered such slaves for ages, when
+battle was physical force of man to man, how certain it is that
+infantry, cavalry, and artillery could hold in bondage millions of
+Africans for a thousand years!</p>
+
+<p>But, dear brethren, our Southern philanthropists do not seek to have this
+unending bondage; Oh, no, no. And I earnestly entreat you to "stand still
+and see the salvation of the Lord." Assume a masterly inactivity, and you
+will behold all you desire and pray for,--you will see <i>America liberated
+from the curse of slavery</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The great question of the world is, WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE
+AMERICAN SLAVE?--WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MASTER? The
+following <i>extract from the "Charleston Mercury"</i> gives my view of the
+subject with great and condensed particularity:--</p>
+
+<p>"Married, Thursday, 26th inst., the Hon. Cushing Kewang, Secretary of
+State of the United States, to Laura, daughter of Paul Coligny,
+Vice-President of the United States, and one of our noblest Huguenot
+families. We learn that this distinguished gentleman, with his bride, will
+visit his father, the Emperor of China, at his summer palace, in Tartary,
+north of Pekin, and return to the Vice-President's Tea Pavilion, on Cooper
+River, ere the meeting of Congress." The editor of the "Mercury" goes on
+to say: "This marriage in high life is only one of many which have
+signalized that immense emigration from Christianized China during the
+last seventy-five years, whereby Charleston has a population of 1,250,000,
+and the State of South Carolina over 5,000,000,--an emigration which has
+wonderfully harmonized with the great exodus of the negro race to
+Africa." [Some gentleman here requested to know of Dr. Ross the date of
+the "Charleston Mercury" recording this marriage. The doctor replied, "The
+date is 27th May, 1953, exactly one hundred years from this day." Great
+laughter.]</p>
+
+<p>Sir, this is a dream; but it is not all a dream. No, I verily believe you
+have there the Gordian knot of slavery untied; you have there the solution
+of the problem; you have there the curtain up, and the last scene in the
+last act of the great drama of Ham.</p>
+
+<p>I am satisfied with the tendencies of things. I stand on the mountain-peak
+above the clouds. I see, far beyond the storm, the calm sea and blue sky;
+I see the Canaan of the African. I like to stand there on the Nebo of his
+exodus, and look across, not the Jordan, but the Atlantic. I see the
+African crossing as certainly as if I gazed upon the ocean divided by a
+great wind, and piled up in walls of green glittering glass on either
+hand, the dry ground, the marching host, and the pillar of cloud and of
+fire. I look over upon the Niger, black with death to the white man,
+instinct with life to the children of Ham. <i>There</i> is the black man's
+home. Oh, how strange that you of the North see not how you degrade him
+when you keep him here! You will not let him vote; you will not let him
+rise to honors or social equality; you will not let him hold a pew in your
+churches. Send him away, then; tell him, begone. Be urgent, like the
+Egyptians: send him out of this land. <i>There</i>, in his fatherland, he will
+exhibit his own type of Christianity. He is, of all races, the most gentle
+and kind. The <i>man</i>, the most submissive; the <i>woman</i>, the most
+affectionate. What other slaves would love their masters better than
+themselves?--rock them and fan them in their cradles? caress them--how
+tenderly!--boys and girls? honor them, grown up, as superior beings? and,
+in thousands of illustrious instances, be willing to give life, and, in
+fact, die, to serve or save them? Verily, verily, this emancipated race
+may reveal the most amiable form of spiritual life, and the <i>jewel</i> may
+glitter on the Ethiop's brow in meaning more sublime than all in the
+poet's imagery. Brethren, let them go; and, when they are gone,--ay,
+before they go away,--rear a monument; let it grow in greatness, if not on
+your highest mountain, in your hearts,--in lasting memory of the
+South,--in memory of your wrong to the South,--in memory of the
+self-denial of the South, and her philanthropy in training the slave to
+be free, enlightened, and Christian.</p>
+
+<p>Can all this be? Can this double emigration civilize Africa and more than
+re-people the South? Yes; and I regard the difficulties presented here, in
+Congress, or the country, as little worth. God intends both emigrations.
+And, without miracle, he will accomplish both. Difficulties! There are no
+difficulties. Half a million emigrate to our shores, from Ireland, and all
+Europe, every year. And you gravely talk of difficulties in the negro's
+way to Africa! Verily, God will unfold their destiny as fast, and as
+fully, as he sees best for the highest good of the slave, the highest good
+of the master, and the glory of Christ in Africa.</p>
+
+<p>And, sir, there are forty thousand Chinese in California. And in Cuba,
+this day, American gentlemen are cultivating sugar, with Chinese hired
+labor, more profitably than the Spaniards and their slaves. Oh! there is
+China--half the population of the globe--just fronting us across that
+peaceful sea,--her poor, living on rats and a pittance of red rice,--her
+rich, hoarding millions in senseless idolatry, or indulging in the
+luxuries of birds'-nests and roasted ice. Massed together, they must
+migrate. Where can they go? They must come to our shores. They must come,
+even did God forbid them. But he will hasten their coming. They can live
+in the extremest South. It is their latitude,--their side of the ocean.
+They can cultivate cotton, rice, sugar, tea, and the silkworm. Their
+skill, their manipulation, is unrivalled. Their commonest gong you can
+neither make nor explain. They are a law-abiding people, without castes,
+accustomed to rise by merit to highest distinctions, and capable of the
+noblest training, when their idolatry, which is waxing old as a garment,
+shall be folded up as a vesture and changed for <i>that</i> whose years shall
+not fail. The English ambassador assures us that the Chinese negotiator of
+the late treaty was a splendid gentleman, and a diplomatist to move in any
+court of Europe. Shem, then, can mingle with Japheth in America.</p>
+
+<p>The Chinese must come. God will bring them. He will fulfil Benton's noble
+thought. The railroad must complete the voyage of Columbus. The statue of
+the Genoese, on some peak of the Rocky Mountains, high above the flying
+cars, must point to the West, saying, "There is the East! There is India
+and Cathay."</p>
+
+<p>Let us, then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend <i>two ideas</i>,
+and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern philanthropist
+learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave is not sin
+<i>per se</i>. Let him learn that God nowhere says it is sin. Let him learn
+that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no law,
+there is no sin; and that <i>the golden rule</i> may exist in the relations of
+slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil <i>in certain
+circumstances</i>. Let him learn that <i>equality</i> is only the highest form of
+social life; that <i>subjection</i> to authority, even <i>slavery</i>, may, in
+<i>given conditions</i>, be <i>for a time</i> better than freedom to the slave, of
+any complexion. Let him learn that <i>slavery</i>, like <i>all evils</i>, has its
+<i>corresponding</i> and <i>greater good</i>; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded <i>compared with his master</i>, is <i>elevated</i> and <i>ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa</i>. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself. And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+<i>God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual</i>.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away, in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny.</p>
+
+<p>Ham will be ever lower than Shem; Shem will be ever lower than Japheth.
+All will rise in the Christian grandeur to be revealed. Ham will be lower
+than Shem, because he was sent to Central Africa. Man south of the
+Equator--in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa--is
+inferior to his Northern brother. The <i>blessing</i> was upon Shem in his
+magnificent Asia. The <i>greater blessing</i> was upon Japheth in his
+man-developing Europe. <i>Both blessings</i> will be combined, in America,
+<i>north of the Zone</i>, in commingled light and life. I see it all in the
+first symbolical altar of Noah on that mound at the base of Ararat. The
+father of all living men bows before the incense of sacrifice, streaming
+up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all
+flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of
+the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness,
+near the long-necked giraffe, type of his <i>Africa</i>,--his magnificent wife,
+seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her
+long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered with gems from
+mines before the flood. Higher up is Shem, leaning his arm over that
+mouse-colored horse,--his <i>Arab</i> steed. His wife, in pure white linen,
+feeds the elephant, and plays with his lithe proboscis,--the mother of
+Terah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, and Christ. And yet she looks
+up, and bows in mild humility, to <i>her</i> of Japheth, seated amid plumed
+birds, in robes like the sky. Her noble lord, meanwhile, high above all,
+stands, with folded arms, following that eagle which wheels up towards
+Ararat, displaying his breast glittering with stars and stripes of scarlet
+and silver,--radiant heraldry, traced by the hand of God. Now he purifies
+his eye in the sun, and now he spreads his broad wings in symbolic flight
+to the <i>West</i>, until lost to the prophetic eye of Japheth, under the bow
+of splendors set that day in the cloud. God's covenant with man,--oh, may
+the bow of covenant between us be here to-day, that the waters of <i>this
+flood</i> shall never again threaten our beloved land!</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Speech Delivered in the General Assembly<br />
+New York, 1856.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>The circumstances, under which this speech was delivered, are sufficiently
+shown in the statement below.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a hasty production. After being spoken, it was prepared for the
+"Journal of Commerce," with the greatest care I could give to it: most of
+it was written again and again. Unlike Pascal, who said, as to his longest
+and inferior sixteenth letter, that he had not had time to make it
+shorter, I had time; and I did condense in that one speech the matured
+reflections of my whole life. I am calmly satisfied I am right. I am sure
+God has said, and does say, "Well done."</p>
+
+<p>The speech brings to view a wide range of thought, all belonging to the
+subject of slavery, of immense importance. As introductory,--there is the
+question of the abolition agitation the last thirty years; then, what is
+right and wrong, and the foundation of moral obligation; then, the
+definition of sin; next, the origin of human government, and the
+relations, in which God has placed men under his rule of subjection;
+finally, the word of God is brought to sustain all the positions taken.</p>
+
+<p>The challenge to argue the question of slavery from the Bible was thrown
+down on the floor of the Assembly, as stated. Presently I took up the
+gauntlet, and made this argument. The challenger never claimed his glove,
+then nor since; nor has anybody, so far as I know, attempted to refute
+this speech. Nothing has come to my ears (save as to two points, to be
+noticed hereafter) but reckless, bold denial of God's truth, infidel
+affirmation without attempt at proof, and denunciations of myself.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Wisner</i> having said that he would argue the question on the Bible at
+a following time, Dr. Ross rose, when he took his seat, and, taking his
+position on the platform near the Moderator's chair, said,--</p>
+
+<p>"I accept the challenge given by Dr. Wisner, to argue the question of
+slavery from the Scriptures."</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Wisner</i>.--Does the brother propose to go into it here?</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Ross</i>.--Yes, sir.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Wisner</i>.--Well, I did not propose to go into it here.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Ross</i>.--You gave the challenge, and I accept it.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Wisner</i>.--I said I would argue it at a proper time; but it is no
+matter. Go ahead.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Beman</i> hoped the discussion would be ruled out. He did not think it a
+legitimate subject to go into,--Moses and the prophets, Christ and his
+apostles, and all intermediate authorities, on the subject of what the
+General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America had done.</p>
+
+<p><i>Judge Jessup</i> considered the question had been opened by this report of
+the majority: after which <i>Dr. Beman</i> withdrew his objection, and <i>Dr.
+Ross</i> proceeded.</p>
+
+<p>I am not a slave-holder. Nay, I have shown some self-denial in that
+matter. I emancipated slaves whose money-value would now be $40,000. In
+the providence of God, my riches have entirely passed from me. I do not
+mean that, like the widow, I gave all the living I had. My estate was then
+greater than that slave-property. I merely wish to show I have no selfish
+motive in giving, as I shall, the true Southern defence of slavery.
+(Applause.) I speak from Huntsville, Alabama, my present home. That gem of
+the South, that beautiful city where the mountain softens into the
+vale,--where the water gushes, a great fountain, from the rock,--where
+around that living stream there are streets of roses, and houses of
+intelligence and gracefulness and gentlest hospitality,--and, withal,
+where so high honor is ever given to the ministers of God.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking then from that region where "<i>Cotton is king</i>," I affirm,
+contrary as my opinion is to that most common in the South, that the
+slavery agitation has accomplished and will do great good. I said so, to
+ministerial and political friends, twenty-five years ago. I have always
+favored the agitation,--just as I have always countenanced discussion
+upon all subjects. I felt that the slavery question needed examination.
+I believed it was not understood in its relations to the Bible and human
+liberty. Sir, the light is spreading North and South. 'Tis said, I know,
+this agitation has increased the severity of slavery. True, but for a
+moment only, in the days of the years of the life of this noble problem.
+Farmers tell us that deep ploughing in poor ground will, for a year or
+two, give you a worse crop than before you went so deep; but that that
+deep ploughing will turn up the under-soil, and sun and air and rain will
+give you harvests increasingly rich. So, this moral soil, North and
+South, was unproductive. It needed deep ploughing. For a time the harvest
+was worse. Now it is becoming more and more abundant. The political
+controversy, however fierce and threatening, is only for power. But the
+moral agitation is for the harmony of the Northern and Southern mind, in
+the right interpretations of Scripture on this great subject, and, of
+course, for the ultimate union of the hearts of all sensible people, to
+fulfil God's intention,--to bless the white man and the black man in
+America. I am sure of this. I take a wide view of the progress of the
+destiny of this vast empire. I see God in America. I see him in the North
+and in the South. I see him more honored in the South to-day than he was
+twenty-five years ago; and that that higher regard is due, mainly, to the
+agitation of the slavery question. Do you ask how? Why, sir, this is the
+how. Twenty-five years ago the religious mind of the South was leavened
+by wrong Northern training, on the great point of the right and wrong of
+slavery. Meanwhile, powerful intellects in the South, following the mere
+light of a healthy good sense, guided by the common grace of God, reached
+the very truth of this great matter,--namely, that the relation of the
+master and slave is not sin; and that, notwithstanding its admitted
+evils, it is a connection between the highest and the lowest races of
+man, revealing influences which may be, and will be, most benevolent for
+the ultimate good of the master and the slave,--conservative on the
+Union, by preserving the South from all forms of Northern fanaticism, and
+thereby being a great balance-wheel in the working of the tremendous
+machinery of our experiment of self-government. This seen result of
+slavery was found to be in absolute harmony with the word of God. These
+men, then, of highest grade of thought, who had turned in scorn from
+Northern notions, now see, in the Bible, that these notions are false
+and silly. They now read the Bible, never examined before, with growing
+respect. God is honored, and his glory will be more and more in their
+salvation. These are some of the moral consummations of this agitation in
+the South. The development has been twofold in the North. On the one
+hand, some anti-slavery men have left the light of the Bible, and
+wandered into the darkness until they have reached the blackness of the
+darkness of infidelity. Other some are following hard after, and are
+throwing the Bible into the furnace,--are melting it into iron, and
+forging it, and welding it, and twisting it, and grooving it into the
+shape and significance and goodness and gospel of Sharpe's rifles. Sir,
+are you not afraid that some of your once best men will soon have no
+better Bible than that?</p>
+
+<p>But, on the other hand, many of your brightest minds are looking intensely
+at the subject, in the same light in which it is studied by the highest
+Southern reason. Ay, sir, mother-England, old fogy as she is, begins to
+open her eyes. What, then, is our gain? Sir, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in many of
+its conceptions, could not have been written twenty-five years ago. That
+book of genius,--over which I and hundreds in the world have freely
+wept,--true in all its facts, false in all its impressions,--yea, as false
+in the prejudice it creates to Southern social life as if Webster, the
+murderer of Parkman, may be believed to be a personification of the
+<i>elite</i> of honor in Cambridge, Boston, and New England. Nevertheless,
+Uncle Tom's Cabin could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Dr.
+Nehemiah Adams's "<i>South-Side View</i>" could not have been written
+twenty-five years ago. Nor Dr. Nathan Lord's "<i>Letter of Inquiry</i>." Nor
+Miss Murray's book. Nor "<i>Cotton is King</i>". Nor Bledsoe's "<i>Liberty and
+Slavery"</i>. These books, written in the midst of this agitation, are all of
+high, some the highest, reach of talent and noblest piety; all give, with
+increasing confidence, the present Southern Bible reading on Slavery. May
+the agitation, then, go on! I know the New School Presbyterian church has
+sustained some temporary injury. But God is honored in his word. The
+reaction, when the first abolition-movement commenced, has been succeeded
+by the sober second thought of the South. The sun, stayed, is again
+travelling in the greatness of his strength, and will shine brighter and
+brighter to the perfect day.</p>
+
+<p>My only fear, Mr. Moderator, is that, as you Northern people are so prone
+to go to extremes in your zeal and run every thing into the ground, you
+may, perhaps, become <i>too pro-slavery;</i> and that we may have to take
+measures against your coveting, over much, our daughters, if not our
+wives, our men-servants, our maid-servants, our houses, and our lands.
+(Laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>Sir, I come now to the Bible argument. I begin at the beginning of
+eternity! (Laughter.) WHAT is RIGHT AND WRONG? <i>That's the question of
+questions</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Two theories have obtained in the world. The one is, that right and wrong
+are eternal facts; that they exist <i>per se</i> in the nature of things; that
+they are ultimate truths above God; that he must study, and does study, to
+know them, as really as man. And that he comprehends them more clearly
+than man, only because he is a better student than man. Now, sir, <i>this
+theory is atheism</i>. For if right and wrong are like mathematical
+truths--fixed facts--then I may find them out, as I find out mathematical
+truths, without instruction from God. I do not ask God to tell me that one
+and one make two. I do not ask him to reveal to me the demonstrations of
+Euclid. I thank him for the mind to perceive. But I perceive mathematical
+relations without his telling me, because they exist independent of his
+will. If, then, moral truths, if right and wrong, if rectitude and sin,
+are, in like manner, fixed, eternal facts,--if they are out from and above
+God, like mathematical entities,--then I may find them for myself. I may
+condescend, perhaps, to regard the Bible as a hornbook, in which God, an
+older student than I, tells <i>me</i> how to <i>begin</i> to learn what he had to
+study; or I may decline to be taught, through the Bible, how to learn
+right and wrong. I may think the Bible was good enough, may be, for the
+Israelite in Egypt and in Canaan; good enough for the Christian in
+Jerusalem and Antioch and Rome, but not good enough, even as a hornbook,
+for me,--the man of the nineteenth century,--the man of Boston, New York,
+and Brooklyn! Oh, no. I may think I need it not at all. What next? Why,
+sir, if I may think I need not God to teach me moral truth, I may think I
+need him not to teach me any thing. What next? The irresistible conclusion
+is, I may think I can live without God; that Jehovah is a myth,--a name; I
+may bid him stand aside, or die. Oh, sir, <i>I will be</i> the fool to say
+there is no God. This is the result of the notion that right and wrong
+exist in the nature of things.</p>
+
+<p>The other theory is, that right and wrong are results brought into being,
+mere contingencies, means to good, made to exist solely by the will of
+God, expressed through his word; or, when his will is not thus known, he
+shows it in the human reason by which he rules the natural heart. This is
+so; because God, in making all things, saw that in the relations he would
+constitute between himself and intelligent creatures, and among
+themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass. In his benevolent
+wisdom, he then <i>willed</i> LAW, to control this <i>natural good and evil</i>. And
+he thereby made <i>conformity</i> to that law to be <i>right</i>, and
+<i>non-conformity</i> to be <i>wrong</i>. Why? Simply because he saw it to be good,
+and made it to be right; not because <i>he saw it to be right</i>, but because
+he <i>made it to be right</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, the ten specific commandments of the one moral law of love are just
+ten rules which God made to regulate the natural good and evil which he
+knew would be in the ten relations, which he himself constituted between
+himself and man, and between man and his neighbor. The Bible settles the
+question:--<i>sin is the transgression of the law, and where there is no law
+there is no sin</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I must-advance one step further. <i>What is sin</i>, as a mental state? Is
+it some quality--some concentrated essence--some elementary moral
+particle in the nature of things--something black, or red, like
+crimson, in the constitution of the soul, or the soul and body as
+amalgamated? No. Is it self-love? No. Is it selfishness? No. What is
+it? Just exactly, <i>self-will.</i> Just that. I, the creature, WILL <i>not
+submit</i> to <i>thy</i> WILL, God, the Creator. It is the I AM, <i>created</i>, who
+dares to defy and dishonor the I AM, not created,--the Lord God, the
+Almighty, Holy, Eternal.</p>
+
+<p><i>That</i> IS SIN, <i>per se</i>. And that is all of it,--so help me God! Your
+child there--John--says to his father, "I WILL <i>not to submit</i> to your
+will." "Why not, John?" And he answers and says, "Because I WILL <i>not</i>."
+There, sir, John has revealed <i>all of sin</i>, on earth or in hell. Satan has
+never said--can never say--more. "I, Satan, WILL NOT, because I WILL <i>not
+to submit</i> to thee, God; MY WILL, not thine, shall be."</p>
+
+<p>This beautiful theory is the ray of light which leads us from night, and
+twilight, and fog, and mist, and mystification, on this subject, to clear
+day. I will illustrate it by the law which has controlled and now
+regulates the most delicate of all the relations of life,--viz.: that of
+the intercourse between the sexes. I take this, because it presents the
+strongest apparent objections to my argument.</p>
+
+<p>Cain and Abel married their sisters. Was it wrong in the nature of things?
+[Here Dr. Wisner spoke out, and said, "Certainly."] I deny it. What an
+absurdity, to suppose that God could not provide for the propagation of
+the human race from one pair, without <i>requiring them to sin!</i> Adam's sons
+and daughters must have married, had they remained in innocence. They must
+then have sinned in Eden, from the very necessity of the command upon the
+race:--"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." (Gen. i. 28).
+What pure nonsense! There, sir!--<i>that</i>, my one question, Dr. Wisner's
+reply, and my rejoinder, bring out, perfectly, the two theories of right
+and wrong. Sir, Abraham married his half-sister. And there is not a word
+forbidding such marriage, until God gave the law (Lev. xviii.) prohibiting
+marriage in certain degrees of consanguinity. That law made, then, such
+marriage <i>sin</i>. But God gave no such law in the family of Adam; because he
+made, himself, the marriage of brother and sister the way, and the only
+way, for the increase of the human race. <i>He commanded them thus to marry.
+They would have sinned had they not thus married</i>; for they would have
+transgressed his law. Such marriage was not even a natural evil, in the
+then family of man. But when, in the increase of numbers, it became a
+natural evil, physical and social, God placed man on a higher platform for
+the development of civilization, morals, and religion, and then made the
+law regulating marriages in the particulars of blood. But he still left
+polygamy untouched. [Here Dr. Wisner again asked if Dr. R. regarded the
+Bible as sustaining the polygamy of the Old Testament.] Dr. R.--Yes, sir;
+yes, sir; yes, sir. Let the reporters mark <i>that</i> question, and my answer.
+(Laughter.) My principle vindicates God from unintelligible abstractions.
+I fearlessly tell what the Bible says. In its strength, I am not afraid of
+earth or hell. I fear only God. God made no law against polygamy, in the
+beginning. Therefore it was no sin for a man to have more wives than one.
+God sanctioned it, and made laws in regard to it. Abraham had more wives
+than one; Jacob had, David had, Solomon had. God told David, by the mouth
+of Nathan, when he upbraided him with his ingratitude for the blessings
+he had given him, and said, "And I gave thee thy master's house, and <i>thy
+master's wives</i> into thy bosom." (2 Sam. xvii. 8.)</p>
+
+<p>God, in the gospel, places man on another platform, for the revelation of
+a nobler social and spiritual life. He now forbids polygamy. <i>Polygamy now
+is sin</i>--not because it is in itself sin. No; but because God forbids
+it,--to restrain the natural and social evil, and to bring out a higher
+humanity. And see, sir, how gently in the gospel the transition from the
+lower to the higher table-land of our progress upward is made. Christ and
+his apostles do not declare polygamy to be sin. The new law is so wisely
+given that nothing existing is rudely disturbed. The minister of God,
+unmarried, must have only one wife at the same time. This law, silently
+and gradually, by inevitable and fair inference of its meaning, and from
+the example of the apostles, passed over the Christian world. God, in the
+gospel, places us in this higher and holier ground and air of love. We
+sin, then, if we marry the sister, and other near of kin; and we sin if we
+marry, at the same time, more wives than one, not because there is sin in
+the thing itself, whatever of natural evil there might be, but because in
+so doing we transgress God's law, given to secure and advance the good of
+man. I might comment in the same way on every one of the ten commandments,
+but I pass on.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of slavery, in this view of <i>right and wrong</i>, is seen in the
+very light of heaven. And you, Mr. Moderator, know that, if the view I
+have presented be true, I have got you. (Great laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>[The Moderator said, very pleasantly--Yes--<i>if</i>--but it is a <i>long if</i>.]
+(Continued laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>Dr. R. touched the Moderator on the shoulder, and said, Yes, <i>if</i>--it is a
+<i>long if</i>; for it is this:--<i>if</i> there is a God, he is not Jupiter, bowing
+to the Fates, but God, the sovereign over the universe he has created, in
+which he makes right, by making law to be known and obeyed by angels and
+men, in their varied conditions.</p>
+
+<p>He gave Adam <i>that</i> command,--sublime in its simplicity, and intended to
+vindicate the principle I am affirming,--that there is no right and wrong
+in the nature of things. There was no right or wrong, <i>per se</i>, in eating
+or willing to eat of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.</p>
+
+<p>But God made the law,--<i>Thou shall not eat of that tree</i>. As if he had
+said,--I seek to <i>test</i> the submission of your will, freely, to my will.
+And, that your test may be perfect, I will let your temptation be
+nothing more than your natural desire for that fruit. Adam sinned. What
+was the sin?</p>
+
+<p>Adam said, in heart, MY WILL, <i>not thine</i>, SHALL BE. <i>That</i> was the
+sin,--<i>the simple transgression of God's law</i>, when there was neither sin
+nor evil in the <i>thing</i> which God forbade to be done.</p>
+
+<p>Man fell and was cursed. The law of the control of the superior over the
+inferior is now to begin, and is to go on in the depraved conditions of
+the fallen and cursed race. And, FIRST, God said to the woman, "<i>Thy
+desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." There,</i> in
+that law, is <i>the beginning of government ordained of God. There</i> is the
+beginning of the rule of the superior over the inferior, bound to obey.
+<i>There</i>, in the family of Adam, is the germ of the rule in the tribe,--the
+state. Adam, in his right, from God, to rule over his wife and his
+children, had <i>all the authority</i> afterwards expanded in the patriarch and
+the king. This simple, beautiful fact, there, on the first leaf of the
+Bible, solves the problem, whence and how has man right to rule over man.
+In that great fact God gives his denial to the idea that government over
+man is the result of a social compact, in which each individual man living
+in a state of natural liberty, yielded some of that liberty to secure the
+greater good of government. Such a thing never was; such a thing never
+could have been. <i>Government was ordained and established before the first
+child was born:</i>--"HE SHALL RULE OVER THEE." Cain and Abel were born in a
+<i>state</i> as perfect as the empire of Britain or the rule of these United
+States. All that Blackstone, and Paley, and Hobbs, or anybody else, says
+about the social compact, is flatly and fully denied and upset by the
+Bible, history, and common sense. Let any New York lawyer--or even a
+Philadelphia lawyer--deny this if he dares. <i>Life, liberty, and the
+pursuit of happiness</i> never were the <i>inalienable</i> right of the
+<i>individual</i> man.</p>
+
+<p>His self-control, in all these particulars, <i>from the beginning</i>, was
+subordinate to the good of the family,--the empire. The command to Noah
+was,--"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
+(Gen. ix. 6.)</p>
+
+<p>This command to shed blood was, and is, in perfect harmony with the
+law,--"Thou shalt not kill." There is nothing right or wrong in <i>the
+taking of life</i>, per se, or in itself considered. It may or it may not be
+a natural good or evil. As a <i>general fact</i>, the taking of life is a
+natural evil. Hence, "Thou shalt not kill" is the general rule, to
+preserve the good there is in life. To take life under the forbidden
+conditions is sin, simply because God forbids it under those conditions.
+The sin is not in taking life, but in transgressing God's law.</p>
+
+<p>But <i>sometimes</i> the taking of life will secure a greater good. God, then,
+commands that life be taken. Not to take life, under the commanded
+conditions, is sin,--solely because God then commands it.</p>
+
+<p>This power over life, for the good of the one great family of man, God
+<i>delegated</i> to Noah, and through him to the tribe, the clan, the kingdom,
+the empire, the democracy, the republic, as they may be governed by chief,
+king, emperor, parliament, or congress. Had Ham killed Shem, Noah would
+have commanded Japheth to slay him. So much for the origin of the power
+over life: now for the power over liberty.</p>
+
+<p>The right to take life included the right over liberty. But God intended
+the rule of the superior over the inferior, in relations of service,
+should <i>exemplify human depravity, his curse and his overruling blessing</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The rule and the subordination which is essential to the existence of the
+family, God made commensurate with mankind; for <i>mankind is only the
+congeries of families</i>. When Ham, in his antediluvian recklessness,
+laughed at his father, God took occasion to give to the world the rule of
+the superior over the inferior. <i>He cursed him. He cursed him because he
+left him unblessed</i>. The withholding of the father's blessing, in the
+Bible, was curse. Hence Abraham prayed God, when Isaac was blessed, that
+Ishmael might not be passed by. Hence Esau prayed his father, when Jacob
+was blessed, that he might not be left untouched by his holy hands. Ham
+was cursed to render service, forever, to Shem and Japheth. The <i>special</i>
+curse on Canaan made the general curse on Ham conspicuous, historic, and
+explanatory, simply because his descendants were to be brought under the
+control of God's peculiar people. Shem was blessed to rule over Ham.
+Japheth was blessed to rule over both. God sent Ham to Africa, Shem to
+Asia, Japheth to Europe. Mr. Moderator, you have read Guyot's "<i>Earth and
+Man</i>." That admirable book is a commentary upon this part of Genesis. It
+is the philosophy of geography. And it is the philosophy of the rule of
+the higher races over the inferior, written on the very face of the earth.
+He tells you why the continents are shaped as they are shaped; why the
+mountains stand where they stand; why the rivers run where they run; why
+the currents of the sea and the air flow as they flow. And he tells you
+that the earth south of the Equator makes the inferior man. That the
+oceanic climate makes the inferior man in the Pacific Islands. That South
+America makes the inferior man. That the solid, unindented Southern Africa
+makes the inferior man. That the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent Asia
+makes the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent man. That Europe, indented by
+the sea on every side, with its varied scenery, and climate, and Northern
+influences, makes the varied intellect, the versatile power and life and
+action, of the master-man of the world. And it is so. Africa, with here
+and there an exception, has never produced men to compare with the men of
+Asia. For six thousand years, save the unintelligible stones of Egypt, she
+has had no history. Asia has had her great men and her name. But Europe
+has ever shown, and now, her nobler men and higher destiny. Japheth has
+now come to North America, to give us his past greatness and his
+transcendent glory. (Applause.) And, sir, I thank God our mountains stand
+where they stand; and that our rivers run where they run. Thank God they
+run not across longitudes, but across latitudes, from north to south. If
+they crossed longitudes, we might fear for the Union. But I hail the
+Union,--made by God, strong as the strength of our hills, and ever to live
+and expand,--like the flow and swell of the current of our streams.
+(Applause.)</p>
+
+<p>These two theories of Right and Wrong,--these two ideas of human
+liberty,--the right, in the nature of things, or the right as made by
+God,--the liberty of the individual man, of Atheism, of Red Republicanism,
+of the devil,--or the liberty of man, in the family, in the State, the
+liberty from God,--these two theories now make the conflict of the world.
+This anti-slavery battle is only part of the great struggle: God will be
+victorious,--and we, in his might.</p>
+
+<p>I now come to particular illustrations of the world-wide law that service
+shall be rendered by the inferior to the superior. The relations in which
+such service obtains are very many. Some of them are these:--husband and
+wife; parent and child; teacher and scholar; commander and
+soldier,--sailor; master and apprentice; master and hireling; master and
+slave. Now, sir, all these relations are ordained of God. They are all
+directly commanded, or they are the irresistible law of his providence, in
+conditions which must come up in the progress of depraved nature. The
+relations themselves are all good in certain conditions. And there may be
+no more of evil in the lowest than in the highest. And there may be in the
+lowest, as really as in the highest, the fulfilment of the commandment to
+love thy neighbor as thyself, and of doing unto him whatsoever thou
+wouldst have him to do unto thee.</p>
+
+<p>Why, sir, the wife everywhere, except where Christianity has given her
+elevation, is <i>the slave</i>. And, sir, I say, without fear of saying too
+strongly, that for every sigh, every groan, every tear, every agony of
+stripe or death, which has gone up to God from the relation of master and
+slave, there have been more sighs, more groans, more tears, and more agony
+in the rule of the husband over the wife. Sir, I have admitted, and do
+again admit, without qualification, that every fact in Uncle Tom's Cabin
+has occurred in the South. But, in reply, I say deliberately, what one of
+your first men told me, that he who will make the horrid examination will
+discover in New York City, in any number of years past, more cruelty from
+husband to wife, parent to child, <i>than in all the South from master to
+slave</i> in the same time. I dare the investigation. And you may extend it
+further, if you choose,--to all the results of honor and purity. I fear
+nothing on this subject. I stand on rock,--the Bible,--and therefore, just
+before I bring the Bible, to which all I have said is introductory, I will
+run a parallel between the relation of master and slave and that of
+husband and wife. I will say nothing of the grinding oppression of capital
+upon labor, in the power of the master over the hireling--the crushed
+peasant--the chain-harnessed coal-pit woman, a thousand feet under ground,
+working in darkness, her child toiling by her side, and another child not
+born; I will say nothing of the press-gang which fills the navy of
+Britain--the conscription which makes the army of France--the terrible
+floggings--the awful court-martial--the quick sentence--the
+lightning-shot--the chain, and ball, and every-day lash--the punishment of
+the soldier, sailor, slave, who had run away. I pass all this by: I will
+run the parallel between the slave and wife.</p>
+
+<p>Do you say, The slave is held to <i>involuntary service?</i> So is the wife.
+Her relation to her husband, in the immense majority of cases, is made for
+her, and not by her. And when she makes it for herself, how often, and how
+soon, does it become involuntary! How often, and how soon, would she
+throw off the yoke if she could! O ye wives, I know how superior you are
+to your husbands in many respects,--not only in personal attraction,
+(although in that particular, comparison is out of place,) in grace, in
+refined thought, in passive fortitude, in enduring love, and in a heart to
+be filled with the spirit of heaven. Oh, I know all this. Nay, I know you
+may surpass him in his own sphere of boasted prudence and worldly wisdom
+about dollars and cents. Nevertheless, he has authority, from God, to rule
+over you. You are under service to him. You are bound to obey him <i>in all
+things</i>. Your service is very, very, very often involuntary from the
+first, and, if voluntary at first, becomes hopeless necessity afterwards.
+I know God has laid upon the husband to love you as Christ loved the
+church, and in that sublime obligation has placed you in the light and
+under the shadow of a love infinitely higher, and purer, and holier than
+all talked about in the romances of chivalry. But the husband may not so
+love you. He may rule you with the rod of iron. What can you do? Be
+divorced? God forbids it, save for crime. Will you say that you are
+free,--that you will go where you please, do as you please? Why, ye dear
+wives, your husbands may forbid. And listen, you cannot leave New York,
+nor your palaces, any more than your shanties. No; you cannot leave your
+parlor, nor your bedchamber, nor your couch, if your husband commands you
+to stay there! What can you do? Will you run away, with your stick and
+your bundle? He can advertise you!! What can you do? You can, and I fear
+some of you do, wish him, from the bottom of your hearts, at the bottom of
+the Hudson. Or, in your self-will, you will do just as you please. (Great
+laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>[A word on the subject of divorce. One of your standing denunciations on
+the South is the terrible laxity of the marriage vow among the slaves.
+Well, sir, what does your Boston Dr. Nehemiah Adams say? He says, after
+giving eighty, sixty, and the like number of applications for divorce, and
+nearly all granted at individual quarterly courts in New England,--he says
+he is not sure but that the marriage relation is as enduring among <i>the
+slaves in the South</i> as it is among white people in New England. I only
+give what Dr. Adams says. I would fain vindicate the marriage relation
+from this rebuke. But one thing I will say: you seldom hear of a divorce
+in Virginia or South Carolina.]</p>
+
+<p>But to proceed:--</p>
+
+<p>Do you say the slave is <i>sold and bought?</i> So is the wife the world over.
+Everywhere, always, and now as the general fact, however done away or
+modified by Christianity. The savage buys her. The barbarian buys her. The
+Turk buys her. The Jew buys her. The Christian buys her,--Greek, Armenian,
+Nestorian, Roman Catholic, Protestant. The Portuguese, the Spaniard, the
+Italian, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the New
+England man, the New Yorker,--especially the upper ten,--<i>buy the
+wife</i>--in many, very many cases. She is seldom bought in the South, and
+never among the slaves themselves; for they always marry for love.
+(Continued laughter.) Sir, I say the wife is bought in the highest
+circles, too often, as really as the slave is bought. Oh, she is not sold
+and purchased in the public market. But come, sir, with me, and let us
+take the privilege of spirits out of the body to glide into that gilded
+saloon, or into that richly comfortable family room, of cabinets, and
+pictures, and statuary: see the parties, there, to sell and buy that human
+body and soul, and make her a chattel! See how they sit, and bend towards
+each other, in earnest colloquy, on sofa of rosewood and satin,--<i>Turkey</i>
+carpet (how befitting!) under feet, sunlight over head, softened through
+stained windows: or it is night, and the gas is turned nearly off, and the
+burners gleam like stars through the shadow from which the whisper is
+heard, in which that old ugly brute, with gray goatee--how fragrant!--bids
+one, two, five, ten hundred thousand dollars, and <i>she</i> is knocked off to
+him,--that beautiful young girl asleep up there, amid flowers, and
+innocent that she is sold and bought. Sir, that young girl would as soon
+permit a baboon to embrace her, as that old, ignorant, gross, disgusting
+wretch to approach her. Ah, has she not been sold and bought for money?
+But--But what? But, you say, she freely, and without parental authority,
+accepted him. Then she sold herself for money, and was guilty of <i>that</i>
+which is nothing better than legal prostitution. I know what I say; you
+know what I say. Up there in the gallery you know: you nod to one another.
+Ah! you know the parties. Yes, you say: All true, true, true. (Laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>Now, Mr. Moderator, I will clinch all I have said by nails sure, and
+fastened from the word of God.</p>
+
+<p>There is King James's English Bible, with its magnificent dedication. I
+bring the English acknowledged translation. And just one word more to
+push gently aside--for I am a kind man to those poor, deluded anti-slavery
+people--their last argument. It is <i>that</i> this English Bible, in those
+parts which treat of slavery, don't give the ideas which are found in the
+original Hebrew and Greek. Alas for the common people!--alas for this good
+old translation! Are its days numbered? No, sir; no, sir. The Unitarian,
+the Universalist, the Arminian, the Baptist, when pressed by this
+translation, have tried to find shelter for their false isms by making or
+asking for a new rendering. And now the anti-slavery men are driving hard
+at the same thing. (Laughter.) Sir, shall we permit our people everywhere
+to have their confidence in this noble translation undermined and
+destroyed by the isms and whims of every or any man in our pulpits? I
+affirm, whatever be our perfect liberty of examination into God's meaning
+in all the light of the original languages, that there is a respect due to
+this received version, and that great caution should be used, lest we
+teach the people to doubt its true rendering from the original word of
+God. I protest, sir, against having a Doctor-of-Divinity <i>priest</i>, Hebrew
+or Greek, to tell the people what God has spoken on the subject of
+slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin
+priest,--I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,--I would as soon go to
+Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,--I would as soon have the Pope at once in
+his fallible infallibility,--as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery
+Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible
+rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet
+produced this Bible, in its plain unanswerable authority, for the relation
+of master and slave, but the anti-slavery man ran away into the fog of
+<i>his</i> Hebrew or Greek, (laughter,) or he jabbered the nonsense that God
+permitted the <i>sin</i> of slaveholding among the Jews, but that he don't do
+it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it
+right, they know, then and now. Having thus taken the last puff of wind
+out of the sails of the anti-slavery phantom ship, turn to the
+twenty-first chapter of Exodus, vs. 2-5. God, in these verses, gave the
+Israelites his command how they should buy and hold the Hebrew
+servant,--how, under certain conditions, he went free,--how, under other
+circumstances, he might be held to service forever, with his wife and her
+children. There it is. Don't run into the Hebrew. (Laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>But what have we here?--vs. 7-11:--"And if a man sell his daughter to be a
+maid-servant, she shall not go out as the men-servants do. If she please
+not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her
+be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power,
+seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he hath betrothed her
+unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he
+take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage
+shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall
+she go out free without money." Now, sir, the wit of man can't dodge that
+passage, unless he runs away into the Hebrew. (Great laughter.) For what
+does God say? Why, this:--that an Israelite might sell his own daughter,
+not only into servitude, but into polygamy,--that the buyer might, if he
+pleased, give her to his son for a wife, or take her to himself. If he
+took her to himself, and she did not please him, he should not sell her
+unto a strange nation, but should allow her to be redeemed by her family.
+But, if he took him another wife before he allowed the first one to be
+redeemed, he should continue to give the first one <i>food</i>, her <i>raiment</i>,
+and her <i>duty of marriage</i>; that is to say, <i>her right to his bed</i>. If he
+did not do <i>these three things</i>, she should go out free; <i>i.e.</i> cease to
+be his slave, without his receiving any money for her. There, sir, God
+sanctioned the Israelite father in selling his daughter, and the Israelite
+man to buy her, into slavery and into polygamy. And it was then right,
+because God made it right. In verses 20 and 21, you have these
+words:--"And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die
+under his hand, he shall be surely punished; notwithstanding, if he
+continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."
+What does this passage mean? Surely this:--if the master gave his slave a
+hasty blow with a rod, and he died under his hand, he should be punished.
+But, if the slave lived a day or two, it would so extenuate the act of the
+master he should not be punished, inasmuch as he would be in that case
+sufficiently punished in losing his money in his slave. Now, sir, I affirm
+that God was more lenient to the degraded Hebrew master than Southern laws
+are to the higher Southern master in like cases. But there you have what
+was the divine will. Find fault with God, ye anti-slavery men, if you
+dare. In Leviticus, xxv. 44-46, "Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which
+thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them
+shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the
+strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their
+families that are with you, which they beget in your land: and they shall
+be your 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."</p>
+
+<p>Sir, I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command
+his people to buy slaves from the heathen round about them, and from the
+stranger, and of their families sojourning among them. The passage has no
+other meaning. Did God merely permit sin?--did he merely tolerate a
+dreadful evil? God does not say so anywhere. He gives his people law to
+buy and hold slaves of the heathen forever, on certain conditions, and to
+buy and hold Hebrew slaves in variously-modified particulars. Well, how
+did the heathen, then, get slaves to sell? Did they capture them in
+war?--did they sell their own children? Wherever they got them, they sold
+them; and God's law gave his people the right to buy them.</p>
+
+<p>God in the New Testament made no law prohibiting the relation of master
+and slave. But he made law regulating the relation under Greek and Roman
+slavery, which was the most oppressive in the world.</p>
+
+<p>God saw that these regulations would ultimately remove the evils in the
+Greek and Roman systems, and do it away entirely from the fitness of
+things, as there existing; for Greek and Roman slaves, for the most part,
+were the equals in all respects of their masters. &AElig;sop was a slave;
+Terence was a slave. The precepts in Colossians iv. 18, 23, 1 Tim. vi.
+1-6, and other places, show, unanswerably, that God as really sanctioned
+the relation of master and slave as those of husband and wife, and parent
+and child; and that all the obligations of the moral law, and Christ's law
+of love, might and must be as truly fulfilled in the one relation as in
+the other. The fact that he has made the one set of relations permanent,
+and the other more or less dependent on conditions of mankind, or to pass
+away in the advancement of human progress, does not touch the question. He
+sanctioned it under the Old Testament and the New, and ordains it now
+while he sees it best to continue it, and he now, as heretofore, proclaims
+the duty of the master and the slave. Dr. Parker's admirable explanation
+of Colossians, and other New Testament passages, saves me the necessity of
+saying any thing more on the Scripture argument.</p>
+
+<p>One word on the Detroit resolutions, and I conclude. Those resolutions of
+the Assembly of 1850 decide that slavery is sin, unless the master holds
+his slave as a guardian, or under the claims of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Moderator, I think we had on this floor, yesterday, proof conclusive
+that those resolutions mean any thing or nothing; that they are a fine
+specimen of Northern skill in platform-making; that it put in a plank
+here, to please this man,--a plank there, to please that man,--a plank for
+the North, a broad board for the South. It is Jackson's judicious tariff.
+It is a gum-elastic conscience, stretched now to a charity covering all
+the multitude of our Southern sins, contracted now, giving us hardly a
+fig-leaf of righteousness. It is a bowl of punch,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>  A little sugar to make it sweet,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A little lemon to make it sour,<br />
+A little water to make it weak,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A little brandy to give it power. (Laughter.)</blockquote>
+
+<p>As a Northern argument against us, it is a mass of lead so heavy that it
+weighed down even the strong shoulders of Judge Jessup. For, sir, when he
+closed his speech, I asked him a single question I had made ready for him.
+It was this:--"Do you allow that Mr. Aiken, of South Carolina, may, under
+the claims of humanity, hold three thousand slaves, or must he emancipate
+them?" The Judge staggered, and stammered, and said, "No man could rightly
+hold so many." I then asked, "How many may he hold, in humanity?" The
+Judge saw his fatal dilemma. He recovered himself handsomely, and fairly
+said, "Mr. Aiken might hold three thousand slaves, in harmony with the
+Detroit action." I replied, "Then, sir, you have surrendered the whole
+question of Southern slavery." And, sir, the Judge looked as if he felt he
+had surrendered it. And every man in this house, capable of understanding
+the force of that question, felt it had shivered the whole anti-slavery
+argument, on those resolutions, to atoms. Why, sir, if a man can hold
+three slaves, with a right heart and the approbation of God, he may hold
+thirty, three hundred, three thousand, or thirty thousand. It is a mere
+question of heart, and capacity to govern. The Emperor of Russia holds
+sixty millions of slaves: and is there a man in this house so much of a
+fool as to say that God regards the Emperor of Russia a sinner because he
+is the master of sixty millions of slaves? Sir, that Emperor has certainly
+a high and awful responsibility upon him. But, if he is good as he is
+great, he is a god of benevolence on earth. And so is every Southern
+master. His obligation is high, and great, and glorious. It is the same
+obligation, in kind, he is under to his wife and children, and in some
+respects immensely higher, by reason of the number and the tremendous
+interests involved for time and eternity in connection with this great
+country, Africa, and the world. Yes, sir, <i>I know</i>, whether Southern
+masters fully know it or not, that <i>they hold from God</i>, individually and
+collectively, <i>the highest and the noblest responsibility ever given by
+Him to individual private men on all the face of the earth.</i> For God has
+intrusted to them to train millions of the most degraded in form and
+intellect, but, at the same time, the most gentle, the most amiable, the
+most affectionate, the most imitative, the most susceptible of social and
+religious love, of all the races of mankind,--to train them, and to give
+them civilization, and the light and the life of the gospel of Jesus
+Christ. And I thank God he has given this great work to that type of the
+noble family of Japheth best qualified to do it,--to the Cavalier
+stock,--the gentleman and the lady of England and France, born to command,
+and softened and refined under our Southern sky. May they know and feel
+and fulfil their destiny! Oh, may they "know that they also have a Master
+in heaven."</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="02"></a>Letter from Dr. Ross.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>I need only say, in reference to this letter, that my friends
+having questioned my position as to the good of the agitation, I
+wrote the following letter to vindicate that point, as given, in
+the New York speech:--</p>
+
+<p>HUNTSVILLE, ALA., July 14, 1856.</p>
+
+<p><i>Brother Blackburn</i>:--I affirmed, in my New York speech, that the Slavery
+agitation has done, and will accomplish, good.</p>
+
+<p>Your very kind and courteous disagreement on that point I will make the
+occasion to say something more thereon, without wishing you, my dear
+friend, to regard what I write as inviting any discussion.</p>
+
+<p>I said <i>that</i> agitation has brought out, and would reveal still more
+fully, the Bible, in its relation to slavery and liberty,--also the
+infidelity which long has been, and is now, leavening with death the whole
+Northern mind. And that it would result in the triumph of the <i>true</i>
+Southern interpretation of the Bible; to the honor of God, and to the
+good of the master, the slave, the stability of the Union, and be a
+blessing to the world. To accomplish this, the sin <i>per se</i> doctrine will
+be utterly demolished. That doctrine is the difficulty in every <i>Northern
+mind,</i> (where there is any difficulty about slavery,) whether they confess
+it or not. Yes, the difficulty with every Northern man is, that <i>the
+relation of</i> master and slave is felt <i>to be</i> sin. I know that to be the
+fact. I have talked with all grades of Northern men, and come in contact
+with all varieties of Northern mind on this subject. And I know that the
+man who says and tries to believe, and does, partially in sober judgment,
+believe, that slavery is not sin, yet, <i>in his feelings, in his educated
+prejudices</i>, he feels that slavery is sin.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, <i>that</i> is the difficulty, and <i>that</i> is the whole of the difficulty,
+<i>between the North and the South</i>, so far as the question is one of the
+Bible and morals. Now, I again say, that that <i>sin per se</i> doctrine will,
+in this agitation, be utterly demolished. And when that is done,--when the
+North will know and feel fully, perfectly, that the relation of master and
+slave is not sin, but sanctioned of God,--then, and not till then, the
+North and South can and will, without anger, consider the following
+questions:--Whether slavery, as it exists in the United States, all
+things considered, be or be not a great good, and the greatest good for a
+time, notwithstanding its admitted evils? Again, whether these evils can
+or cannot be modified and removed? Lastly, whether slavery itself can or
+cannot pass away from this land and the world? Now, sir, the moment the
+sin question is settled, then all is peace. For these other questions
+belong entirely to another category of morals. They belong entirely to the
+category of <i>what is</i> wise <i>to realize</i> good. This agitation will bring
+this great result. And therefore I affirm the agitation to be good.</p>
+
+<p>There is another fact also, the result, in great measure, of this
+agitation, which in my view proves it to have been and to be of great
+good. I mean the astonishing rise and present stability of the slave-power
+of the United States. This fact, when examined, is undeniable. And it is
+equally undeniable that it has been caused, in great part, by the slavery
+question in all its bearings. It is a wonderful development made by God.
+And I must believe he intends thereby either to destroy or bless this
+great Union. But, as I believe he intends to bless, therefore I am
+fortified in affirming the good there has been and is in this agitation.
+Let me bring out to view this astonishing fact.</p>
+
+<p>1. Twenty-five years ago, and previously, the whole slave-holding South
+and West had a strong tendency to emancipation, in some form. But the
+abolition movement then began, and arrested that Southern and Western
+leaning to emancipation. Many people have said, and do say, that that
+<i>arrest</i> was and is a great evil. I say it was and is a great good. Why?
+Answer: It was and would now be premature. Had it been carried out, it
+would have been and would now be evil, immense, inconceivable,--to master,
+slave, America, Africa, and the world; because neither master, slave,
+America, Africa, the world, were, or are, ready for emancipation. God has
+a great deal to do before he is ready for emancipation. He tells us so by
+this <i>arrest</i> put upon that tendency to emancipation years ago. For He put
+it into the hearts of abolitionists <i>to make the arrest</i>. And He stopped
+the Southern movement all the more perfectly by permitting Great Britain
+to emancipate Jamaica, and letting that experiment prove, as it has, a
+perfect failure and a terrible warning. JAMAICA IS DESTROYED. And now,
+whatever be done for its negroes must be done with the full admission that
+what has been attempted was in violation of the duty Britain owed to
+those negroes. But her failure in seeing and doing her duty, God has given
+to us to teach us knowledge; and, through us, to instruct the world in the
+demonstration of the problem of slavery.</p>
+
+<p>2. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to give Texas to the South. Texas, a territory so vast that
+a bird, as Webster said, can't fly over it in a week. Many in the South
+did not want Texas. But many longer-headed ones did want it. And Northern
+men voted and gave to the South exactly what these longer-headed Southern
+statesmen wanted. This, I grant, was Northern anti-slavery fatuity,
+utterly unaccountable but that God made them do it.</p>
+
+<p>3. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to vote for Polk, Dallas, and Texas. This gave us the
+Mexican War; and that immense territory, its spoil,--a territory which,
+although it may not be favorable for slave-labor, has increased, and will,
+in many ways, extend the slave-power.</p>
+
+<p>4. This leads me to say that God put it into the hearts of many Northern
+men--especially abolitionists--to believe what Great Britain
+said,--namely, that <i>free trade</i> would result in slave-emancipation. <i>But
+lo! the slave-holder wanted free trade</i>. So Northern abolitionists helped
+to destroy the <i>tariff policy</i>, and thus to expand the demand for, and the
+culture of, cotton. Now, see, the gold of California has <i>perpetuated free
+trade</i> by enabling our merchants to meet the enormous demand for specie
+created by free trade. So California helps the slave-power. But the
+abolitionists gave us Polk, the Mexican War, and California.</p>
+
+<p>5. God put it into the hearts of the North, and especially abolitionists,
+to stimulate the settlement of new free States, and to be the ardent
+friends of an immense foreign emigration. The result has been to send down
+to the South, with railroad speed and certainty, corn, wheat, flour, meal,
+bacon, pork, beef, and every other imaginable form of food, in quantity
+amazing, and so cheap that the planter can spread wider and wider the
+culture of cotton.</p>
+
+<p>6. God has, by this growth of the Northwest, made the demand for cotton
+enormous in the North and Northwest. Again, he has made English and French
+experiments to procure cotton somewhere else than from the United States
+<i>dead failures</i>,--in the East Indies, Egypt, Algeria, Brazil. God has
+thus given to the Southern planter an absolute monopoly. A monopoly so
+great that he, the Southern planter, sits now upon his throne of cotton
+and wields the commercial sceptre of the world. Yes, it is the Southern
+planter who says to-day to haughty England, Go to war, if you dare;
+dismiss Dallas, if you dare. Yes, he who sits on the throne of the
+cotton-bag has triumphed at last over him who sits on the throne of the
+wool-sack. England is prostrate at his feet, as well as the abolitionists.</p>
+
+<p>7. God has put it into the hearts of abolitionists to prevent half a
+million of free negroes from going to Liberia; and thereby the
+abolitionists have made them consumers of slave-products to the extension
+of the slave-power. And, by thus keeping them in America, the
+abolitionists have so increased their degradation as to prove all the more
+the utter folly of emancipation in the United States.</p>
+
+<p>8. God has permitted the anti-slavery men in the North, in England, in
+France, and everywhere, so to blind themselves in hypocrisy as to give the
+Southern slave-holder his last perfect triumph over them; for God tells
+the planter to say to the North, to England, to France, to all who buy
+cotton, "Ye men of Boston, New York, London, Paris,--ye hypocrites,--ye
+brand me as a pirate, a kidnapper, a murderer, a demon, fit only for hell,
+and yet ye buy my blood-stained cotton. O ye hypocrites!--ye Boston
+hypocrites! why don't ye throw the cotton in the sea, as your fathers did
+the tea? Ye Boston hypocrites! ye say, <i>if we had been in the days of our
+fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the
+slave-trade!</i> Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the
+children of them who, in fact, kidnapped and bought in blood, and sold the
+slave in America! for now, ye hypocrites, ye buy the blood-stained cotton
+in quantity so immense, that <i>ye</i> have run up the price of slaves to
+be more than a thousand dollars,--the average of old and young! O ye
+hypocrites! ye denounce slavery; then ye bid it live, and not die,--in
+that ye buy sugar, rice, tobacco, and, above all, cotton! Ye hypocrites!
+ye abuse the devil, and then fall down and worship him!--ye
+hypocrites,--ye New England hypocrites,--ye Old England hypocrites,--ye
+French hypocrites,--ye Uncle Tom's Cabin hypocrites,--ye Beecher
+hypocrites,--ye Rhode Island Consociation hypocrites! Oh, your holy
+twaddle stinks in the nostrils of God, and he commands me to lash you
+with my scorn, and his scorn, so long as ye gabble about the sin of
+slavery, and then bow down to me, and buy and spin cotton, and thus work
+for me as truly as my slaves! O ye fools and blind, fill ye up the measure
+of your folly, and blindness, and shame! And this ye are doing. Ye have,
+like the French infidels, made <i>reason</i> your goddess, and are exalting her
+above the Bible; and, in your unitarianism and neology and all modes of
+infidelity, ye are rejecting and crucifying the Son of God."</p>
+
+<p>Now, my brother, this controlling slave-power is a world-wide fact. Its
+statistics of bales count by millions; its tonnage counts by hundreds of
+thousands; its manufacture is reckoned by the workshops of America and
+Europe; its supporters are numbered by all who must thus be clothed in the
+world. This tremendous power has been developed in great measure by the
+abolition agitation, controlled by God. I believe, then, as I have already
+said, that God intends one of two things. He either intends to destroy the
+United States by this slave-power, or he intends to bless my country and
+the world by the unfoldings of his wisdom in this matter. I believe he
+will bless the world in the working out of this slavery. I rejoice, then,
+in the agitation which has so resulted, and will so terminate, to reveal
+the Bible, and bless mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Your affectionate friend,</p>
+
+<p>F.A. Ross.</p>
+
+<p>REV. A. BLACKBURN.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="03"></a>What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>My position as to this all-important question, in my New York speech, was
+made subject of remark in the "Presbyterian Herald," Louisville, Kentucky,
+to which I replied at length in the "Presbyterian Witness," Knoxville,
+Tennessee. No rejoinder was ever made to that reply. But, recently, an
+extract from the younger Edwards was submitted to me. To that I gave the
+following letter. The subject is of the first and the last importance, and
+bears directly, as set forth in my New York speech, on infidelity, and, of
+course, the slavery question:--</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Editor:--In your paper of Tuesday, 24th ult., there is an article,
+under this head, giving the argument of Edwards (the son) against my views
+as to <i>the foundation of moral obligation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I thank the writer for his argument, and his courteous manner of
+presenting it. In my third letter to Mr. Barnes, I express my preparation
+to meet "<i>all comers</i>" on this question; and I am pleased to see this
+"<i>comer</i>". If my views cannot be refuted by Edwards, I may wait long
+for an "<i>uglier customer</i>."</p>
+
+<p>A word, introductory, to your correspondent. He says, "His [Dr. Ross's]
+theory was advanced and argued against in a former age." By this, I
+understand him to express his belief that my theory has been rejected
+heretofore. Well. It may, nevertheless, be the true theory. The Copernican
+astronomy was argued against in a former age and rejected; yet it has
+prevailed. Newton's law of gravitation was argued against and rejected by
+a whole generation of philosophers on the continent of Europe; yet it has
+prevailed. And now all school-boys and girls would call anybody a fool who
+should deny it. Steam, in all its applications, was argued against and
+rejected; yet it has prevailed. So the electric telegraph; and, to go back
+a little, the theory of vaccination,--the circulation of the blood,--a
+thousand things; yea, Edwards's (the father) theory of virtue, although
+received by many, has been argued against, and by many rejected; yet it
+will prevail. Yea, his idea of the unity of the race in Adam was and is
+argued against and rejected; yet it will prevail. I feel, therefore, no
+fear that my theory of moral obligation will not be acknowledged because
+it was argued against and rejected by many in a former age, and may be
+now. Nay; facts to prove it are accumulating,--facts which were not
+developed in Edwards's day,--facts showing, irresistibly, that Edwards's
+theory, which is <i>that</i> most usually now held, is what I say it is,--<i>the
+rejection of revelation, infidelity, and atheism</i>. The evidence amounts to
+demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>The question is in a nutshell; it is this:--<i>Shall man submit to the
+revealed will of God</i>, or <i>to his own will?</i> That is the naked question
+when the fog of confused ideas and unmeaning words is lifted and
+dispersed.</p>
+
+<p>My position, expressed in the speech delivered in the General Assembly,
+New York, May, 1856, is this:--"God, in making all things, saw that, in
+the relations he would constitute between himself and intelligent
+creatures, and among themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass.
+In his benevolent wisdom, he then <i>willed</i> LAW to control this <i>good</i> and
+<i>evil</i>; and he thereby made <i>conformity</i> to that law to be <i>right</i>, and
+<i>non-conformity</i> to be <i>wrong</i>. Why? Simply because he saw it to be
+<i>good</i>, and <i>made it to be</i> RIGHT; not because <i>he saw it to be right</i>,
+but because <i>he made it to be right</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Your correspondent replies to this theory in the following words of
+Edwards:--"Some hold that the foundation of moral obligation is
+primarily in the will of God. But the will of God is either benevolent
+or not. If it be benevolent, and on that account the foundation of moral
+obligation, it is not the source of obligation merely because it is the
+will of God, but because it is benevolent, and is of a tendency to
+promote happiness; and this places the foundation of obligation in a
+tendency to happiness, and not primarily in the will of God. But if the
+will of God, and that which is the expression of it, the divine law, be
+allowed to be not benevolent, and are foundation of obligation, we are
+obliged to conform to them, whatever they be, however malevolent and
+opposite to holiness and goodness the requirements be. But this, I
+presume, none will pretend." Very fairly and strongly put; that's to say,
+if I understand Edwards, he supposes, if God was the devil and man what
+he is, then man would not be under obligation to obey the devil's will!
+That's it! Well, I suppose so too; and I reckon most <i>Christians</i> would
+agree to that statement, Nay, more: I presume nobody ever taught that the
+mere naked <i>will</i>, abstractly considered, if it could be, from the
+<i>character</i> of God, was the ground of moral obligation? Nay, I think
+nobody ever imagined that the notion of an infinite Creator presupposes
+or includes the idea that he is a malevolent Being! I agree, then, with
+Edwards, that the ultimate ground of obligation <i>is</i> in the <i>fact</i> that
+God is benevolent, or is a good God. I said <i>that</i> in my speech quoted
+above. I formally stated that "<i>God, in his benevolent wisdom, willed law
+to control the natural good and evil</i>," &amp;c. What, then, is the point of
+disagreement between my view and Edwards's? It is in <i>the different ways
+by which we</i> GET AT <i>the</i> FACT <i>of divine benevolence</i>. I hold that the
+REVEALED WORD <i>tells us who God is and what he does</i>, and is, therefore,
+the ULTIMATE GROUND OF OBLIGATION. But Edwards holds that HUMAN REASON
+<i>must tell us who God is and what he does</i>, and IS, therefore, the
+PRIMARY GROUND OF OBEDIENCE. <i>That</i> is my issue with Edwards and others;
+and it is as broad an issue as <i>faith in revelation</i>, or the REJECTION OF
+IT. I do not charge that Edwards did, or that all who hold with him do,
+deny the word of God; but I do affirm that their argument does. The
+matter is plain. For what is revelation? It is that God has appeared in
+person, and <i>told</i> man in WORD that he is GOD; and <i>told</i> him first in
+WORD (to be expanded in studying <i>creation</i> and <i>providence</i>) that God is
+a Spirit, eternal, infinite in power, wisdom, goodness, holiness,--the
+Creator, Preserver, Benefactor. That WORD, moreover, he proved by
+highest evidence--namely, supernatural evidence--to be <i>absolute,
+perfect</i> TRUTH as to all FACT affirmed <i>of him</i> and <i>what</i> he <i>does</i>.
+REVELATION, as claimed in the Bible, was and is THAT THING.</p>
+
+<p>Man, then, having this revelation; is under obligation ever to believe
+every jot and tittle of that WORD. He at first, no doubt, knew little of
+the meaning of some <i>facts</i> declared; nay, he may have comprehended
+nothing of the sense or scope of many <i>facts</i> affirmed. Nay, he may now,
+after thousands of years, know most imperfectly the meaning of that WORD.
+But he was and he is, notwithstanding, to believe with absolute faith the
+WORD,--that God <i>is</i> all he says he is, and <i>does</i> all he says he
+does,--however that WORD may <i>go beyond</i> his reason, or <i>surprise</i> his
+feelings, or <i>alarm</i> his conscience, or <i>command</i> his will.</p>
+
+<p>This statement of what revelation is, settles the whole question as
+presented by Edwards. For REVELATION, as explained, does FIX <i>forever the
+foundation of man's moral obligation in the benevolence of God</i>,
+PRIMARILY, as it is <i>expressed</i> in the word of God. REVELATION does then,
+in that sense, FIX <i>obligation in the</i> MERE WILL OF GOD; for, the moment
+you attempt to establish the foundation <i>somewhere else</i>, you have
+abandoned the ground of revelation. You have left the WILL OF GOD <i>in his
+word</i>, and you have made your rule of right to be the WILL OF MAN <i>in the</i>
+SELF <i>of the</i> HEART. The proof of what I here say is so plain, even as the
+writing on the tables of Habakkuk's vision, that he may run that readeth
+it. Read, then, even as on the <i>tables</i>.</p>
+
+<p>God <i>says</i> in his WORD, "I am all-powerful, all-wise, the Creator." "You
+may be," says Edwards, "but I want <i>primary foundation</i> for my faith; and
+I can't take your <i>word</i> for it. I must look first into <i>nature</i> to see if
+evidence of infinite power and wisdom is there,--to see if evidence of a
+Creator is there,--and if thou art he!"</p>
+
+<p>Again, God <i>says</i> in his word, "I am benevolent, and <i>my will</i> in my law
+is expression of that benevolence." "You may tell the truth," Edwards
+replies, "but I want <i>primary ground</i> for my belief, and I must hold your
+word suspended until I examine into my reason, my feelings, my conscience,
+my will,--to see if your WORD <i>harmonizes</i> with my HEART,--to see if what
+you reveal tends to <i>happiness</i> IN MY NOTION OF HAPPINESS; <i>or tends to
+right</i> IN MY NOTION OF RIGHT!" That's it. That's the theory of Edwards,
+Barnes, and others.</p>
+
+<p>And what is this but the attempt to know the divine attributes and
+character in <i>some other way</i> than through the divine WORD? And what is
+this but the denial of the divine WORD, except so far as it agrees with
+the knowledge of the attributes and character of God, obtained in THAT
+<i>some other way?</i> And what is this but to make the word of God
+<i>subordinate</i> to the teaching of the HUMAN HEART? And what is this but to
+make the WILL <i>of God</i> give place to the WILL <i>of man?</i> And what is this
+but the REJECTION OF REVELATION? Yet this is the result (though not
+intended by him) of the whole scheme of obligation, maintained by Edwards
+and by all who agree with him.</p>
+
+<p>Carry it out, and what is the progress and the end of it? This. Human
+reason--the human heart--will be supreme. Some, I grant, will hold to a
+revelation of some sort. A thing more and more transcendental,--a thing
+more and more of fog and moonshine,--fog floating in German cellars from
+fumes of lager-beer, and moonshine gleaming from the imaginations of the
+drinkers. Some, like Socrates and Plato, will have a God supreme,
+personal, glorious, somewhat like the true; and with him many inferior
+deities,--animating the stars, the earth, mountains, valleys, plains, the
+sea, rivers, fountains, the air, trees, flowers, and all living things.
+Some will deny a personal God, and conceive, instead, the intelligent mind
+of the universe, without love. Some will contend for mere law,--of
+gravitation and attraction; and some will suggest that all is the result
+of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Here, having passed through the
+shadows and the darkness, we have reached the blackness of
+infidelity,--blank atheism. No God--yea, all the way the "<i>fools</i>" were
+saying in their hearts, no God. What now is man? Alas! some, the Notts and
+Gliddons, tell us, man was indeed <i>created</i> millions of ages ago, the Lord
+only knows when, in swarms like bees to suit the zones of the
+earth,--while other some, the believers in the <i>vestiges of creation</i>, say
+man is the result of development,--from fire, dust, granite, grass, the
+creeping thing, bird, fish, four-footed beast, monkey. Yea, and some of
+these last philosophers are even now going to Africa to try to find men
+they have heard tell of, who still have tails and are jumping and climbing
+somewhere in the regions around the undiscovered sources of the Nile.</p>
+
+<p>This is the progress and the result of the Edwards theory; because, deny
+or hesitate about revelation, and man cannot prove, <i>absolutely</i>, any of
+the things we are considering. Let us see if he can. Edwards writes, "On
+the supposition that the will or law of God is the primary foundation,
+reason, and standard of right and virtue, every attempt <i>to prove the
+moral perfection or attributes of God is absurd</i>." Here, then, Edwards
+believes, that, to reach the primary foundation of right and virtue, he
+must not take God's word as to his perfection or attributes, no matter how
+fully <i>God</i> may have <i>proved</i> his word: no; but he, Edwards, he, man, must
+first <i>prove</i> them in <i>some other way</i>. And, of course, he believes he can
+reach such primary foundation by such other proof. Well, let us see how he
+goes about it. I give him, to try his hand, the easiest
+attribute,--"POWER." I give him, then, all creation, and providence
+besides, as his <i>black-board</i>, on which to work his demonstration. I give
+him, then, the lifetime of Methuselah, in which to reach his conclusion of
+proof.--Well, I will now suppose we have all lived and waited that long
+time: what is his <i>proof</i> OF INFINITE POWER? Has he found the EXHIBITION
+of <i>infinite power?</i> No. He has found <i>proof</i> of GREAT POWER; but he has
+not reached the DISPLAY of <i>infinite power</i>. What then is his <i>faith</i> in
+infinite power after such <i>proof?</i> Why, just this: he INFERS <i>only</i>, that
+THE POWER, <i>which did the things he sees, can go on, and on, and on, to
+give greater, and greater, and greater manifestations of itself!</i> VERY
+GOOD: <i>if so be, we can have no better proof</i>. But <i>that</i> PROOF is
+infinitely below ABSOLUTE PROOF <i>of infinite power</i>. And all
+manifestations of power to a <i>finite creature</i>, even to the archangel
+Michael, during countless millions of ages, never gives, because it never
+can give to him, ABSOLUTE PROOF <i>of infinite power</i>. But the word of GOD
+gives the PROOF ABSOLUTE, <i>and in a moment of time!</i> "I AM THE ALMIGHTY!"
+The <i>perfect proof</i> is in THAT WORD OF GOD.
+
+I might set Edwards to work to prove the <i>infinite wisdom</i>, the <i>infinite
+benevolence</i>, the <i>infinite holiness</i>--yea, the EXISTENCE--of God. And he,
+finite man, in any examination of creation or providence, must fall
+infinitely below the PERFECT PROOF.</p>
+
+<p>So then I tell Edwards, and all agreeing with him, that <i>it is absurd</i> to
+attempt to <i>prove</i> the moral perfection and attributes of God, if he
+thereby seeks to reach the HIGHEST EVIDENCE, <i>or if he thereby means to
+find the</i> PRIMARY GROUND <i>of moral obligation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Do I then teach that man should not seek the <i>proof</i> there is, of the
+perfection and attributes of God, in <i>nature and providence</i>? No. I hold
+that such proof unfolds the <i>meaning</i> of the FACTS declared in the WORD of
+God, and is all-important, as such expansion of meaning. But I say, by
+authority of the Master, that <i>the highest proof, the absolute proof, the
+perfect proof</i>, of the FACTS as to <i>who God is, and what he does</i>, and the
+PRIMARY OBLIGATION <i>thereupon, is in the</i> REVEALED WORD.</p>
+
+<p>FRED. A. ROSS.</p>
+
+<p>Huntsville, Ala., April 3, 1857.</p>
+
+<p>N.B.--In notice of last Witness's extract from Erskine, I remark that
+Thomas Erskine was, and may yet be, a lawyer of Edinburgh. He wrote
+<i>three works</i>:--<i>one</i> on the <i>Internal Evidences</i>, the <i>next</i> on
+<i>Faith</i>, the <i>last</i> on the <i>Freeness of the Gospel</i>. They are all
+written with great ability, and contain much truth. But all have in them
+fundamental <i>untruths</i>. There is least in the Evidences; more in the
+essay on Faith; most in the tract on the Freeness of the Gospel,--which
+last has been utterly refuted, and has passed away. His <i>Faith</i> is,
+also, not republished. The Evidences is good, like good men,
+notwithstanding the evil.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="letters"></a>Letters to Rev. A. Barnes.</h1>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Introduction.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>As part of the great slavery discussion, Rev. A. Barnes, of Philadelphia,
+published, in October, 1856, a pamphlet, entitled, "The CHURCH and
+SLAVERY." In this tract he invites every man to utter his views on the
+subject. And, setting the example, he speaks his own with the greatest
+freedom and honesty.</p>
+
+<p>In the same freedom of speech, I have considered his views unscriptural,
+false, fanatical, and infidel. Therefore, while I hold him in the highest
+respect, esteem, and affection, as a divine and Christian gentleman, and
+cherish his past relations to me, yet I have in these letters written to
+him, and of him, just as I would have done had he lived in France or
+Germany, a stranger to me, and given to the world the refined scoff of the
+one, or the muddy transcendentalism of the other.</p>
+
+<p>My first letter is merely a glance at some things in his pamphlet, in
+which I show wherein I agree and disagree with him,--<i>i.e.</i> in our
+estimate of the results of the agitation; in our views of the Declaration
+of Independence; in our belief of the way men are made infidels; and in
+our appreciation of the testimonies of past General Assemblies.</p>
+
+<p>The other letters I will notice in similar introductions.</p>
+
+<p>These letters first appeared as original contributions to the Christian
+Observer, published and edited by Dr. A. Converse, Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>I take this occasion to express my regard for him, and my sense of the
+ability with which he has long maintained the rights and interests of the
+Presbyterian body, to which we both belong; and the wise and masterly way
+in which he has vindicated, from the Bible, the truth on the slavery
+question. To him, too, the public is indebted for the first exhibition of
+Mr. Barnes's errors in his recent tract which has called forth my reply.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="05"></a>No. I.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+<i>Dear Sir</i>:--You have recently published a tract:--"The Church and
+Slavery."
+
+"The opinion of each individual," you remark, "contributes to form public
+sentiment, as the labor of the animalcule in the ocean contributes to the
+coral reefs that rise above the waves."
+
+True, sir, and beautifully expressed. But while, in harmony with your
+intimation, I must regard you one of the animalcules, rearing the coral
+reef of public opinion, I cannot admit your disclaimer of "special
+influence" among them in their work. Doubtless, sir, you have "special
+influence,"--and deserve to have. I make no apology for addressing you. I
+am one of the animalcules.
+
+I agree, and I disagree, with you. I harmonize in your words,--"The
+present is eminently a time when the views of every man on the subject of
+slavery should be uttered in unambiguous tones." I agree with you in this
+affirmation; because the subject has yet to be fully understood; because,
+when understood, if THE BIBLE does <i>not</i> sanction the system, the MASTER
+must cease to be the master. The SLAVE must cease to be the slave. He must
+be <i>free</i>, AND EQUAL IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE. <i>That</i> is your
+"<i>unambiguous tone</i>". Let it be heard, if <i>that</i> is the word of God.
+
+But if THE BIBLE <i>does</i> sanction the system, then <i>that</i> "unambiguous
+tone" will silence abolitionists who admit the Scriptures; it will satisfy
+all good men, and give peace to the country. That is the "<i>tone</i>" I want
+men to hear. Listen to it in the past and present speech of providence.
+The time was when <i>you</i> had the very <i>public sentiment</i> you are now trying
+to form. From Maine to Louisiana, the American mind was softly yielding to
+the impress of emancipation, in some hope, however vague and imaginary.
+Southern as well as Northern men, in the church and out of it, not having
+sufficiently studied the word of God, and, under our own and French
+revolutionary excitement, looking only at the evils of slavery, wished it
+away from the land. It was a <i>mistaken</i> public sentiment. Yet, such as it
+was, you had it, and it was doing your work. It was Quaker-like, mild and
+affectionate. It did not, however, work fast enough for you. You thought
+that the negro, with his superior attributes of body and mind and higher
+advantages of the nineteenth century, might reach, in a day, the liberty
+and equality which the Anglo-American had attained after the struggle of
+his ancestors during a thousand years! You got up the agitation. You got
+it up in the Church and State. You got it up over the length and breadth
+of this whole land. Let me show you some things you have secured, as the
+results of your work.
+
+
+
+<i>First Result of Agitation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+1. The most consistent abolitionists, affirming the sin of slavery, on the
+maxim of created equality and unalienable right, after torturing the Bible
+for a while, to make it give the same testimony, felt they could get
+nothing from the book. They felt that the God of the Bible disregarded the
+thumb-screw, the boot, and the wheel; that he would not speak for them,
+but against them. These consistent men have now turned away from the
+word, in despondency; and are seeking, somewhere, an abolition Bible, an
+abolition Constitution for the United States, and an abolition God.</p>
+
+<p>This, sir, is the <i>first result</i> of your agitation:--the very van of your
+attack repulsed, and driven into infidelity.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>A Second Result of Agitation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+2. Many others, and you among them, are trying in exactly the same way
+just mentioned to make the Bible speak against slave-holding. You get
+nothing by torturing the English version. People understand English. Nay,
+you get little by applying the rack to the Hebrew and Greek; even before a
+tribunal of men like you, who proclaim beforehand that Moses, in Hebrew,
+and Paul, in Greek, <i>must</i> condemn slavery because "<i>it is a violation of
+the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence</i>." You find it
+difficult to persuade men that Moses and Paul were moved by the Holy Ghost
+to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson! You find it hard to make
+men believe that Moses saw in the mount, and Paul had vision in heaven,
+that this future <i>apostle of Liberty</i> was inspired by Jesus Christ.</p>
+
+<p>You torture very severely. But the muscles and bones of those old men are
+tough and strong. They won't yield under your terrible wrenchings. You get
+only groans and mutterings. You claim these voices, I know, as testimony
+against slavery. But you cannot torture in secret as in olden times. When
+putting the question, you have to let men be present,--who tell us that
+Moses and Paul won't speak for you,--that they are silent, like Christ
+before Pilate's scourging-men; or, in groans and mutterings,--the voices
+of their sorrow and the tones of their indignation,--they rebuke your
+pre-judgment of the Almighty when you say if the Bible sanctions slavery,
+"it neither ought to be nor could be received by mankind as a divine
+revelation."</p>
+
+<p>This, sir, is the <i>second result</i> you have gained by your agitation. You
+have brought a thousand Northern ministers of the gospel, with yourself,
+to the verge of the same denial of the word of God which they have made,
+who are only a little ahead of you in the road you are travelling.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>A Third Result of Agitation.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>3. Meanwhile, many of your most pious men, soundest scholars, and
+sagacious observers of providence, have been led to study the Bible more
+faithfully in the light of the times. And they are reading it more and
+more in harmony with the views which have been reached by the highest
+Southern minds, to wit:--That the relation of master and slave is
+sanctioned by the Bible;--that it is a relation belonging to the same
+category as those of husband and wife, parent and child, master and
+apprentice, master and hireling;--that the relations of husband and wife,
+parent and child, <i>were ordained in Eden for man, as man</i>, and <i>modified
+after the fall</i>, while the relation of slavery, as a system of labor, is
+<i>only one form of the government ordained of God over fallen and degraded
+man</i>;--that the <i>evils</i> in the system are <i>the same evils</i> of OPPRESSION
+we see in the relation of husband and wife, and all other forms of
+government;--that slavery, as a relation, suited to the more degraded or
+the more ignorant and helpless types of a sunken humanity, is, like all
+government, intended <i>as the proof of the curse of such degradation, and
+at the same time to elevate and bless</i>;--that the relation of husband and
+wife, being for man, as man, <i>will ever be over him</i>, while slavery will
+remain so long as God sees it best, as a controlling power over the
+ignorant, the more degraded and helpless;--and that, when he sees it for
+the good of the country, he will cause it to pass away, if the slave can
+be elevated to liberty and equality, political and social, with his
+master, <i>in</i> that country; or <i>out of</i> that country, if such elevation
+cannot be given therein, but may be realized in some other land: all which
+result must be left to the unfoldings of the divine will, <i>in harmony with
+the Bible</i>, and not to a newly-discovered dispensation. These facts are
+vindicated in the Bible and Providence. In the Old Testament, they stare
+you in the face:--in the family of Abraham,--in his slaves, bought with
+his money and born in his house,--in Hagar, running away under her
+mistress's hard dealing with her, and yet sent back, as a fugitive slave,
+by the angel,--in the law which authorized the Hebrews to hold their
+brethren as slaves for a time,--in which parents might sell their children
+into bondage,--in which the heathen were given to the Hebrews as their
+slaves forever,--in which slaves were considered so much the money of
+their master, that the master who killed one by an unguarded blow was,
+under certain circumstances, sufficiently punished in his slave's death,
+because he thereby lost his money,--in which the difference between
+<i>man-stealing</i> and <i>slave-holding</i> is, by law, set forth,--in which the
+runaway from heathen masters may not be restored, because God gave him
+the benefits of an adopted Hebrew. In the New Testament:--wherein the
+slavery of Greece and Rome was recognised,--in the obligations laid on
+master and slave,--in the close connection of this obligation with the
+duties of husband and wife, parent and child,--in the obligation to return
+the fugitive slave to his master,--and <i>in the condemnation of every
+abolition principle</i>, "AS DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH." (1 Tim. vi. 1-5.)</p>
+
+<p>This view of slavery is becoming more and more, not only the settled
+decision of the Southern but of the best Northern mind, with a movement so
+strong that you have been startled by it to write the pamphlet now lying
+before me.</p>
+
+<p>This is the <i>third result</i> you have secured:--to make many of the best men
+in the North see the infidelity of your philosophy, falsely so called, on
+the subject of slavery, in the clearer and clearer light of the
+Scriptures.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Another Result of Agitation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+4. The Southern slave-holder is now satisfied, as never before, that the
+relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible; and he feels, as
+never before, the obligations of the word of God. He no longer, in his
+ignorance of the Scriptures, and afraid of its teachings, will seek to
+defend his common-sense opinions of slavery by arguments drawn from "Types
+of Mankind," and other infidel theories; but he will look, in the light of
+the Bible, on all the good and evil in the system. And when the North, as
+it will, shall regard him holding from God this high power for great
+good,--when the North shall no more curse, but bid him God-speed,--then he
+will bless himself and his slave, in nobler benevolence. With no false
+ideas of created equality and unalienable right, but with the Bible in his
+heart and hand, he will do justice and love mercy in higher and higher
+rule. Every evil will be removed, and the negro will be elevated to the
+highest attainments he can make, and be prepared for whatever destiny God
+intends. This, sir, is the <i>fourth result</i> of your agitation:--to make the
+Southern master <i>know</i>, from the Bible, his right to be a master, and his
+duty to his slave.</p>
+
+<p>These <i>four results</i> are so fully before you, that I think you must see
+and feel them. You have brought out, besides, tremendous political
+consequences, giving astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on
+these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of
+the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep
+of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I
+rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly
+purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long
+latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and
+South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of
+God and to speak it to the land. I rejoice that all the South now know
+that God gives the right to hold slaves, and, with that right,
+obligations they must fulfil. I rejoice that the day has dawned in which
+the North and South will think and feel and act together on the subject
+of slavery. I thank God for the agitation. May he forgive the folly and
+wickedness of many who have gotten it up! May he reveal more and more,
+that surely the wrath of man shall praise him, while the remainder of
+wrath he will restrain!</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Declaration of Independence</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+I agree with you, sir, that <i>the second paragraph</i> of the Declaration of
+Independence contains <i>five affirmations</i>, declared to be self-evident
+truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every
+thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to
+liberty,--to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to
+their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident
+truth, or a truth at all. On the contrary, that each one is contrary to
+the Bible; that each one, separately, is denied; and that all five,
+collectively, are denied and upset by the Bible, by the natural history of
+man, and by providence, in every age of the world. I say this now. In a
+subsequent communication, I will prove what I affirm. For the present I
+merely add, that the Declaration of Independence stands in no need of
+these false affirmations. It was, and is, a beautiful whole without them.
+It was, and is, without these imaginary maxims, the simple statement of
+the grievances the colonies had borne from the mother-country, and their
+right <i>as colonies</i>, when thus oppressed, to declare themselves
+independent. That is to say, the right given of God to oppressed children
+to seek protection in another family, or to set up for themselves somewhat
+before <i>twenty-one</i> or natural maturity; right belonging to them <i>in the
+British family;</i> right sanctioned of God; right blessed of God, in the
+resistance of the colonies <i>as colonies</i>--not as individual men--to the
+attempt of the mother-country to consummate her tyranny. But God gives no
+sanction to the affirmation that he has <i>created all men equal</i>; that this
+is <i>self-evident,</i> and that he has given them <i>unalienable rights;</i> that
+he has made government to <i>derive its power solely from their consent</i>,
+and that he has given them <i>the right to change that government in their
+mere pleasure</i>. All this--every word of it, every jot and tittle--is the
+liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times
+in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if
+Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed
+it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as
+time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru
+Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, Garrison, or Barnes.</p>
+
+<p>Sir, that paragraph is an <i>excrescence</i> on the tree of our liberty. I pray
+you take it away. Worship it if you will, and in a manner imitate the
+Druid. He gave reverence to the <i>mistletoe</i>, but first he removed the
+<i>parasite</i> from the noble tree. Do you the same. Cut away <i>this mistletoe</i>
+with golden knife, as did the Druid; enshrine its imaginary divinity in a
+grove or cave; then retire there, and leave our oak to stand in its glory
+in the light of heaven. Men have been afraid to say all this for years,
+just as they have been timid to assert that God has placed master and
+slave in the same relation as husband and wife. Public sentiment, which
+you once had and have lost, suppressed this utterance as the other. But
+now, men speak out; and I, for one, will tell you what the Bible reveals
+as to that part of the Declaration of Independence, as fearlessly as I
+tell you what it says of the system of slavery.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>How Men are made Infidels</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+I agree with you that some men have been, are, and will be, made infidels
+by hearing that God has ordained slavery as one form of his government
+over depraved mankind. But how does this fact prove that the Bible does
+not sanction slavery? Why, sir, you have been all your life teaching that
+some men are made infidels by hearing any truth of the Bible;--that some
+men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement,
+Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. True: and these men
+find "<i>great laws of their nature,--instinctive feelings</i>"--just such as
+you find against slavery, and not more perverted in them than in you,
+condemning all this Bible. And they hold now, with your sanction, that a
+book affirming such facts "<i>cannot be from God</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Sir, some men are made infidels by hearing the Ten Commandments, and they
+find "<i>great laws of their nature</i>," as strong in them as yours in you
+against slavery, warring against every one of these commandments. And
+they declare now, with your authority, that a book imposing such
+restraints upon human nature, "<i>cannot be from God</i>" Sir, what is it
+makes infidels? You have been wont to answer, "They <i>will not</i> have God
+<i>to rule over them</i>. They <i>will not</i> have the BIBLE <i>to control the great
+laws of their nature."</i> Sir, that is the true answer. And you know that
+<i>the great instinct of liberty</i> is only one of <i>three great laws</i>,
+needing special teaching and government:--that is to say, <i>the instinct
+to rule; the instinct to submit to be ruled; and the instinct for
+liberty.</i> You know, too, that the instinct <i>to submit</i> is the strongest,
+the instinct <i>to rule</i> is next, and that the <i>aspiration for liberty</i> is
+the weakest. Hence you know the overwhelming majority of men have ever
+been willing to be slaves; masters have been next in number; while the
+few have struggled for freedom.</p>
+
+<p>The Bible, then, in proclaiming God's will <i>as to these three great
+impulses</i>, will be rejected by men, exactly as they have yielded forbidden
+control to the one or the other of them. The Bible will make infidels of
+<i>masters</i>, when God calls to them to rule right, or to give up rule, if
+they have allowed <i>the instinct of power</i> to make them hate God's
+authority. Pharaoh spoke for all infidel rulers when he said, "<i>Who is the
+Lord that I should obey his voice?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The Bible will make infidels of <i>slaves</i>, when God calls to them to aspire
+to be free, if they have permitted <i>the instinct of submission to</i> make
+them hate his commands. The Israelites in the wilderness revealed ten
+times, in their murmuring, <i>the slave-instinct</i> in all ages:--"<i>Would to
+God we had died in the wilderness!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>You know all this, and you condemn these infidels. Good.</p>
+
+<p>But, sir, you know equally well that the Bible will make infidels of men
+<i>affirming the instinct of liberty,</i> when God calls them to learn of him
+how <i>much liberty</i> he gives, and <i>how</i> he gives it, and <i>when</i> he gives
+it, if they have so yielded to this law of their nature as to make them
+despise the word of the Lord. Sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram spoke out
+just what the liberty-and-equality men have said in all time:--"<i>Ye, Moses
+and Aaron, take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy,
+every one of them: wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the
+congregation?"</i> Verily, sir, these men were intensely excited by "<i>the
+great law of our nature,--the great instinct of freedom."</i> Yea, they told
+God to his face they had looked within, and found the <i>higher law of
+liberty and equality--the eternal right--in their intuitional
+consciousness</i>; and that they would not submit to his will in the
+elevation of Moses and Aaron <i>above them</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Verily, sir, you, in the spirit of Korah, now proclaim and say, "Ye
+masters, and ye white men who are not masters, North and South, ye take
+too much upon you, seeing the negro is created your equal, and, by
+unalienable right, is as free as you, and entitled to all your political
+and social life. Ye take, then, too much upon you in excluding him from
+your positions of wealth and honor, from your halls of legislation, and
+from your palace of the nation, and from your splendid couch, and from
+your fair women with long hair on that couch and in that gilded chariot:
+wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the negro?"</p>
+
+<p>Verily, sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram said all we have ever heard from
+abolition-platforms or now listen to from you. But the Lord made the
+earth swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram!</p>
+
+<p>I agree with you then, sir, fully, that some men have been, are, and will
+be, made infidels by hearing that God, in the Bible, has ordained slavery.
+But I hold this to be no argument against the fact that the Bible does so
+teach, because men are made infidels by any other doctrine or precept they
+hate to believe.</p>
+
+<p>Sir, no man has said all this better than you. And I cannot express my
+grief that you--in the principle now avowed, <i>that every man must
+interpret the Bible as he chooses to reason and feel</i>--sanction all the
+infidelity in the world, obliterate your "<i>Notes</i>" on the Bible, and deny
+the preaching of your whole life, so far as God may, in his wrath, permit
+you to expunge or recall the words of the wisdom of your better day.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Testimonies of General Assemblies</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+I agree with you that the Presbyterian Church, both before and since its
+division, has testified, after a fashion, against slavery. But some of its
+action has been very curious testimony. I know not how the anti-slavery
+resolutions of 1818 were gotten up; nor how in some Assemblies since. I
+can guess, however, from what I do know, as to how such resolutions passed
+in Buffalo in 1853, and in New York in 1856. I know that in Buffalo they
+were at first voted down by a large majority. Then they were reconsidered
+in mere courtesy to men who said they wanted to speak. So the resolutions
+were passed after some days, in which the <i>screws</i> were applied and
+turned, in part, <i>by female hands</i>, to save the chairman of the committee
+from <i>the effects</i> of the resolutions being finally voted down!</p>
+
+<p>I know that, in New York, the decision of the Assembly to spread the
+minority report on the minutes was considered, in the body and out of it,
+as a Southern victory; for it revealed, however glossed over, that many in
+the house, who could not vote directly for the minority report, did in
+fact prefer it to the other.</p>
+
+<p>I was not in Detroit in 1850; but I think it was established in New York
+last May that that Detroit testimony was so admirably worded that both
+Southern and Northern men might vote for it with clear consciences!</p>
+
+<p>I need not pursue the investigation. I admit that, after this sort, you
+have the stultified abstractions of the New School Presbyterian
+Church,--while I have its common sense; you have its Delphic words,--I
+have its actions; you have the traditions of the elders making void the
+word of God,--I have the providence of God restraining the church from
+destroying itself and our social organization under folly, fanaticism, and
+infidelity.
+
+You, sir, seem to acknowledge this; for, while you appear pleased with the
+testimony of the New School Presbyterian Church, such as it is, you lament
+that the Old School have not been true to the resolutions of 1818,--that,
+in that branch of the church, it is questionable whether those resolutions
+could now be adopted. You lament the silence of the Episcopal, the
+Southern Methodist, and the Baptist denominations; you might add the
+Cumberland Presbyterian Church. And you know that in New England, in New
+York, and in the Northwest, many testify against <i>us</i> as a pro-slavery
+body. You lament that so many members of the church, ministers of the
+gospel, and editors of religious papers, defend the system; you lament
+that so large a part of the religious literature of the land, though
+having its seat North and sustained chiefly by Northern funds, shows a
+perpetual deference to the slave-holder; you lament that, after fifty
+years, nothing has been done to arrest slavery; you lament and ask, "Why
+should this be so?" In saying this, you acknowledge that, while you have
+been laboring to get and have reached the abstract testimony of the
+church, all diluted as it is, the common-sense fact has been and is more
+and more brought out, in the providence of God, that <i>the slave-power has
+been and is gaining ground in the United States</i>. In one word, you have
+contrived to get, in confused utterance, the voice of the Sanhedrim; while
+Christ himself has been preaching in the streets of our Jerusalem the true
+meaning of slavery as one form of his government over fallen men.</p>
+
+<p>These, then, are some of the things I promised to show as the results of
+your agitation. This is the "<i>tone</i>" of the past and present speech of
+Providence on the subject of slavery. You seem disturbed. I feel sure
+things are going on well as to that subject. Speak on, then, "in
+unambiguous tones." But, sir, when you desire to go from words to
+actions,--when you intimate that the constitution of the Presbyterian
+Church may be altered to permit such action, or that, without its
+alteration, the church can detach itself from slavery by its existing laws
+or the modification of them,--then I understand you to mean that you
+desire to deal, in fact, with slave-holders as <i>offenders</i>. Then, sir,
+<i>you mean to exscind the South</i>; for it is absurd to imagine that you
+suppose the South will submit to such action. You mean, then, to <i>exscind
+the South, or to exscind yourself and others</i>, or to <i>compel the South to
+withdraw</i>. Your tract, just published, is, I suppose, intended by you to
+prepare the next General Assembly for such movement? What then? Will you
+make your "American Presbyterian," and your Presbyterian House, effect
+that great change in the religious literature of the land whereby the
+subject of slave-holding shall be approached <i>precisely</i> as you deal with
+"theft, highway-robbery, or piracy?" Will you, then, by act of Assembly,
+Synod, Presbytery, Session, deny your pulpits, and communion-bread and
+wine, to slave-holding ministers, elders, and members? Will you, then,
+tell New England, and especially little Rhoda, We have purified our skirts
+from the blood: forgive us, and take us again to your love? What then?
+Will you then ostracize the South and compel the abolition of slavery?
+Sir, do you bid us fear these coming events, thus casting their shadow
+before from the leaves of your book?</p>
+
+<p>Sir, you may destroy the integrity of the New School Presbyterian Church.
+So much evil you may do; but you will hereby only add immensely to the
+great power and good of the Old School; and you will make disclosures of
+Providence, unfolding a consummation of things very different from the end
+you wish to accomplish for your country and the world.</p>
+
+<p>I write as one of the animalcules contributing to the coral reef of
+public opinion.</p>
+
+<p>F. A. Ross.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="06"></a>No. II.</h1>
+
+<h2>Government Over Man a Divine Institute.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>This letter is the examination and refutation of the infidel theory of
+human government foisted into the Declaration of Independence.</p>
+
+<p>I had written this criticism in different form for publication, before Mr.
+Barnes's had appeared. I wrote it to vindicate my affirmation in the
+General Assembly which met in New York, May last, on this part of the
+Declaration. My views were maturely formed, after years of reflection, and
+weeks--nay months--of carefully-penned writing.</p>
+
+<p>And thus these truths, from the Bible, Providence, and common sense, were
+like rich freight, in goodly ship, waiting for the wind to sail; when lo,
+Mr. Barnes's abolition-breath filled the canvas, and carried it out of
+port into the wide, the free, the open sea of American public thought.
+There it sails. If pirate or other hostile craft comes alongside, the good
+ship has guns.</p>
+
+<p>I ask that this paper be carefully read more than once, twice, or three
+times. Mr. Barnes, I presume, will not so read it. He is committed.
+Greeley may notice it with his sparkling wit, albeit he has too much sense
+to grapple with its argument. The Evangelist-man will say of it, what he
+would say if Christ were casting out devils in New York,--"He casteth
+out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils." Yea, this
+Evangelist-man says that my version of the golden rule is "diabolical;"
+when truly that version is the <i>word</i> of the Spirit, as Christ's casting
+out devils was the <i>work</i> of the Holy Ghost.</p>
+
+<p>Gerrett Smith, Garrison, Giddings, do already agree with me, that they are
+right if Jefferson spoke the truth. Yea, whether the Bible be true, is no
+question with them no more than with him. Yea, they hold, as he did, that
+whether there be one God or twenty, it matters not: the fact either way,
+in men's minds, neither breaks the leg nor picks the pocket. (See
+Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.) Messrs. Beecher and Cheever will find
+nothing in me to aid them in speaking to the mobs of Ephesus and Antioch.
+They are making shrines, and crying, Great is Diana. Mrs. Stowe is on the
+Dismal Swamp, with Dred for her Charon, to paddle her light canoe, by the
+fire-fly lamps, to the Limbo of Vanity, of which she is the queen. None of
+these will read with attention or honesty, if at all, this examination of
+what Randolph long ago said was a <i>fanfaronade of nonsense</i>. These are all
+wiser "than seven men that can render a reason."</p>
+
+<p>But there are thousands, North and South, who will read this refutation,
+and will feel and acknowledge that in the light of God's truth the notion
+of created equality and unalienable right is falsehood and infidelity.</p>
+
+<p></p>
+
+<p>Rev. A. Barnes:--</p>
+
+<p>Dear Sir:--In my first letter I promised to prove that the paragraph in
+the Declaration of Independence, which contains the affirmation of
+created equality and unalienable rights, has no sanction from the word of
+God. I now meet my obligation.</p>
+
+<p>The time has come when civil liberty, as revealed in the Bible and in
+Providence, must be re-examined, understood, and defended against infidel
+theories of human rights. The slavery question has brought on this
+conflict; and, strange as it may seem, the South, the land of the slave,
+is summoned by God to defend the liberty he gives; while the North, the
+clime of the free, misunderstands and changes the truth of God into a
+lie,--claiming a liberty he does not give. Wherefore is this? I reply:---</p>
+
+<p>God, when he ordained government over men, gave to the individual man
+RIGHTS, <i>only</i> as he is under government. He first established the family;
+hence all other rule is merely the family expanded. The <i>good</i> of the
+family limited the <i>rights</i> of every member. God required the family, and
+then the state, so to rule as to give to every member the <i>good</i> which is
+his, in harmony with the welfare of the whole; and he commanded the
+individual to seek <i>that good</i>, and NO MORE.</p>
+
+<p>Now, mankind being depraved, government has ever violated its obligation
+to rule for the benefit of the entire community, and has wielded its
+power in oppression. Consequently, the governed have ever struggled to
+secure the good which was their right. But, in this struggle, they have
+ever been tempted to go beyond the limitation God had made, and to seek
+supposed good, not given, in rights, prompted by <i>self-will</i>, destructive
+of the state.</p>
+
+<p>Government thus ever existing in oppression, and people thus ever rising
+up against despotism, have been the history of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>The Reformation was one of the many convulsions in this long-continued
+conflict. In its first movements, men claimed the liberty the Bible
+grants. Soon they ran into licentiousness. God then stayed the further
+progress of emancipation in Europe, because the spread of the asserted
+liberty would have made infidelity prevail over that part of the
+continent where the Reformation was arrested. God preferred Romanism,
+and other despotisms, modified as they were by the struggle, to rule for
+a time, than have those countries destroyed under the sway of a
+licentious freedom.</p>
+
+<p>In this contest the North American colonies had their rise, and they
+continued the strife with England until they declared themselves
+independent.</p>
+
+<p>That "Declaration" affirmed not only the liberty sanctioned of the Bible,
+but also the liberty constituting infidelity. Its first paragraph, to the
+word "<i>separation</i>," is a noble introduction. Omit, then, what follows,
+to the sentence beginning "<i>Prudence will dictate</i>," and the paper, thus
+expurgated, is complete, and is then simply the complaint of the colonies
+against the government of England, which had oppressed them beyond
+further submission, and the assertion of their right to be free and
+independent States.</p>
+
+<p>This declaration was, in that form, nothing more than the affirmation of
+the right God gives to children, in a family, applied to the colonies, in
+regard to their mother-country. That is to say, children have, from God,
+RIGHT, AS CHILDREN, when cruelly treated, to secure the good to which they
+are entitled, as children, IN THE FAMILY. They may secure <i>this</i> good by
+becoming part of another family, or by setting up for themselves, if old
+enough. So the colonies had, from God, <i>right</i> as colonies, when oppressed
+beyond endurance, to exchange the British family for another, or, if of
+sufficient age, to establish their own household. The Declaration, then,
+in that complaint of oppression and affirmation of right, in the colonies,
+to be independent, asserts liberty sanctioned by the word of God. And
+therefore the pledge to <i>that</i> Declaration, of "lives, fortune, and sacred
+honor," was blessed of Heaven, in the triumph of their cause.</p>
+
+<p>But the Declaration, in the part I have omitted, affirms other things, and
+very different. It asserts facts and rights as appertaining to man, not in
+the Scriptures, but contrary thereto. Here is the passage:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>  "We hold these truths to be self-evident,--that all men are created
+  equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
+  unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
+  pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are
+  instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
+  the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
+  destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
+  abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation
+  on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to
+  them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."</blockquote>
+
+<p><i>This is the affirmation of the liberty claimed by infidelity.</i> It teaches
+as a fact <i>that</i> which is not true; and it claims as right <i>that</i> which
+God has not given. It asserts nothing new, however. It lays claim to that
+individual right beyond the limitation God has put, which man has ever
+asserted when in his struggle for liberty he has refused to be guided and
+controlled by the word and providence of his Creator.</p>
+
+<p>The paragraph is a chain of four links, each of which is claimed to be a
+self-evident truth.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>first</i> and controlling assertion is, "that ALL MEN ARE CREATED
+EQUAL;" which proposition, as I understand it, is, that <i>every man and
+woman on earth is created with equal attributes of body and mind</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Secondly</i>, and consequently, that every individual has, by virtue of his
+or her being created the equal of each and every other individual, the
+right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, <i>so in his or her
+own keeping that that right is unalienable without his or her consent</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thirdly</i>, it follows, that government among men must derive its just
+powers only from the <i>consent</i> of the governed; and, as the governed are
+the aggregate of individuals, <i>then each person must consent to be thus
+controlled before he or she can be rightfully under such authority</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fourthly</i>, and finally, that whenever any form of government becomes
+destructive of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+<i>as each such individual man or woman may think</i>, then each such person
+may rightly set to work to alter or abolish such form, and institute a new
+government, on such principles and in such form as to them shall seem most
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.</p>
+
+<p>This is the celebrated averment of created equality, and unalienable right
+to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, with the necessary
+consequences. I have fairly expanded its meaning. It is the old infidel
+averment. It is not true in any one of its assertions.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>All Men not created equal</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not a truth, <i>self-evident,</i> that all men are created equal.
+Webster, in his dictionary, defines "Self-evident--Evident without proof
+or reason: clear conviction upon a bare presentation to the mind, as that
+two and three make five."</p>
+
+<p>Now, I affirm, and you, I think, will not contradict me, that the
+position, "<i>all men are created equal"</i> is <i>not</i> self-evident; that the
+nature of the case makes it impossible for it to be self-evident. For the
+created nature of man is not in the class of things of which such
+self-evident propositions can by possibility be predicated. It is equally
+clear and beyond debate, that it is not <i>self-evident</i> that all men have
+<i>unalienable rights</i>, that governments derive their just powers from the
+<i>consent</i> of the governed, and may be altered or abolished whenever <i>to
+them</i> such rights may be better secured. All these assertions can be known
+to be true or false only from revelation of the Creator, or from
+examination and induction of reasoning, covering the nature and the
+obligations of the race on the whole face of the earth. What revelation
+and examination of facts do teach, I will now show. The whole
+battle-ground, as to the truth of this series of averments, is on the
+first affirmation, "<i>that all men are created equal</i>." Or, to keep up my
+first figure, the strength of the chain of asserted truths depend on
+<i>that</i> first link. It must then stand the following perfect trial.</p>
+
+<p>God reveals to us that he created man in his image, <i>i.e.</i> a spirit
+endowed with attributes resembling his own,--to reason, to form rule of
+right, to manifest various emotions, to will, to act,--and that he gave
+him a body suited to such a spirit, (Gen. i. 26, 27, 28;) that he created
+MAN "<i>male and female</i>," (Gen. i. 27;) that he made the woman "<i>out of the
+man</i>," (Gen. ii. 23;) that he made "<i>the man the image and glory of God</i>,
+but the woman <i>the glory of the man</i>. For the man is not of the woman, but
+the woman of the man. Neither was the man <i>created for the woman</i>, but the
+woman <i>for the man</i>," (1 Cor. xi.;) that he made the woman to be the
+weaker vessel, (1 Pet. iii. 7.) Here, then, God created <i>the race</i> to be
+in the beginning TWO,--a male and a female MAN; one of them <i>not equal</i> to
+the other <i>in attributes of body and mind</i>, and, as we shall see
+presently, not equal in rights as to government. Observe, this inequality
+was fact as to the TWO, in the perfect state wherein they were <i>created</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But these two fell from that perfect state, became depraved, and began to
+be degraded in body and mind. This statement of the original inequality in
+which man was created controls all that comes after, in God's providence
+and in the natural history of the race.</p>
+
+<p><i>Providence</i>, in its comprehensive teaching, "says that God, soon after
+the flood, subjected the races to all the influences of the different
+zones of the earth;"--"That he hath made of one blood all nations of men
+for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times
+before appointed and the bounds of their habitation; that they should
+seek the Lord if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he
+be not far from every one of us." (Acts xvii. 26, 27.)</p>
+
+<p>These "bounds of their habitation" have had much to do in the natural
+history of man; for "<i>all men</i>" have been "<i>created</i>," or, more
+correctly, <i>born</i>, (since the race was "created" once only at the first,)
+with attributes of body and mind derived from the TWO unequal parents,
+and these attributes, in every individual, the combined result of the
+parental natures. "<i>All men</i>," then, come into the world under influences
+upon the amalgamated and transmitted body and mind, from depravity and
+degradation, sent down during all the generations past; and, therefore,
+under causes of inequality, acting on each individual from climate, from
+scenery, from food, from health, from sickness, from love, from hatred,
+from government, inconceivable in variety and power. Under such causes,
+to produce infinite shades of inequality, physical and mental, in
+birth--if "all men" were created equal (<i>i.e.</i> born equal) in attributes
+of body and mind--such "creation" would be a violation of all the known
+analogies in the world of life.</p>
+
+<p>Do, then, the facts in man's natural history exhibit this departure from
+the laws of life and spirit? Do they prove that "all men are created
+equal"? Do they show that every man and every woman of Africa, Asia,
+Europe, America, and the islands of the seas, is created each one equal in
+body and mind to each other man or woman on the face of the earth, and
+that this has always been?</p>
+
+<p>Need I extend these questions? Methinks, sir, I hear you say, what others
+have told me, that the "Declaration" is not to be understood as affirming
+what is so clearly false, but merely asserts that all men are "created
+equal" in <i>natural rights.</i></p>
+
+<p>I reply that <i>that</i> is <i>not</i> the meaning of the clause before us; for
+<i>that</i> is the meaning of the next sentence,--the <i>second</i> in the series we
+are considering.</p>
+
+<p>There are, as I have said, four links to the chain of thought in this
+passage:--1. That all men are created equal. 2. That they are endowed by
+the Creator with certain unalienable rights. 3. That government derives
+its just powers from the consent of the governed. 4. That the people may
+alter and abolish it, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>These links are logical sequences. All men--man and woman--are created
+equal,--equal in <i>attributes of body and mind</i>; (for <i>that</i> is the only
+sense in which they could be <i>created</i> equal;) <i>therefore</i> they are
+endowed with right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,
+unalienable, except in their consent; <i>consequently</i> such consent is
+essential to all rightful government; and, <i>finally</i> and <i>irresistibly</i>,
+the people have supreme right to alter or abolish it, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>The meaning, then, I give to that first link, and to the chain following,
+<i>is</i> the sense, because, if you deny that meaning to the <i>first link</i>,
+then the others have no logical truth whatever. Thus:--</p>
+
+<p>If all men are <i>not</i> created equal in attributes of body and mind, then
+the <i>inequality</i> may be <i>so great</i> that such men cannot be endowed with
+right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, unalienable save in
+their <i>consent</i>; then government over such men cannot rightfully rest upon
+their <i>consent</i>; nor can they have right to alter or abolish government in
+their mere determination.</p>
+
+<p>Yea, sir, you concede every thing if you admit that the "Declaration"
+does <i>not</i> mean to affirm that all men are "<i>created</i>" <i>equal in body
+and mind</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I will suppose in the Alps a community of Cretins,--<i>i.e.</i> deformed and
+helpless idiots,--but among them many from the same parents, who, in body
+and mind, by birth are comparatively <i>Napoleons</i>. Now, this <i>inequality</i>,
+physical and mental, by birth, makes it impossible that the government
+over these Cretins can be in their "<i>consent</i>." <i>The Napoleons must rule</i>.
+The Napoleons must absolutely control their "life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness," for the good of the community. Do you reply that I have taken
+an extreme case? that everybody admits sensible people must govern natural
+fools? Ay, sir, there is the rub. <i>Natural fools</i>! Are some men, then,
+"<i>created</i>" natural fools? Very well. Then you also admit that some men
+are <i>created</i> just a degree above natural fools!--and, consequently, that
+men are "<i>created</i>" in all degrees, gradually rising in the scale of
+intelligence. Are they not "<i>created</i>" just above the brute, with savage
+natures along with mental imbecility and physical degradation? Must the
+Napoleons govern the Cretins without their "consent"? Must they not also
+govern without their "consent" these types of mankind, whether one, two,
+three, thirty, or three hundred degrees above the Cretins, if they are
+still greatly inferior by nature? Suppose the Cretins removed from the
+imagined community, and a colony of Australian ant-catchers or California
+lizard-eaters be in their stead: must not the Napoleons govern these? And,
+if you admit inequality to be in birth, then that inequality is the very
+ground of the reason why the Napoleons must govern the ant-catchers and
+lizard-eaters. Remove these, and put in their place an importation of
+African negroes. Do you admit <i>their inferiority by</i> "CREATION?" Then the
+same control over them must be the irresistible fact in common sense and
+Scripture of God. <i>The Napoleons must govern</i>. They must govern without
+asking "consent,"--if the inequality be such that "<i>consent</i>" would be
+evil, and not good, in the family--the state.</p>
+
+<p>Yea, sir, if you deny that the "Declaration" asserts "all men are created
+equal" in body and mind, then you admit the inequality may be such as to
+make it impossible that in such cases men have rights unalienable save in
+their "consent;" and you admit it to be impossible that government in such
+circumstances can exist in such "<i>consent</i>" But, if you affirm the
+"Declaration" <i>does</i> mean that men are "<i>created</i> equal" in attributes of
+body and mind, then you hold to an equality which God, in his word, and
+providence, and the natural history of man, denies to be truth.</p>
+
+<p>I think I have fairly shown, from Scripture and facts, that the first
+averment is not the truth; and have reduced it to an absurdity. I will now
+regard the second, third, and fourth links of the chain.</p>
+
+<p>I know they are already broken; for, the whole chain being but an electric
+current from a vicious imagination, I have destroyed the whole by breaking
+the first link. Or was it but a cluster from a poisonous vine, then I have
+killed the branches by cutting the vine. I will, however, expose the other
+three sequences by a distinct argument covering them all.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Authority Delegated to Adam</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+God gave to Adam sovereignty over the human race, in his first
+decree:--"<i>He shall rule over thee</i>." <i>That</i> was THE INSTITUTION OF
+GOVERNMENT. It was not based on the "<i>consent</i>" of Eve, the governed. It
+was from God. He gave to Adam like authority to rule his children. It was
+not derived from their "<i>consent</i>". It was from God. He gave Noah the same
+sovereignty, with express power over life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness. It was not founded in "<i>consent</i>" of Shem, Ham, and Japheth,
+and their wives. It was from God. He then determined the habitations of
+men on all the face of the earth, and <i>indicated</i> to them, in every clime,
+the <i>form</i> and <i>power</i> of their governments. He gave, directly, government
+to Israel. He just as truly gave it to Idumea, to Egypt, and to Babylon,
+to the Arab, to the Esquimaux, the Caffre, the Hottentot, and the negro.</p>
+
+<p>God, in the Bible, decides the matter. He says, "Let every soul be subject
+unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that
+be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
+the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
+damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.
+Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou
+shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for
+good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid, for he beareth not the
+sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath
+upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for
+wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also:
+for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
+Render, therefore, to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due;
+custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor." (Rom.
+xiii. 1-7.)</p>
+
+<p>Here God reveals to us that he has <i>delegated to government his own</i> RIGHT
+<i>over life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness</i>; and that that RIGHT is
+not, in any sense, from the "<i>consent</i>" of the governed, but is directly
+from him. Government over men, whether in the family or in the state, is,
+then, as directly from God as it would be if he, in visible person, ruled
+in the family or in the state. I speak not only of the RIGHT simply to
+govern, but the <i>mode</i> of the government, and the <i>extent</i> of the power.
+Government <i>can do</i> ALL which God <i>would do,--just</i> THAT,--<i>no more, no
+less</i>. And it is <i>bound to do just</i> THAT,--<i>no more, no less</i>. Government
+is responsible to God, if it fails to do <i>just</i> THAT which He himself
+would do. It is under responsibility, then, to rule in righteousness. It
+must not oppress. It must <i>give</i> to every individual "<i>life, liberty, and
+pursuit of happiness</i>," in harmony with the <i>good</i> of the family,--the
+state,--<i>as God himself would give it</i>,--<i>just</i> THAT, <i>no more, no less</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This passage of Scripture settles the question, From whence has
+government RIGHT to rule, and what is the <i>extent</i> of its power? The
+RIGHT is from God, and the EXTENT of the power is <i>just</i> THAT to which
+God would exercise it if he were personally on the earth. God, in this
+passage, and others, settles, with equal clearness, from whence is the
+OBLIGATION to <i>submit</i> to government, and what is the <i>extent</i> of the
+duty of obedience? The OBLIGATION to submit is not from individual RIGHT
+to consent or not to consent to government,--but the OBLIGATION <i>to
+submit</i> is directly from God.</p>
+
+<p>The EXTENT of the duty of obedience is equally revealed--in this wise: so
+long as the government rules in righteousness, the duty is perfect
+obedience. So soon, however, as government requires <i>that</i> which God, in
+his word, <i>forbids the subject to do</i>, he must obey God, and not man. He
+must refuse to obey man. But, inasmuch as the obligation to submit to
+authority of government is so great, the subject must <i>know</i> it is the
+will of God, that he shall refuse to obey, before he assumes the
+responsibility of resistance to the powers that be. His <i>conscience</i> will
+not justify him before God, if he mistakes his duty. <i>He may be all the
+more to blame for having</i> SUCH A CONSCIENCE. Let him, then, be CERTAIN he
+can say, like Peter and John, "Whether it be right, in the sight of God,
+to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."</p>
+
+<p>But, when government requires <i>that</i> which God <i>does not forbid</i> the
+subject to do, although <i>in that</i> the government may have transcended the
+line of its righteous rule, the subject must, nevertheless,
+submit,--<i>until</i> oppression has gone to <i>the point</i> at which <i>God makes</i>
+RESISTANCE <i>to be duty.</i> And <i>that point</i> is when RESISTANCE will clearly
+be <i>less of evil, and more of good</i>, TO THE COMMUNITY, than further
+submission.</p>
+
+<p><i>That</i> is the rule of <i>duty</i> God gives to the <i>whole</i> people, or to the
+<i>minority</i>, or to the <i>individual</i>, to guide them in resistance to the
+powers that be.</p>
+
+<p>It is irresistibly <i>certain</i> that <i>He who ordains</i> government <i>has, alone,
+the right to alter or abolish it</i>,--that He who institutes the powers that
+be has, alone, the right to say when and how the people, in whole or in
+part, may resist. So, then, the people, in whole, or in part, have no
+right to resist, to alter, or abolish government, simply because <i>they</i>
+may deem it destructive of the end for which it was instituted; but they
+may resist, alter, or abolish, <i>when it shall be seen that God so regards
+it</i>. This places the great fact where it must be placed,--<i>under the</i>
+CONTROL <i>of the</i> BIBLE <i>and</i> PROVIDENCE.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Illustrations</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+I will conclude with one or two illustrations. God, in his providence,
+ordains the Russian form of government,--<i>i.e.</i> He places the sovereignty
+in one man, because He sees that such government can secure, for a time,
+more good to that degraded people than any other form. Now, I ask, Has the
+emperor <i>right</i>, from God, to change at once, in his mere "<i>consent</i>," the
+<i>form</i> of his government to <i>that</i> of the United States? No. God forbids
+him. Why? Because he would thereby destroy the good, and bring immense
+evil in his empire. I ask again, Have the Russian serfs and nobles,--yea,
+all,--"consenting," the right, from God, to make that change? No. For the
+government of the United States is not suited to them. And, in such an
+attempt, they would deprive themselves of the blessings they now have, and
+bring all the horrors of anarchy.</p>
+
+<p>Do you ask if I then hold, that God ordains the Russian type of rule to be
+perpetual over that people? No. The emperor is bound to secure all of
+"<i>life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness</i>," to each individual,
+consistent with the good of the nation. And he is to learn his obligation
+from the Bible, and faithfully apply it to the condition of his subjects.
+<i>He will thus gradually elevate them</i>; while they, on their part, are
+bound to strive for this elevation, in all the ways in which God may show
+them the good, and the right, which, more and more, will belong to them in
+their upward progress. The result of such government and such obedience
+would be that of a father's faithful training, and children's
+corresponding obedience. The Russian people would thus have, gradually,
+that measure of liberty they could bear, under the one-man power,--and
+then, in other forms, as they might be qualified to realize them. This
+development would be without convulsion,--as the parent gives place, while
+the children are passing from the lower to their higher life. It would be
+the exemplification of Carlyle's illustration of the snake. He says, A
+people should change their government only as a snake sheds his skin: the
+new skin is gradually formed under the old one,--and then the snake
+wriggles out, with just a drop of blood here and there, where the old
+jacket held on rather tightly.</p>
+
+<p>God ordains the government of the United States. And <i>He places</i> the
+<i>sovereignty</i> in the <i>will</i> of the majority, because He has trained the
+people, through many generations in modes of government, to such an
+elevation in moral and religious intelligence, that such sovereignty is
+best suited to confer on them the highest right, as yet, to "life,
+liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But God requires that <i>that will
+of the majority</i> be in perfect submission to Him. Once more then I
+inquire,--Whether the people of this country, yea all of them consenting,
+have right from God, to abolish now, at this time, our free institutions,
+and set up the sway of Russia? No. But why? There is one answer only. He
+tells us that our happiness is in this form of government, and in it, its
+developed results.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>The "Social Compact" not recognised in the Divine Institute</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+Here I pause. So, then, God gives no sanction to the notion of a SOCIAL
+COMPACT. He never gave to man individual, isolated, natural rights,
+unalienably in his keeping. He never made him a Caspar Hauser, in the
+forest, without name or home,--a Melchisedek, in the wilderness, without
+father, without mother, without descent,--a Robinson Crusoe, on his
+island, in skins and barefooted, waiting, among goats and parrots, the
+coming of the canoes and the savages, to enable him to "<i>consent</i>" if he
+would, to the relations of social life.
+
+And, therefore, those five sentences in that second paragraph of the
+Declaration of Independence are not the truth; so, then, it is not
+<i>self-evident</i> truth that all men are created equal. So, then, it is not
+the truth, in fact, that they are created equal. So, then, it is not the
+truth that God has endowed all men with unalienable right to life,
+liberty, and pursuit of happiness. So, then, it is not the truth that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So,
+then, it is not the truth that the people have right to alter or abolish
+their government, and institute a new form, whenever to them it shall seem
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.</p>
+
+<p>The manner in which these unscriptural dogmas have been modified or
+developed in the United States, I will examine in another paper.</p>
+
+<p>I merely add, that the opinions of revered ancestors, on these questions
+of right and their application to American slavery, must now, as never
+before, be brought to the test of the light of the Bible. F.A. Ross.</p>
+
+<p>Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 1857.</p>
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="07"></a>Man-Stealing.</h1>
+
+
+<p>This argument on the abolition charge, against the slave-holder,--that he
+is a man-stealer,--covers the whole question of slavery, especially as it
+is seen in the Old Testament. The headings in the letter make the subject
+sufficiently clear.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>No. III.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>Rev. Albert Barnes:--</p>
+
+<p>Dear Sir:--In my first letter, I merely touched some points in your tract,
+intending to notice them more fully in subsequent communications. I have,
+in my second paper, sufficiently examined the imaginary maxims of created
+equality and unalienable rights.</p>
+
+<p>In this, I will test your views by Scripture more directly. "To the law
+and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is
+because there is no light in them." (Isaiah viii. 20).</p>
+
+<p>The abolitionist charges the slave-holder with being a <i>man-stealer</i>. He
+makes this allegation in two affirmations. First, that the slave-holder
+is thus guilty, because, the negro having been kidnapped in Africa,
+therefore those who now hold him, or his children, in bondage, lie under
+the guilt of that first act. Secondly, that the slave-holder, by the very
+fact that he is such, is guilty of stealing from the negro his unalienable
+right to freedom.</p>
+
+<p>This is the charge. It covers the whole subject. I will meet it in all
+its parts.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>The Difference between Man-Stealing and Slave-Holding, as set forth in
+the Bible</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+The Bible reads thus: (Exodus xxi. 16:)--"He that stealeth a man
+and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be
+put to death."</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is it to kidnap or steal a man? Webster informs us--To kidnap
+is "to steal a human being, a man, woman, or child; or to seize and
+forcibly carry away any person whatever, from his own country or state
+into another." The idea of "<i>seizing and forcibly carrying away"</i> enters
+into the meaning of the word in all the definitions of law.</p>
+
+<p>The crime, then, set forth in the Bible was not <i>selling</i> a man: but
+selling a <i>stolen</i> man. The crime was not having a man <i>in his hand as a
+slave</i>; but......in <i>his</i> hand, as a slave, a <i>stolen</i> man. And hence, the
+penalty of <i>death</i> was affixed, not to selling, buying, or holding man, as
+a slave, but to the specific offence of <i>stealing and selling, or holding</i>
+a man <i>thus stolen, contrary to this law</i>. Yea, it was <i>this law</i>, and
+this law <i>only</i>, which made it <i>wrong</i>. For, under some circumstances, God
+sanctioned the seizing and forcibly carrying away a man, woman, or child
+from country or state, into slavery or other condition. He sanctioned the
+utter destruction of every male and every married woman, and child, of
+Jabez-Gilead, and the seizure, and forcibly carrying away, four hundred
+virgins, unto the camp to Shiloh, and there, being given as wives to the
+remnant of the slaughtered tribe of Benjamin, in the rock Rimmon. Sir,
+how did that destruction of Jabez-Gilead, and the kidnapping of those
+young women, differ from the razing of an African village, and forcibly
+seizing, and carrying away, those not put to the sword? The difference is
+in this:--God commanded the Israelites to seize and bear off those young
+women. But he forbids the slaver to kidnap the African. Therefore, the
+Israelites did right; therefore, the trader does wrong. The Israelites,
+it seems, gave wives, in that way, to the spared Benjamites, because they
+had sworn not to give their daughters. But there were six hundred of these
+Benjamites. Two hundred were therefore still without wives. What was done
+for them? Why, God authorized the elders of the congregation to tell the
+two hundred Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of
+Shiloh, when they came out to dance, in the feast of the Lord, on the
+north side of Bethel. And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them
+wives, "whom they caught:" (Judges xxi.) God made it right for those
+Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of Shiloh. But he
+makes it wrong for the trader to catch his slaves of the sons or daughters
+of Africa. Lest you should try to deny that God authorized this act of the
+children of Israel, although I believe he did order it, let me remind you
+of another such case, the authority for which you will not question.</p>
+
+<p>Moses, by direct command from God, destroyed the Midianites. He slew all
+the males, and carried away all the women and children. He then had all
+the married women and male children killed; but all the virgins,
+thirty-two thousand, were divided as spoil among the people. And
+<i>thirty-two</i> of these virgins, <i>the Lord's tribute</i>, were given unto
+Eleazar, the priest, "as the Lord commanded Moses." (Numbers xxxi.)</p>
+
+<p>Sir, Thomas Paine rejected the Bible on this fact among his other
+objections. Yea, <i>his</i> reason, <i>his</i> sensibilities, <i>his</i> great law of
+humanity, <i>his</i> intuitional and eternal sense of right, made it impossible
+for him to honor such a God. And, sir, on your now avowed principles of
+interpretation, which are those of Paine, you sustain him in his rejection
+of the books of Moses and all the word of God.</p>
+
+<p>God's command <i>made it right</i> for Moses to destroy the Midianites and make
+slaves of their daughters; and I have dwelt upon these facts, to reiterate
+what I hold to be THE FIRST TRUTH IN MORALS:--that a thing is right, not
+because it is ever so <i>per se</i>, but because God <i>makes it right</i>; and, of
+course, a thing is wrong, not because it is so in the nature of things,
+but because God makes it wrong. I distinctly have taken, and do take, that
+ground in its widest sense, and am prepared to maintain it against all
+comers. He made it right for the sons of Adam to marry their sisters. He
+made it right for Abraham to marry his half-sister. He made it right for
+the patriarchs, and David and Solomon, to have more wives than one. He
+made it right when he gave command to kill whole nations, sparing none. He
+made it right when he ordered that nations, or such part as he pleased,
+should be spared and enslaved. He made it right that the patriarchs and
+the Israelites should hold slaves in harmony with the system of servile
+labor which had long been in the world. He merely modified that system to
+suit his views of good among his people. So, then, when he saw fit, they
+might capture men. So, then, when he forbade the individual Israelite to
+steal a man, he made it crime, and the penalty death. So, then, that crime
+was not the mere <i>stealing</i> a man, nor the <i>selling</i> a man, nor the
+<i>holding</i> a man,--but the <i>stealing and selling</i>, or <i>holding</i>, a man
+<i>under circumstances thus forbidden of God</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Was the Israelite Master a Man-Stealer?</i></p>
+
+<p>
+I now ask, Did God intend to make man-stealing and slave-holding the same
+thing? Let us see. In that very chapter of Exodus (xxi.) which contains
+the law against man-stealing, and only four verses further on, God says,
+"If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his
+hand, he shall be surely punished: notwithstanding, if he continue a day
+or two he shall not be punished; for he is his money." (Verses 20, 21.)</p>
+
+<p>Sir, that man was not a hired servant. He was bought with money. He was
+regarded by God <i>as the money</i> of his master. He was his slave, in the
+full meaning of a slave, then, and now, bought with money. God, then, did
+not intend the Israelites to understand, and not one of them ever
+understood, from that day to this, that Jehovah in his law to Moses
+regarded the slave-holder as a man-stealer. Man-stealing was a specific
+offence, with its specific penalty. Slave-holding was one form of God's
+righteous government over men,--a government he ordained, with various
+modifications, among the Hebrews themselves, and with sterner features in
+its relation to heathen slaves.</p>
+
+<p>In Exodus xxi. and Leviticus xxv., various gradations of servitude were
+enacted, with a careful particularity which need not be misunderstood.
+Among these, a Hebrew man might be a slave for six years, and then go free
+with his wife, if he were married when he came into the relation; but if
+his master had given him a wife, and she had borne him sons or daughters,
+the wife and her children should be her master's, and he should go out by
+himself. That is, the man by the law became free, while his wife and
+children remained slaves. If the servant, however, plainly said, "I love
+my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his
+master brought him unto the judges, also unto the doorpost, and his master
+bored his ear through with an awl, and he served him forever." (Ex. xxi.
+1-6.) Sir, you have urged discussion:--give us then your views of that
+passage. Tell us how that man was separated from his wife and children
+according to <i>the eternal right</i>. Tell us what was the condition of the
+woman in case the man chose to "go out" without her? Tell us if the Hebrew
+who thus had his ear bored by his master with an awl was not a slave for
+life? Tell us, lastly, whether those children were not slaves? And, while
+on that chapter, tell us whether in the next verses, 7-11, God did not
+allow the Israelite father to sell his own daughter into bondage and into
+polygamy by the same act of sale?</p>
+
+<p>I will not dwell longer on these milder forms of slavery, but read to you
+the clear and unmistakable command of the Lord in Leviticus xxv. 44,
+46:--"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be
+of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and
+bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn
+among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you,
+which they beget in your land: and they shall be your possession: and ye
+shall take them for an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit
+them for a possession; and they shall be your bondmen forever."</p>
+
+<p>Sir, the sun will grow dim with age before that Scripture can be tortured
+to mean any thing else than just what it says; that God commanded the
+Israelites to be slave-holders in the strict and true sense over the
+heathen, in manner and form therein set forth. Do you tell the world that
+this cannot be the sense of the Bible, because it is "a violation of the
+first principles of the American Declaration of Independence;" because it
+grates upon your "instinct of liberty;" because it reveals God in
+opposition to the "spirit of the age;" because, if it be the sense of the
+passage, then "the Bible neither ought to be, nor can be, received by
+mankind as a divine revelation"? <i>That</i> is what you say: <i>that</i> is what
+Albert Barnes affirms in his philosophy. But what if God in his word says,
+"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have shall be of the
+heathen that are round about you"? What if we may then choose between
+Albert Barnes's philosophy and God's truth?</p>
+
+<p>Or will you say, God, under the circumstances, <i>permitted</i> the Israelites
+<i>to sin</i> in the matter of slave-holding, just as he permitted them <i>to
+sin</i> by living in polygamy. <i>Permitted</i> them <i>to sin!</i> No, sir; God
+<i>commanded</i> them to be slave-holders. He <i>made it</i> the law of their social
+state. He <i>made it</i> one form of his ordained government among them.
+Moreover, you take it for granted all too soon, that the Israelites
+committed sin in their polygamy. God sanctioned their polygamy. It was
+therefore not sin in them. It was right. But God now forbids polygamy,
+under the gospel; and now it is sin.</p>
+
+<p>Or will you tell us the iniquity of the Canaanites was then full, and
+God's time to punish them had come? True; but the same question comes
+up:--Did God punish the Canaanites by placing them in the relation of
+slaves to his people, by express command, which compelled them to sin?
+That's the point. I will not permit you to evade it. In plainer
+words:--Did God command the Hebrews to make slaves of their fellow-men, to
+buy them and sell them, to regard them as their money? He did. Then, did
+the Hebrews sin when they obeyed God's command? No. Then they did what was
+right, and it was right because God made it so. Then <i>the Hebrew
+slave-holder was not a man-stealer</i>. But, you say, the Southern
+slave-holder is. Well, we shall see presently.</p>
+
+<p>Just here, the abolitionist who professes to respect the Scriptures is
+wont to tell us that the whole subject of bondage among the Israelites was
+so peculiar to God's ancient dispensation, that no analogy between that
+bondage and Southern slavery can be brought up. Thus he attempts to raise
+a dust out of the Jewish institutions, to prevent people from seeing that
+slaveholding then was the same thing that it is now. But, to sustain my
+interpretation of the plain Scriptures given, I will go back five hundred
+years before the existence of the Hebrew nation.</p>
+
+<p>I read at that time, (Gen. xiv. 14:)--"And when Abraham heard that his
+brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own
+house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them even unto Damascus,"
+&amp;c. (Gen. xvii. 27:)--"And all the men of his house, born, in the house,
+and bought with the money of the stranger, were circumcised." (Gen. xx.
+14:)--"And Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and men-servants and
+women-servants, and gave them unto Abraham." (Gen. xxiv. 34, 35:)--"And he
+said, I am Abraham's servant; and the Lord hath blessed my master greatly,
+and he is become great; and he hath given him flocks and herds, and silver
+and gold, and men-servants and maid-servants, and camels and asses."</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Was Abraham a Man-Stealer?</i></p>
+
+<p>
+Sir, what is the common sense of these Scriptures? Why, that the
+slave-trade existed in Abraham's day, as it had long before, and has ever
+since, in all the regions of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, in which
+criminals and prisoners of war were sold,--in which parents sold their
+children. Abraham, then, it is plain, bought, of the sellers in this
+traffic, men-servants and maid-servants; he had them born in his house; he
+received them as presents.</p>
+
+<p>Do you tell me that Abraham, by divine authority, made these servants part
+of his family, social and religious? Very good. But still he regarded them
+as his slaves. He took Hagar as a wife, but he treated her as his
+slave,--yea, as Sarah's slave; and as such he gave her to be chastised,
+for misconduct, by her mistress. Yea, he never placed Ishmael, the son of
+the bondwoman, on a level with Isaac, the son of the freewoman. If, then,
+he so regarded Hagar and Ishmael, of course he never considered his other
+slaves on an equality with himself. True, had he been childless, he would
+have given his estate to Eliezer: but he would have given it to his slave.
+True, had Isaac not been born, he would have given his wealth to Ishmael;
+but he would nave given it to the son of his bondwoman. Sir, every
+Southern planter is not more truly a slave-holder than Abraham. And the
+Southern master, by divine authority, may, to-day, consider his slaves
+part of his social and religious family, just as Abraham did. His relation
+is just that of Abraham. He has slaves of an inferior type of mankind from
+Abraham's bondmen; and he therefore, for that reason, as well as from the
+fact that they are his slaves, holds them lower than himself. But,
+nevertheless, he is a slave-holder in no other sense than was Abraham. Did
+Abraham have his slave-household circumcised? Every Southern planter may
+have his slave-household baptized. I baptized, not long since, a
+slave-child,--the master and mistress offering it to God. What was done
+in the parlor might be done with divine approbation on every plantation.</p>
+
+<p>So, then, Abraham lived in the midst of a system of slave-holding exactly
+the same in nature with that in the South,--a system ordained of God as
+really as the other forms of government round about him. He, then, with
+the divine blessing, made himself the master of slaves, men, women, and
+children, by buying them,--by receiving them in gifts,--by having them
+born in his house; and he controlled them as property, just as really as
+the Southern master in the present day. I ask now, <i>was Abraham a
+man-stealer?</i> Oh, no, you reiterate: but the Southern master is. Why?</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Is the Southern Master a Man-Stealer</i>?</p>
+
+<p>
+Do you, sir, or anybody, contend that the Southern master seized his slave
+in Africa, and forcibly brought him away to America, contrary to law?
+That, and that alone, was and is kidnapping in divine and human statute.
+No. What then? Why, the abolitionist responds, The African man-stealer
+sold his victim to the slave-holder; he, to the planter; and the negro has
+been ever since in bondage: therefore <i>the guilt</i> of the man-stealer has
+cleaved to sellers, buyers, and inheritors, to this time, and will
+through all generations to come. That is the charge.</p>
+
+<p>And it brings up the question so often and triumphantly asked by the
+abolitionist; <i>i.e.</i> "You," he says to the slave-holder,--"you admit it
+was wrong to steal the negro in Africa. Can the slave-holder, then, throw
+off wrong so long as he holds the slave at any time or anywhere
+thereafter?" I answer, yes; and my reply shall be short, yet conclusive. It
+is this:--<i>Guilt</i>, or criminality, is that state of a moral agent which
+results from <i>his</i> actual commission of a crime or offence knowing it to
+be crime or violation of law. <i>That</i> is the received definition of
+<i>guilt</i>, and <i>you</i>, I know, do accept it. The <i>guilt</i>, then, of kidnapping
+<i>terminated</i> with the man-stealer, the seller, the buyer, and holders,
+who, knowingly and intentionally, carried on the traffic contrary to the
+divine law. THAT GUILT attaches in no sense whatever, as a personal, moral
+responsibility, to the present slave-holder. Observe, I am here
+discussing, <i>not the question of mere slave-holding,</i> but whether the
+master, who has had nothing to do with the slave-trade, can <i>now</i> hold the
+slave without the moral guilt of the man-stealer? I have said that <i>that</i>
+guilt, in no sense whatever, rests upon him; for he neither stole the
+man, nor bought him from the kidnapper, nor had any <i>complicity</i> in the
+traffic. Here, I know, the abolitionist insists that the master <i>is</i>
+guilty of this <i>complicity</i>, unless he will at once emancipate the slave;
+because, so long as he holds him, he thereby, personally and <i>voluntarily,
+assumes the same relation which the original kidnapper or buyer held to
+the African</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This is Dr. Cheever's argument in a recent popular sermon. He thinks it
+unanswerable; but it has no weight whatever. It is met perfectly by adding
+<i>one</i> word to his proposition. Thus:--<i>The master does</i> NOT <i>assume the
+same relation which the original man-stealer or buyer held to the
+African</i>. The master's <i>relation</i> to God and to his slave is now <i>wholly
+changed</i> from that of the man-stealer, and those engaged in the trade; and
+his obligation is wholly different. What is his relation? and what is his
+obligation? They are as follows:----</p>
+
+<p>The master finds himself, with no taint of personal concern in the African
+trade, in a Christian community of white Anglo-Americans, holding control
+over his black fellow-man, who is so unlike himself in complexion, in
+form, in other peculiarities, and so unequal to himself in attributes of
+body and mind, that it is <i>impossible, in every sense</i>, to place him on a
+level with himself in the community. <i>This is his relation to the negro</i>.
+What, then, does God command him to do? Does God require him to send the
+negro back to his heathen home from whence he was stolen? That home no
+longer exists. But, if it did remain, does God command the master to send
+his Christianized slave into the horrors of his former African heathenism?
+No. God has placed the master under law entirely different from his
+command to the slave-trader. God said to the trader, <i>Let the negro
+alone</i>. But he says to the present master, <i>Do unto the negro all the good
+you can; make him a civilized man; make him a Christian man; lift him up
+and give him all he has a right to claim in the good of the whole
+community</i>. This the master can do; this he must do, and then leave the
+result with the Almighty.</p>
+
+<p>We reach the same conclusion by asking, What does God say to the
+negro-slave?</p>
+
+<p>Does he tell him to ask to be sent back to heathen Africa? No. Does he
+give him authority to claim a created equality and unalienable right to
+be on a level with the white man in civil and social relations? No. To
+ask the first would be to ask a great evil; to claim the second is to
+demand a natural and moral impossibility. No. God tells him to seek none
+of these things. But he commands him to know the facts in his case as
+they are in the Bible, and have ever been, and ever will be in
+Providence:--that he is not the white man's equal,--that he can never
+have his level--that he must not claim it; but that he can have, and
+ought to have, and must have, all of good, in his condition as a slave,
+until God may reveal a higher happiness for him in some other relation
+than that <i>he must ever</i> have to the Anglo-American. The present
+slave-holder, then, by declining to emancipate his bondman, does not
+place himself in <i>the guilt</i> of the man-stealer or of those who had
+complicity with him; but he stands <i>exactly</i> in that NICK <i>of time and
+place</i>, in the course of Providence, where <i>wrong</i>, in the transmission
+of African slavery, <i>ends</i>, and <i>right begins</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I have, sir, fairly stated this, your strongest argument, and fully met
+it. <i>The Southern master is not a man-stealer.</i> The abolitionist--repulsed
+in his charge that the slave-owner is a kidnapper, either in fact or by
+voluntarily assuming any of the relations of the traffic--then makes his
+impeachment on his second affirmation, mentioned at the opening of this
+letter. That the slave-holder is, nevertheless, thus <i>guilty</i>, because,
+in the simple fact of being a master, he <i>steals</i> from the negro his
+unalienable right to freedom.</p>
+
+<p>This, sir, looks like a new view of the subject. The crime forbidden in
+the Bible was stealing and selling a man; <i>i.e.</i> seizing and forcibly
+carrying away, from country or State, a human being--man, woman, or
+child--contrary to law, and selling or holding the same. But the
+abolitionist gives us to understand this crime rests on the slave-holder
+in another sense:--namely, that he steals from the negro a metaphysical
+attribute,--his unalienable right to liberty!</p>
+
+<p>This is a new sort of kidnapping. This is, I suppose, <i>stealing the man
+from himself</i>, as it is sometimes elegantly expressed,--<i>robbing him of
+his body and his soul</i>. Sir, I admit this is a strong figure of speech, a
+beautiful personification, a sonorous rhetorical flourish, which must make
+a deep impression on Dr. Cheever's people, Broadway, New York, and on your
+congregation, Washington Square, Philadelphia; but it is certainly not the
+Bible crime of man-stealing. And whether the Southern master is <i>guilty</i>
+of this sublimated thing will be understood by us when you prove that the
+negro, or anybody else, has such metaphysical right to be stolen,--such
+transcendental liberty not in subordination to the good of the whole
+people. In a word, sir, this refined expression is, after all, just the
+old averment that the slave-holder is guilty of <i>sin per se!</i> That's it.</p>
+
+<p>I have given you, in reply, the Old Testament. In my next, I propose to
+inquire what the New Testament says in the light of the <i>Golden Rule</i>.</p>
+
+<p>F.A. Ross.</p>
+
+<p>Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 31, 1857.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="08"></a>The Golden Rule.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>This view of the Golden Rule is the only exposition of that great text
+which has ever been given in words sufficiently clear, and, with practical
+illustrations, to make the subject intelligible to every capacity. The
+explanation is the truth of God, and it settles forever the slavery
+question, so far as it rests on this precept of Jesus Christ.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>No. IV.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--The argument against slave-holding, founded on the Golden Rule,
+is the strongest which can be presented, and I admit that, if it cannot be
+perfectly met, the master must give the slave liberty and equality. But if
+it can be absolutely refuted, then the slave-holder in this regard may
+have a good conscience; and the abolitionist has nothing more to say. Here
+is the rule.
+
+"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to
+you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets."
+(Matt. vii. 12.)
+
+In your "<i>Notes</i>," on this passage you thus write:--"This command has been
+usually called the Savior's <i>Golden Rule</i>; a name given to it on account
+of its great value.--<i>All that you</i> EXPECT or DESIRE <i>of others, in
+similar circumstances</i>, DO TO THEM."
+
+This, sir, is your exposition of the Savior's rule of right. With all due
+respect, I decline your interpretation. You have missed the meaning by
+leaving out ONE word. Observe,--you do not say, All that you OUGHT to
+<i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i>, &amp;c., THAT <i>do to them</i>. No. But you make the
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE, <i>which every man</i> ACTUALLY HAS <i>in similar
+circumstances</i>, THE MEASURE <i>of his</i> DUTY <i>to every other man</i>. Or, in
+different words, you make, without qualification or explanation, the MERE
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE which every man,--with no instruction, or any sort
+of training,--wise or simple, good or bad, heathen, Mohammedan, nominal
+Christian,--WOULD HAVE <i>in similar circumstances</i>, THE LAW OF OBLIGATION,
+<i>always binding</i> upon him TO DO THAT SAME THING <i>unto his neighbor!</i>
+
+Sir, you have left out <i>the very idea</i> which contains the sense of that
+Scripture. It is this: Christ, in his rule, <i>presupposes</i> that the man to
+whom he gives it <i>knows</i>, and from the Bible, (or providence, or natural
+conscience, <i>so far as in harmony</i> with the Bible,) the <i>various
+relations</i> in which God has placed him; and the <i>respective duties</i> in
+those relations; <i>i.e.</i> The rule <i>assumes</i> that he KNOWS what he OUGHT to
+<i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> in similar circumstances.
+
+I will test this affirmation by several and varied illustrations. I will
+show how Christ, according to your exposition of his rule, speaks on the
+subject,--of <i>revenge, marriage, emancipation</i>,--<i>the fugitive from
+bondage</i>. And how he truly speaks on these subjects.
+
+
+
+<i>Revenge--Right according to your view of the Golden Rule</i>.
+
+
+Indian and Missionary--Prisoner tied to a tree, stuck over with burning
+splinters.
+
+Here is an Indian torturing his prisoner. The missionary approaches and
+beseeches him to regard <i>the Golden Rule</i>. "Humph!" utters the savage:
+"Golden Rule! what's that?" "Why" says the good man, "all that you
+<i>expect</i> or <i>desired</i> other Indians, in similar circumstances, do you
+even so to them." "Humph!" growls the warrior, with a fierce
+smile,--"Missionary--good: that's what I do now. If I was tied to that
+tree, I would <i>expect</i> and <i>desire him</i> to have <i>his</i> revenge,--to do to
+me as I do to him; and I would sing my death-song, as he sings his.
+Missionary, your rule is Indian rule,--good rule, missionary. Humph!"
+And he sticks more splinters into his victim, brandishes his tomahawk,
+and yells.
+
+Sir, what has the missionary to say, after this perfect proof that you
+have mistaken the great law of right? Verily, he finds that the rule,
+with your explanation, tells the Indian to torture his prisoner. Verily,
+he finds that the wild man has the best of the argument. He finds he had
+left out the word OUGHT; and that he can't put it in, until he teaches
+the Indian things which as yet he don't know. Yea, he finds he gave the
+commandment too soon; for that he must begin back of that commandment,
+and teach the savage God's ordination of the relations in which he is to
+his fellow-men, before he can make him comprehend or apply the rule as
+Christ gives it.
+
+
+
+<i>Marriage--Void under your Interpretation of the Golden Rule</i>.
+
+
+Lucy Stone, and Moses--Lady on sofa, having just divorced herself--Moses,
+with the Tables of the Law, appears: she falls at his feet, and covers her
+face with her hands.
+
+This woman, everybody knows, was married some time since, after a fashion;
+that is to say, protesting publicly against all laws of wedlock, and
+entering into the relation so long only as she, or her husband, might
+continue pleased therewith.
+
+Very well. Then I, without insult to her or offense to my readers, suppose
+that about this time she has shown her unalienable right to liberty and
+equality by giving her husband a bill of divorcement. Free again, she
+reclines on her couch, and is reading the Tribune. It is mid-day. But
+there is a light, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about
+her. And <i>he</i>, who saw God on Sinai, stands before her, the glory on his
+face, and the tables of stone in his hands. The woman falls before him,
+veils her eyes with her trembling fingers, and cries out, "Moses, oh, I
+believed till now that thou practised deception, in claiming to be sent of
+God to Israel. But now, I know thou didst see God in the burning bush,
+and heard him speak that law from the holy mountain. Moses, I know ... I
+confess.".... And Moses answers, and says unto her, "Woman, thou art one
+of a great class in this land, who claim to be more just than God, more
+pure than their Maker, who have made their inward light their God. Woman,
+thou in '<i>convention</i>' hast uttered <i>Declaration of Independence</i> from
+man. And, verily, thou hast asserted this claim to equality and
+unalienable right, even now, by giving thy husband his bill of
+divorcement, in thy sense of the Golden Rule. Yea, verily, thou hast done
+unto him all that thou <i>expectedst</i> or <i>desiredst</i> of him, in similar
+circumstances. And now thou thinkest thyself free again. Woman, thou art a
+sinner. Verily, thine inward light, and declaration of independence, and
+Golden Rule, do well agree the one with the other. Verily, thou hast
+learned of Jefferson, and Channing, and Barnes. But, woman,
+notwithstanding thou hast sat at the feet of these wise men, I, Moses, say
+thou art a sinner before the law, and the prophets, and the gospel. Woman,
+thy light is darkness; thy declaration of equality and right is vanity and
+folly; and thy Golden Rule is license to wickedness.
+
+"Woman, hast thou ears? Hear: I, by authority of God, ordained that the
+man should rule over thee. I placed thee, and children, and men-servants,
+and maid-servants, under the same law of subjection to the government
+ordained of God in the family,--the state. I for a time sanctioned
+polygamy, and made it right. I, for the hardness of men's hearts, allowed
+them, and made it right, to give their wives a bill of divorcement.
+Woman, hear. Paul, having the same Spirit of God, confirms my word. He
+commands <i>wives</i>, and children, and servants, after this manner:--'Wives,
+submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord;
+children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto
+the Lord; servants, obey in all things your masters according to the
+flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but in singleness of heart,
+fearing God.' Woman, Paul makes <i>that rule</i> the same, and <i>that
+submission</i>, the same. The <i>manner</i> of the rule he varies with the
+relations. He requires it to be, in the <i>love</i> of the husband, even as
+Christ loved the church,--in the <i>mildness</i> of the father, not provoking
+the children to anger, lest they be discouraged,--in <i>the justice and
+equity</i> of the master, knowing that he also has a master in heaven:
+(Colossians.) Woman, hear. Paul says to thee, the man <i>now</i> shall have
+one wife, and he <i>now</i> shall not give her a bill of divorcement, save for
+crime. Woman, thou art not free from thy husband. Christ's Golden Rule
+must not be interpreted by thee as A. Barnes has rendered it; Christ
+<i>assumes</i> that thou <i>believest</i> God's truth,--that thou <i>knowest</i> the
+relation of husband and wife, and the <i>obligations and rights</i> of the
+same, <i>as in the Bible; then</i>, in the light of this <i>knowledge</i>, verily,
+thou art required to do what God says thou <i>oughtest</i> to do. Woman, thou
+art a sinner. Go, sin no more. Go, find thy husband; see to it that he
+takes thee back. Go, submit to him, and honor him, and obey him."
+
+
+
+<i>Emancipation--Ruin--Golden Rule, in your meaning, carried out</i>.
+
+
+Island in the Tropics--Elegant houses falling to decay--Broad fields
+abandoned to the forest--Wharves grass-grown--Negroes relapsing into the
+savage state--A dark cloud over the island, through which the lightning
+glares, revealing, in red writing, these words:--"<i>Redeemed, regenerated,
+and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal
+emancipation"</i>.--[Gospel--according to Curran--and the British
+Parliament.]
+
+Jamaica, sir, to say nothing of St. Domingo, is illustration of your
+theory of the Golden Rule, in negro emancipation. You tell the Southern
+master that all he would <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i>, if he were a slave, he must
+do unto his bondman; that he must not pause to ask whether the relation of
+master and slave be ordained of God or not. No. You tell him, <i>if</i> he
+would <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> liberty were he a slave, <i>that</i> settles the
+question as to what he is to do! He must let his bondman go free. Yea,
+<i>that</i> is what you teach: because the moment you put in the word OUGHT,
+and say, all that you OUGHT to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i>,--<i>i.e.</i> all that you
+<i>know</i> God commands you to <i>expect </i> or <i>desire</i> in your relations to men,
+<i>as established by him,</i>--THAT <i>do to them</i>. Sir, when you thus explain
+the Golden Rule, then your argument against slave-holding, so far as
+founded on this rule, is at once arrested; it is stopped short, in full
+career; it has to wait for reinforcement of FACT, which may never come up.
+For, suppose the FACT to be, that the relation of master and slave is one
+mode of the government ordained of God. Then, sir, the master, <i>knowing
+that</i> FACT, and <i>knowing</i> what the slave, <i>as a slave</i>, OUGHT to <i>expect</i>
+or <i>desire</i>, he, the master, then FULFILS THE GOLDEN RULE when he does
+that unto his slave which, in similar circumstances, he OUGHT to expect
+<i>to be done unto himself</i>. Now comes the question, OUGHT he then to
+<i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> liberty and equality? THAT is the question of
+questions on this subject. And without hesitation I reply, The Golden Rule
+DECIDES <i>that question</i> YEA or NAY, <i>absolutely</i> and <i>perfectly</i>, as God's
+word or providence shows that the GOOD <i>of the family, the community, the
+state</i>, REQUIRES that the slave IS or IS NOT <i>to be set free and made
+equal</i>. THAT GOOD, <i>as God reveals it</i>, SETTLES THE QUESTION.
+
+Let the master then see to it, how he hears God's word as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, how he understands God's providence as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, that he makes no mistake as to THAT GOOD. For God will
+not hold him guiltless, if he will not hear what he tells him as to THAT
+GOOD. God will not justify him, if he has a bad conscience or blunders in
+his philosophy. God will punish him, if he fails to bless his land by
+letting the bond go free when, he OUGHT to emancipate. And God will punish
+him, if he brings a curse upon his country by freeing his slave when he
+OUGHT NOT to give him liberty.
+
+So, then, <i>the Golden Rule does not</i>, OF ITSELF, <i>reveal to man at all
+what are his</i> RELATIONS <i>to his fellow-men; but it tells him what he is
+to</i> DO, <i>when he</i> ALREADY KNOWS THEM.
+
+So, then, you, sir, cannot be permitted to tell the world that this rule
+must emancipate all the negro slaves in the United States,--no matter how
+unprepared they may be,--no matter how degraded,--no matter how unlike and
+unequal to the white man by creation,--no matter if it be a natural and
+moral impossibility,--no matter: the Golden Rule must emancipate by
+authority of the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, and
+by obligation of the great law of liberty,--the intuitional consciousness
+of the eternal right!
+
+No. The Rule, as said, <i>presupposes</i> that he who is required to obey it
+does already <i>know</i> the relations in which God has placed him, and the
+respective duties in those conditions. Has God, then, established the
+relations of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave? Yes.
+Then the command comes. It says to the husband, To aid you in your known
+obligations to your wife,--to give you a lively sense of it,--suppose
+yourself to be the wife: whatsoever, therefore, you OUGHT, in that
+condition, to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i>, that, as husband, do unto your wife.
+It says to the parent, Imagine yourself the child; and whatsoever, as
+such, you OUGHT to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire, that</i>, as parent, do unto your
+child. It says to the master, Put yourself in the place of your slave;
+and whatsoever you OUGHT, in that condition, to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire,
+that</i>, as master, do unto your slave. Let husband, parent, master, <i>know</i>
+his obligations from God, and obey the Rule.
+
+
+
+<i>Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule under your version</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+Honorable Joshua R. Giddings and the Angel of the Lord--Hon. Gentleman at
+table--Nine runaway negroes dining with him--The Angel, uninvited, comes
+in and disturbs the feast.</p>
+
+<p>Giddings has boasted in Congress of having had nine fugitive slaves to
+break bread with him at one time. I choose, then, to imagine that, during
+the dinner, the angel who found Hagar by the fountain stands suddenly in
+the midst, and says to the negroes, "Ye slaves, whence came ye, and
+whither will ye go?" And they answer and say, "We flee from the face of
+our masters. This abolitionist told us to kill, and steal, and run away
+from bondage; and we have murdered and stolen and escaped. He, thou seest,
+welcomes us to liberty and equality. We <i>expect</i> and <i>desire</i> to be
+members of Congress, Governors of States, to marry among the great, and
+one of us to be President. Giddings, and all abolitionists, tell us that
+these honors belong to us equally as to white people, and will be given
+under the Golden Rule." And the angel of the Lord says to them, "Ye
+slaves, return unto your masters, and submit yourselves under their hands.
+I sent your fathers, and I send you, into bondage. I mean it unto good,
+and I will bring it to pass to save much people alive." Then, turning to
+the tempter, he says, "Thou, a statesman! thou, a reader of my word and
+providence! why hast thou not understood my speech to Hagar? I gave her, a
+slave, to Sarah. She fled from her mistress. I sent her back. Why hast
+thou not understood my word four thousand years ago,--that <i>the slave
+shall not flee from his master?</i> Why hast thou also perverted my law in
+Deuteronomy, (xxiii. 15, 16?) I say therein, 'Thou shalt not deliver unto
+his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he
+shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall
+choose, in one of thy gates where it liketh him best: thou shalt not
+oppress him.' Why hast thou not known that I meant the <i>heathen slave</i> who
+escaped from his <i>heathen master?</i> I commanded, Israel, in such case, not
+to hold <i>him</i> in bondage. I made this specific law for this specific fact.
+Why hast thou taught that, in this commandment, I gave license to all
+men-servants and maid-servants in the whole land of Israel to run away
+from their masters? Why hast thou thus made me, in one saying, contradict
+and make void all my laws wherein I ordained that the Hebrews should be
+slave-owners over their brethren during years, and over the heathen
+forever? Why hast thou in all this changed my Golden Rule? I, in that
+rule, <i>assume</i> that men <i>know</i> from revelation and providence the
+relations in which I have placed them, and their duties therein. I then
+command them to do unto others what they thus <i>know</i> they <i>ought</i> to do
+unto them in these relations; and I make the obligation quick and
+powerful, by telling every man to imagine himself in such conditions, and
+then he will <i>the better</i> KNOW '<i>whatsoever</i>' he should do unto his
+neighbor. Why hast thou made void my law, by making me say, 'All that thou
+<i>expectest</i> or <i>desirest</i> of others, in similar circumstances, do to
+them'? I never imagined to give such license to folly and sin. Why hast
+thou imagined such license to iniquity? Verily, thou tempter, thou hast in
+thy Golden Rule made these slaves thieves and murderers, and art now
+eating with them the bread of sin and death.</p>
+
+<p>"Why hast thou tortured my speech wherein I say that I have made of <i>one
+blood</i> all nations of men, to mean that I have created all men equal and
+endowed them with rights unalienable save in their consent? I never said
+that thing! I said that I made all men to descend from <i>one parentage!</i>
+That is what I say in that place! Why hast thou tortured that plain truth?
+Thou mightest as well teach that all 'the moving creatures that have life,
+and fowl that fly above the earth, in the open firmament of heaven,' are
+<i>created equal</i>, because I said I brought them forth <i>of the water</i>. Thou
+mightest as well say that 'all cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the
+earth, <i>are created equal</i>, because I said I brought them forth <i>of the
+earth</i>, as to affirm the <i>equality of men</i> because I say they are <i>of one
+blood</i>. Nay, I have made men unequal as the leaves of the trees, the sands
+of the sea, the stars of heaven. I have made them so, in harmony with the
+infinite variety and inequality in every thing in my creation. And I have
+made them unequal in my <i>mercy</i>. Had I made all men equal in attributes of
+body and mind, then <i>unfallen man</i> would never have realized the varied
+glories of his destiny. And had I given <i>fallen man</i> equality of nature
+and unalienable rights, then I had made the earth an Aceldama and Valley
+of Gehenna. For what would be the <i>strife</i> in all the earth among men
+equal in body and mind, equal in power, equal in depravity, equal in will,
+each one maintaining rights unalienable? When would the war end? Who would
+be the victors where all are giants? Who would sue for peace where none
+will submit? What would be <i>human social life?</i> Who would be the weak, the
+loving? Who would seek or need forbearance, compassion, self-denying
+benevolence? Who would be the grateful? Who would be the humble, the meek?
+What would be <i>human</i> virtue, what <i>human</i> vice, what <i>human</i> joy or
+sorrow? Nay, I have made men <i>unequal</i> and given them <i>alienable rights</i>,
+that I might INSTITUTE HUMAN GOVERNMENT and reveal HUMAN CHARACTER.</p>
+
+<p>"Why hast thou been willingly ignorant of these first principles of the
+oracles of God, which would have made thee truly a Christian philosopher
+and statesman?"</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule as Christ gave it</i></p>
+
+<p>
+Rev. A. Barnes and the Apostle Paul--Minister of the gospel in his
+study--Fugitive slave, converted under his preaching, inquiring whether it
+is not his duty to return to his master--Paul appears and rebukes the
+minister for wresting his Gospel.</p>
+
+<p>With all respect and affection for you, sir, I imagine a slave, having run
+away from his master and become a Christian under your preaching, might,
+with the Bible in his hands and the Holy Spirit in his heart, have,
+despite your training, question of conscience, whether he did right to
+leave his master, and ought not to go back. And I think how Paul would
+listen, and what he would say, to your interpretation of his Epistle to
+Philemon. I think he would say,--</p>
+
+<p>"I withstand thee to thy face, because thou art to be blamed. Why hast
+thou written, in thy '<i>Notes</i>,' that the word I apply to Onesimus may
+mean, not <i>slave</i>, but <i>hired servant?</i> Why hast thou said this in
+unsupported assertion? Why hast thou given no respect to Robinson, and all
+thy wise men, who agree that the word wherein I express Onesimus's
+relation to Philemon never means a hired servant, but a <i>slave</i>,--the
+property of his master,--a living possession?</p>
+
+<p>"Why hast thou called in question the fact that Philemon was a
+slave-holder? Why hast thou taught that, if he was a slave-holder when he
+became a Christian, he could not <i>continue, consistently</i>, to be a
+slave-owner and a Christian,--that if he did so <i>continue</i>, he would not
+be in <i>good standing</i>, but an <i>offender</i> in the church? (See Notes.)</p>
+
+<p>"I say Philemon was the master of Onesimus, in the real sense of a
+slave-owner, under Roman law, in which he had the right of life and death
+over him,--being thereby a master in possession of power unknown in the
+United States. And yet I call Philemon 'our dearly beloved and
+fellow-laborer,' I tell him that I send to him again Onesimus, who had
+been unprofitable to him in time past; but now, being a Christian, he
+would be profitable. I tell him, I send him again, not a slave, (only,)
+but above a slave, a Christian brother, beloved, specially to me, but how
+much more unto him, both <i>in the flesh</i> and in the Lord. Dost thou know,
+Albert Barnes, what I mean by that word, <i>in the flesh?</i> Verily, I knew
+the things wherein the master and the slave are beloved, the one of the
+other, in the best affections of human nature, and in the Lord! therefore
+I say to Philemon that he, <i>as master</i>, could receive Onesimus <i>as his
+slave</i>, and yet as a <i>brother</i>, MORE <i>beloved, by reason of his relation
+to him as master</i>, than I could regard him! Yea, verily,--and I say to
+thee, Albert Barnes, thou hast never been in the South, and thou dost not
+understand, and canst not understand, the force, or even the meaning, of
+my words <i>in the flesh</i>; i.e. <i>in the love of the master and the slave to
+one another</i>. But Philemon I knew would feel its power, and so I made that
+appeal to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why hast thou said, that I did not send Onesimus back <i>by authority?</i> I
+did send him back by authority,--yea, by authority of the Lord Jesus
+Christ? For it was my duty to send him again to Philemon, whether he had
+been willing to go or not; and it was his duty to go. But he was willing.
+So we both felt our obligations; and, when I commanded, he cheerfully
+obeyed. What else was my duty and his? Had I not said, in line upon line
+and in precept upon precept, 'Servants, obey in all things your masters
+according to the flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in
+singleness of heart, pleasing God'? (Coloss. iii. 22.) Had not Peter
+written, 'Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to
+the good and gentle, but also to the froward'? (1 Pet. ii. 18.) Onesimus
+had broken these commandments when he fled from his master. Was it not
+then of my responsibility to send him again to Philemon? And was it not
+Christ's law to him to return and submit himself under his master's hand?</p>
+
+<p>"Why, then, hast thou not understood my speech? Has it been even because
+thou couldst not <i>hear</i> my word? What else has hindered? What more could I
+have said, than (in 1 Tim. vi. 1-5) I do say, to rebuke all abolitionists?
+Yea, I describe them--I show their principles--as fully as if I had called
+them by name in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, and said they would
+live in 1857.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet thou hast, in thy commentary on my letter to Timothy, utterly
+distorted, maimed, and falsified my meaning. Thou hast mingled truth and
+untruth so together as to make me say what was not and is not in my mind.
+For thou teachest the slave, while professing not so to teach him, that I
+tell him that he is <i>not</i> to count his master worthy of all honor; that he
+<i>is</i> to <i>despise</i> him; that he is <i>not</i> to do him service as to a
+Christian faithful and beloved. <i>No</i>. But thou teachest the slave, in my
+name, to regard his Christian master an <i>offender</i> in the sight of
+Christ, if he <i>continues</i> a slave-owner.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou tellest him to obey <i>only</i> in the sense in which he is to submit to
+injustice, oppression, and cruelty; and that he is ever to seek to throw
+off the yoke in his created equality and unalienable right to liberty.
+(See Notes.)</p>
+
+<p>"This is what thou hast taught as my gospel. But I commanded thee to
+teach and exhort <i>just the contrary</i>. I commanded thee to say after this
+way:--'Let as many servants as are under the yoke, count their own
+masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not
+blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise
+them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they
+are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach
+and exhort.'</p>
+
+<p>"Thou, in thy 'Notes,' art compelled, though most unwillingly, to confess
+that I do mean <i>slaves</i> in this place, in the full and proper sense; yea,
+slaves under the Roman law. Good. Then do I here tell slaves to count
+their masters, even when not Christians, worthy of all honor; and, when
+Christians, to regard them as faithful and beloved, and not to despise
+them, and to do them service? Yet, after all this, do I say to these same
+slaves that they have a created equality and unalienable right to liberty,
+under which, whenever they think fit, I command them to dishonor their
+masters, despise them, and run away! Sir, I did never so instruct slaves;
+nay, I did never command thee so to teach them. But I did and do exhort
+thee not so to train them; for I said then and say now to thee, 'If any
+man teach [slaves] otherwise, [than to honor their masters as faithful and
+beloved, and to do them service,] and consent not to wholesome words, even
+the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according
+to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and
+strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
+perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH,
+supposing that gain is godliness; from such withdraw thyself,'</p>
+
+<p>"What more could I have said to the abolitionists of my day? What more can
+I say to them in this day? <i>That</i> which was true of them two thousand
+years ago, is true now. I rebuked abolitionists then, and I rebuke them
+now. I tell them the things in their hearts,--the things on their
+tongues,--the things in their hands,--are contrary to wholesome words,
+even the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. Canst thou <i>hear</i> my words in
+this place without feeling how faithfully I have given the head, and the
+heart, and the words, and the doings of the men, from whom thou hast not
+withdrawn thyself?
+
+"Verily, thou canst not <i>hear</i> my speech, and therefore thou canst not
+interpret my gospel. Thou believest it is impossible that I sanction
+slavery! Hence it is impossible for thee to understand my words: for I do
+sanction slavery. How? Thus:--
+
+"I found slavery in Asia, in Greece, in Rome. I saw it to be one mode of
+the government ordained of God. I regarded it, in most conditions of
+fallen mankind, necessarily and irresistibly part of such government, and
+therefore as natural, as wise, as good, in such conditions, as the other
+ways men are ruled in the state or the family.</p>
+
+<p>"I took up slavery, then, as such ordained government,--wise, good, yea
+best, in certain circumstances, until, in the elevating spirit and power
+of my gospel, the slave is made fit for the liberty and equality of his
+master, if he can be so lifted up. Hence I make the RULE of magistrate,
+subject, master and servant, parent and child, husband and wife, THE SAME
+RULE; <i>i.e.</i> I make it THE SAME RIGHT in the <i>superior</i> to control the
+<i>obedience</i> and the <i>service</i> of the <i>inferior</i>, bound to obey, whatever
+the difference in the relations and service to be rendered. Yea, I give
+<i>exactly the same command</i> to all in these relations; and thus, in all my
+words, I make it plainly to be understood that I regard slavery to be as
+righteous a mode of government as that of magistrate and subject, parent
+and child, husband and wife, during the circumstances and times in which
+God is pleased to have it continue. I saw all the injustice, the
+oppression, the cruelty, masters might be guilty of, and were and are now
+guilty of; but I saw no more injustice, oppression, and cruelty, in the
+relation of master and slave, than I saw in all other forms of rule,--even
+in that of husband and wife, parent and child. In my gospel I condemn
+wrong in all these states of life, while I fully sanction and sustain the
+relations themselves. I tell the magistrate, husband, father, master, how
+to rule; I tell the subject, wife, child, servant, how to submit. Hence, I
+command the slave not to flee from bondage, just as I require the subject,
+the wife, the child, not to resist or flee from obedience. I warn the
+slave, if he leaves his master he has sinned, and must return; and I make
+it the duty of all men to see to it, that <i>he shall go back</i>. Hence, I
+myself did what I command others to do: I sent Onesimus back to his
+master.</p>
+
+<p>"Thus I sanction slavery everywhere in the New Testament. But it is
+impossible for thee, with thy principles,--thy law of reason,--thy law of
+created equality and unalienable right,--thy elevation of the Declaration
+of Independence above the ordinance of God,--to sustain slavery. Nay, it
+is impossible for thee, with thy interpretation of Christ's Golden Rule,
+to recognise the system of servile labor; nay, it is impossible for thee
+to tell <i>this</i> slave to return to his master as I sent Onesimus back;
+nay, thou art guarded by thy Golden Rule. Thou tellest him that, if thou
+hadst been in his place, thou wouldst have <i>expected, desired</i> freedom,
+that thou wouldst have run away, and that thou wouldst not now return;
+that thou wouldst have regarded thy created equality and unalienable
+right as thy supreme law, and have disregarded and scorned all other
+obligations as <i>pretended revelation from God</i>. Therefore thou now doest
+unto him '<i>whatsoever</i>' thou wouldst <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> him to do unto
+thee in similar circumstances; <i>i.e.</i> thou tellest him he did right to
+run away, and will do right not to return! This is thy Golden Rule. But
+I did not instruct thee so to learn Christ. Nay, this slave knows thou
+hast not not given him the mind of Christ; nay, he knows that Christ
+commands thee to send him to his master again. And thus do what thou
+OUGHTEST to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> in similar circumstances; yea, <i>do</i> now
+<i>thy duty</i>, and this slave, like Onesimus, will bless thee for giving him
+a good conscience whenever he will return to his obedience. Thus Paul,
+the aged, speaks to thee."</p>
+
+<p>So, then, the Golden Rule is the whole Bible; yea, Christ says it is-"the
+law and the prophets;" yea, it is the Old Testament and the New condensed;
+and with ever-increasing glory of Providence in one sublime aphorism,
+which can be understood and obeyed only by those who <i>know</i> what the
+Bible, or Providence, reveals as to man's varied conditions and his
+obligations therein.</p>
+
+<p>I think, sir, I have refuted your interpretation of the Golden Rule, and
+have given its true meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The slave-holder, then, may have a good conscience under this commandment.
+Let him so exercise himself as to have a conscience void of offence
+towards God and towards men.</p>
+
+<p>Yours, &amp;c. F.A. Ross.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Conclusion.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>I intended to, and may yet, in a subsequent edition, write two more
+letters to A. Barnes. The <i>one</i>, to show how infidelity has been passing
+off from the South to the North,--especially since the <i>Christian death</i>
+of Jackson; the other, to meet Mr. Barnes's argument founded on the spirit
+of the age.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center" class="smallcaps">The End.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Slavery Ordained of God
+
+Author: Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
+Posting Date: April 6, 2014 [EBook #9171]
+Release Date: October, 2005
+First Posted: September 10, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD
+
+By
+
+Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+
+"The powers that be are ordained of God." Romans xiii. 1.
+
+
+TO
+The Men
+NORTH AND SOUTH,
+WHO HONOR THE WORD OF GOD
+AND
+LOVE THEIR COUNTRY.
+
+
+
+
+Preface.
+
+
+
+The book I give to the public, is not made up of isolated articles. It is
+one harmonious demonstration--that slavery is part of the government
+ordained in certain conditions of fallen mankind. I present the subject in
+the form of speeches, actually delivered, and letters written just as
+published. I adopt this method to make a readable book.
+
+I give it to the North and South--to maintain harmony among Christians,
+and to secure the integrity of the union of this great people.
+
+This harmony and union can be preserved only by the view presented in this
+volume,--_i.e._ that _slavery is of God_, and to continue for the good of
+the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family,
+until another and better destiny may be unfolded.
+
+The _one great idea_, which I submit to North and South, is expressed in
+the speech, first in order, delivered in the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, May 27, 1853. I therein say:--
+
+"Let us then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend _two
+ideas_, and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern
+philanthropist learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave
+is not sin _per se_. Let him learn that God says nowhere it is sin. Let
+him learn that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no
+law there is no sin, and that _the Golden Rule_ may exist in the
+relations of slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil _in
+certain circumstances_. Let him learn that _equality_ is only the highest
+form of social life; that _subjection_ to authority, even _slavery_, may,
+in _given conditions_, be _for a time_ better than freedom to the slave
+of any complexion. Let him learn that _slavery_, like _all evils_, has
+its _corresponding_ and _greater good_; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded _compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa_. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself: And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+_God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual_.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny."
+
+All which comes after, in the speech delivered in New York, 1856, and in
+the letters, is just the expansion of this one controlling thought, which
+must be understood, believed, and acted out North and South.
+
+The Author.
+
+Written in Cleveland, Ohio, May 28, 1857.
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+Speech Before the General Assembly at Buffalo
+Speech Before the General Assembly at New York
+Letter to Rev. A. Blackburn
+What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?
+
+Letters to Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+  I.--Results of the slavery agitation--Declaration of Independence--
+      The way men are made infidels--Testimonies of General Assemblies
+ II.--Government over man a divine institute
+III.--Man-stealing
+ IV.--The Golden Rule
+
+
+
+
+Speech Delivered at Buffalo, Before the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church.
+
+
+
+To understand the following speech, the reader will be pleased to
+learn--if he don't know already--that the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, before its division in 1838, and since,--both Old
+School and New School,--has been, for forty years and more, bearing
+testimony, after a fashion, against the system of slavery; that is to say,
+affirming, in one breath, that slave-holding is a "blot on our holy
+religion," &c. &c.; and then, in the next utterance, making all sorts of
+apologies and justifications for the slave-holder. Thus: this august body
+has been in the habit of telling the Southern master (especially in the
+Detroit resolutions of 1850) that he is a _sinner_, hardly meet to be
+called a _Christian_; but, nevertheless, if he will only sin "from
+unavoidable necessity, imposed by the laws of the States,"--if he will
+only sin under the "obligations of guardianship,"--if he will only sin
+"from the demands of humanity,"--why, then, forsooth, he may be a
+slave-holder as long as _he has a mind to_. Yea, he may hold one slave,
+one hundred or one thousand slaves, and till the day of judgment.
+
+Happening to be in attendance, as a member of the body, in Buffalo, May,
+1853, when, as usual, the system of slavery was touched, in a series of
+questions sent down to the church courts below, I made the following
+remarks, in good-natured ridicule of such preposterous and stultifying
+testimony; and, as an argument, opening the views I have since reproduced
+in the second speech of this volume, delivered in the General Assembly
+which convened in New York, May, 1856, and also in the letters
+following:--
+
+BUFFALO, FRIDAY, May 27, 1853.
+
+The order of the day was reached at a quarter before eleven, and the
+report read again,--viz.:
+
+"1. That this body shall reaffirm the doctrine of the second resolution
+adopted by the General Assembly, convened in Detroit, in 1850, and,
+
+"2. That with an express disavowal of any intention to be impertinently
+inquisitorial, and for the sole purpose of arriving at the truth, so as to
+correct misapprehensions and allay all causeless irritation, a committee
+be appointed of one from each of the synods of Kentucky, Tennessee,
+Missouri, and Virginia, who shall be requested to report to the next
+General Assembly on the following points:--1. The number of slave-holders
+in connection with the churches, and the number of slaves held by them. 2.
+The extent to which slaves are held from an unavoidable necessity imposed
+by the laws of the States, the obligations of guardianship, and the
+demands of humanity. 3. Whether the Southern churches regard the
+sacredness of the marriage relation as it exists among the slaves; whether
+baptism is duly administered to the children of the slaves professing
+Christianity, and in general, to what extent and in what manner provision
+is made for the religious well-being of the slave," &c. &c.
+
+Dr. Ross moved to amend the report by substituting the following,--with
+an express disavowal of being impertinently inquisitorial:--that a
+committee of _one_ from each of the Northern synods of ---- be appointed,
+who shall be requested to report to the next General Assembly,--
+
+1. The number of Northern church-members concerned, directly or
+indirectly, in building and fitting out ships for the African slave-trade,
+and the slave-trade between the States.
+
+2. The number of Northern church-members who traffic with slave-holders,
+and are seeking to make money by selling them negro-clothing, handcuffs,
+and cowhides.
+
+3. The number of Northern church-members who have sent orders to New
+Orleans, and other Southern cities, to have slaves sold, to pay debts
+owing them from the South. [See Uncle Tom's Cabin.]
+
+4. The number of Northern church-members who buy the cotton, sugar, rice,
+tobacco, oranges, pine-apples, figs, ginger, cocoa, melons, and a thousand
+other things, raised by slave-labor.
+
+5. The number of Northern church-members who have intermarried with
+slave-holders, and have thus become slave-owners themselves, or enjoy the
+wealth made by the blood of the slave,--especially if there be any
+Northern ministers of the gospel in such a predicament.
+
+6. The number of Northern church-members who are the descendants of the
+men who kidnapped negroes in Africa and brought them to Virginia and New
+England in former years.
+
+7. The aggregate and individual wealth of members thus descended, and what
+action is best to compel them to disgorge this blood-stained gold, or to
+compel them to give dollar for dollar in equalizing the loss of the South
+by emancipation.
+
+8. The number of Northern church-members, ministers especially, who have
+advocated _murder_ in resistance to the laws of the land.
+
+9. The number of Northern church-members who own stock in under-ground
+railroads, running off fugitive slaves, and in Sabbath-breaking railroads
+and canals.
+
+10. That a special commission be sent up Red River, to ascertain whether
+Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to death, (and who was a Northern
+_gentleman_,) be not still in connection with some Northern church in good
+and regular standing.
+
+11. The number of Northern church-members who attend meetings of
+Spiritual Rappers,--or Bloomers,--or Women's-Rights Conventions.
+
+12. The number of Northern church-members who are cruel husbands.
+
+13. The number of Northern church-members who are hen-pecked husbands.
+
+[As it is always difficult to know the temper of speaker and audience from
+a printed report, it is due alike to Dr. R., to the whole Assembly, and
+the galleries, to say, that he, in reading these resolutions, and
+throughout his speech, evinced great good-humour and kindness of feeling,
+which was equally manifested by the Assembly and spectators, repeatedly,
+while he was on the floor.]
+
+Dr. Ross then proceeded:--Mr. Moderator, I move this amendment in the best
+spirit. I desire to imitate the committee in their refinement and delicacy
+of distinction. I disavow all intention to be _impertinently_
+inquisitorial. I intend to be inquisitorial, as the committee say they
+are,--but not _impertinently_ so. No, sir; not at all; not at all.
+(Laughter.) Well, sir, we of the South, who desire the removal of the evil
+of slavery, and believe it will pass away in the developments of
+Providence, are grieved when we read your graphic, shuddering pictures of
+the "middle passage,"--the slave-ship, piling up her canvas, as the shot
+pours after her from English or American guns,--see her again and again
+hurrying hogshead after hogshead, filled with living slaves, into the
+deep, and, thus lightened, escape. Sir, what horror to believe that
+clipper-ship was built by the hands of Northern, noisy Abolition
+church-members! ["Yes, I know some in New York and Boston," said one in
+the crowd.] Again, sir, when we walk along your _Broadways_, and see, as
+we do, the soft hands of your church-members sending off to the South, not
+only clothing for the slave, but manacles and whips, manufactured
+expressly for him,--what must we think of your consistency of character?
+[True, true.] And what must we think of your self-righteousness, when we
+know your church-members order the sale of slaves,--yes, slaves such as
+St. Clair's,--and under circumstances involving all the separations and
+all the loathsome things you so mournfully deplore? Your Mrs. Stowe says
+so, and it is so, without her testimony. I have read that splendid, bad
+book. Splendid in its genius, over which I have wept, and laughed, and got
+mad, (here some one said, "All at the same time?") yes--all at the same
+time. Bad in its theology, bad in its morality, bad in its temporary evil
+influence here in the North, in England, and on the continent of Europe;
+bad, because her isolated cruelties will be taken (whether so meant by her
+or not) as the general condition of Southern life,--while her Shelbys, and
+St. Clairs, and Evas, will be looked upon as angel-visitors, lingering for
+a moment in that earthly hell. The _impression made by the book is a
+falsehood_.
+
+Sir, why do your Northern church-members and philanthropists buy Southern
+products at all? You know you are purchasing cotton, rice, sugar,
+sprinkled with blood, literally, you say, from the lash of the driver! Why
+do you buy? What's the difference between my filching this blood-stained
+cotton from the outraged negro, and your standing by, taking it from me?
+What's the difference? You, yourselves, say, in your abstractions, there
+is no difference; and yet you daily stain your hands in this horrid
+traffic. You hate the traitor, but you love the treason. Your ladies,
+too,--oh, how they shun the slave-owner _at a distance_, in _the
+abstract_! But alas, when they see him in the _concrete_,--when they see
+the slave-owner _himself_, standing before them,--not the brutal driver,
+but the splendid gentleman, with his unmistakable grace of carriage and
+ease of manners,--why, lo, behold the lady says, "Oh, fie on your
+slavery!--what a _wretch_ you are! But, indeed, sir, I love your
+sugar,--and truly, truly, sir, _wretch_ as you are, I love you too." Your
+gentlemen talk just the same way when they behold our matchless women. And
+well for us all it is, that your good taste, and hearts, can thus
+appreciate our genius, and accomplishments, and fascinations, and
+loveliness, and sugar, and cotton. Why, sir, I heard this morning, from
+one pastor only, of two or three of his members thus intermarried in the
+South. May I thus give the mildest rebuke to your inconsistency of
+conduct? (Much good-natured excitement.)
+
+Sir, may we know who are the descendants of the New England kidnappers?
+What is their wealth? Why, here you are, all around me. You, gentlemen,
+made the best of that bargain. And you have kept every dollar of your
+money from the charity of emancipating the slave. You have left us,
+unaided, to give millions. Will you now come to our help? Will you give
+dollar for dollar to equalize our loss? [Here many voices cried out, "Yes,
+yes, we will."]
+
+Yes, yes? Then pour out your millions. Good. I may thank you personally.
+My own emancipated slaves would to-day be worth greatly more than
+$20,000. Will you give me back $10,000? Good. I need it now.
+
+I recommend to you, sirs, to find out your advocates of _murder_,--your
+owners of stock in under-ground railroads,--your Sabbath-breakers for
+money. I particularly urge you to find Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to
+death. He is a Northern _gentleman_, although having a somewhat Southern
+name. Now, sir, you know the Assembly was embarrassed all yesterday by
+the inquiry how the Northern churches may find their absent members, and
+what to do with them. Here then, sir, is a chance for you. Send a
+committee up Red River. You may find Legree to be a Garrison, Phillips,
+Smith, or runaway husband from some Abby Kelly. [Here Rev. Mr. Smith
+protested against Legree being proved to be a Smith. Great laughter.
+[Footnote: This gentleman was soon after made a D.D., and I think in part
+for that witticism.]] I move that you bring him back to lecture on the
+_cuteness_ there is in leaving a Northern church, going South, changing
+his name, buying slaves, and calculating, without _guessing_, what the
+profit is of killing a negro with inhuman labor above the gain of
+treating him with kindness.
+
+I have little to say of spirit-rappers, women's-rights conventionists,
+Bloomers, cruel husbands, or hen-pecked. But, if we may believe your own
+serious as well as caricature writers, you have things up here of which we
+down South know very little indeed. Sir, we have no young Bloomers, with
+hat to one side, cigar in mouth, and cane tapping the boot, striding up to
+a mincing young gentleman with long curls, attenuated waist, and soft
+velvet face,--the boy-lady to say, "May I see you home, sir?" and the
+lady-boy to reply, "I thank ye--no; pa will send the carriage." Sir, we of
+the South don't understand your women's-rights conventions. Women have
+their wrongs. "The Song of the Shirt,"--Charlotte Elizabeth,--many, many
+laws,--tell her wrongs. But your convention ladies despise the Bible. Yes,
+sir; and we of the South are afraid _of them_, and _for you_. When women
+despise the Bible, what next? _Paris,--then the City of the Great Salt
+Lake,--then Sodom, before_ and _after the Dead Sea_. Oh, sir, if slavery
+tends in any way to give the _honour of chivalry_ to Southern young
+gentlemen towards ladies, and the exquisite delicacy and heavenly
+integrity and love to Southern maid and matron, it has then a glorious
+blessing with its curse.
+
+Sir, your inquisitorial committee, and the North so far as represented by
+them, (a small fraction, I know,) have, I take it, caught a Tartar this
+time. Boys say with us, and everywhere, I _reckon_, "You worry my dog, and
+I'll worry your cat." Sir, it is just simply a _fixed fact: the South will
+not submit to these questions_. No, not for an instant. We will not permit
+you to approach us at all. If we are morbidly sensitive, you have made us
+so. But you are directly and grossly violating the Constitution of the
+Presbyterian Church. The book forbids you to put such questions; the book
+forbids _you to begin discipline_; the book forbids your sending this
+committee to help common fame bear testimony against us; the book guards
+the honour of our humblest member, minister, church, presbytery, against
+all this impertinently-inquisitorial action. Have you a _prosecutor_, with
+his definite charge and witnesses? Have you _Common Fame_, with her
+specified charges and witnesses? Have you a request from the South that
+you send a committee to inquire into slanders? No. Then hands off. As
+gentlemen you may ask us these questions,--we will answer you. But,
+ecclesiastically, you cannot speak in this matter. You have no power to
+move as you propose.
+
+I beg leave to say, just here, that Tennessee [Footnote: At that time I
+resided in Tennessee.] will be more calm under this movement than any
+other slave-region. Tennessee has been ever high above the storm, North
+and South,--especially we of the mountains. Tennessee!--"there she
+is,--look at her,"--binding this Union together like a great, long,
+broad, deep stone,--more splendid than all in the temple of Baalbec or
+Solomon. Tennessee!--there she is, in her calm valour. I will not lower
+her by calling her unconquerable, for she has never been assailed; but I
+call her ever-victorious. King's Mountain,--her pioneer
+battles:--Talladega, Emucfau, Horse-shoe, New Orleans, San Jacinto,
+Monterey, the Valley of Mexico. Jackson represented her well in his
+chivalry from South Carolina,--his fiery courage from Virginia and
+Kentucky,--all tempered by Scotch-Irish Presbyterian prudence from
+Tennessee. We, in his spirit, have looked on this storm for years
+untroubled. Yes, Jackson's old bones rattled in their grave when that
+infamous disunion convention met in Nashville, and its members turned
+pale and fled aghast. Yes, Tennessee, in her mighty million, feels
+secure; and, in her perfect preparation to discuss this question,
+politically, ecclesiastically, morally, metaphysically, or physically,
+with the extreme North or South, she is willing and able _to persuade
+others to be calm_. In this connection, I wish to say, for the South to
+the North, and to the world, that we have no fears from our
+slave-population. There might be a momentary insurrection and bloodshed;
+but destruction to the black man would be inevitable. The Greeks and
+Romans controlled immense masses of white slaves,--many of them as
+intelligent as their lords. Schoolmasters, fabulists, and poets were
+slaves. Athens, with her thirty thousand freemen, governed half a
+million of bondmen. Single Roman patricians owned thirty thousand. If,
+then, the phalanx and the legion mastered such slaves for ages, when
+battle was physical force of man to man, how certain it is that
+infantry, cavalry, and artillery could hold in bondage millions of
+Africans for a thousand years!
+
+But, dear brethren, our Southern philanthropists do not seek to have this
+unending bondage; Oh, no, no. And I earnestly entreat you to "stand still
+and see the salvation of the Lord." Assume a masterly inactivity, and you
+will behold all you desire and pray for,--you will see _America liberated
+from the curse of slavery_.
+
+The great question of the world is, WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE
+AMERICAN SLAVE?--WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MASTER? The
+following _extract from the "Charleston Mercury"_ gives my view of the
+subject with great and condensed particularity:--
+
+"Married, Thursday, 26th inst., the Hon. Cushing Kewang, Secretary of
+State of the United States, to Laura, daughter of Paul Coligny,
+Vice-President of the United States, and one of our noblest Huguenot
+families. We learn that this distinguished gentleman, with his bride, will
+visit his father, the Emperor of China, at his summer palace, in Tartary,
+north of Pekin, and return to the Vice-President's Tea Pavilion, on Cooper
+River, ere the meeting of Congress." The editor of the "Mercury" goes on
+to say: "This marriage in high life is only one of many which have
+signalized that immense emigration from Christianized China during the
+last seventy-five years, whereby Charleston has a population of 1,250,000,
+and the State of South Carolina over 5,000,000,--an emigration which has
+wonderfully harmonized with the great exodus of the negro race to
+Africa." [Some gentleman here requested to know of Dr. Ross the date of
+the "Charleston Mercury" recording this marriage. The doctor replied, "The
+date is 27th May, 1953, exactly one hundred years from this day." Great
+laughter.]
+
+Sir, this is a dream; but it is not all a dream. No, I verily believe you
+have there the Gordian knot of slavery untied; you have there the solution
+of the problem; you have there the curtain up, and the last scene in the
+last act of the great drama of Ham.
+
+I am satisfied with the tendencies of things. I stand on the mountain-peak
+above the clouds. I see, far beyond the storm, the calm sea and blue sky;
+I see the Canaan of the African. I like to stand there on the Nebo of his
+exodus, and look across, not the Jordan, but the Atlantic. I see the
+African crossing as certainly as if I gazed upon the ocean divided by a
+great wind, and piled up in walls of green glittering glass on either
+hand, the dry ground, the marching host, and the pillar of cloud and of
+fire. I look over upon the Niger, black with death to the white man,
+instinct with life to the children of Ham. _There_ is the black man's
+home. Oh, how strange that you of the North see not how you degrade him
+when you keep him here! You will not let him vote; you will not let him
+rise to honors or social equality; you will not let him hold a pew in your
+churches. Send him away, then; tell him, begone. Be urgent, like the
+Egyptians: send him out of this land. _There_, in his fatherland, he will
+exhibit his own type of Christianity. He is, of all races, the most gentle
+and kind. The _man_, the most submissive; the _woman_, the most
+affectionate. What other slaves would love their masters better than
+themselves?--rock them and fan them in their cradles? caress them--how
+tenderly!--boys and girls? honor them, grown up, as superior beings? and,
+in thousands of illustrious instances, be willing to give life, and, in
+fact, die, to serve or save them? Verily, verily, this emancipated race
+may reveal the most amiable form of spiritual life, and the _jewel_ may
+glitter on the Ethiop's brow in meaning more sublime than all in the
+poet's imagery. Brethren, let them go; and, when they are gone,--ay,
+before they go away,--rear a monument; let it grow in greatness, if not on
+your highest mountain, in your hearts,--in lasting memory of the
+South,--in memory of your wrong to the South,--in memory of the
+self-denial of the South, and her philanthropy in training the slave to
+be free, enlightened, and Christian.
+
+Can all this be? Can this double emigration civilize Africa and more than
+re-people the South? Yes; and I regard the difficulties presented here, in
+Congress, or the country, as little worth. God intends both emigrations.
+And, without miracle, he will accomplish both. Difficulties! There are no
+difficulties. Half a million emigrate to our shores, from Ireland, and all
+Europe, every year. And you gravely talk of difficulties in the negro's
+way to Africa! Verily, God will unfold their destiny as fast, and as
+fully, as he sees best for the highest good of the slave, the highest good
+of the master, and the glory of Christ in Africa.
+
+And, sir, there are forty thousand Chinese in California. And in Cuba,
+this day, American gentlemen are cultivating sugar, with Chinese hired
+labor, more profitably than the Spaniards and their slaves. Oh! there is
+China--half the population of the globe--just fronting us across that
+peaceful sea,--her poor, living on rats and a pittance of red rice,--her
+rich, hoarding millions in senseless idolatry, or indulging in the
+luxuries of birds'-nests and roasted ice. Massed together, they must
+migrate. Where can they go? They must come to our shores. They must come,
+even did God forbid them. But he will hasten their coming. They can live
+in the extremest South. It is their latitude,--their side of the ocean.
+They can cultivate cotton, rice, sugar, tea, and the silkworm. Their
+skill, their manipulation, is unrivalled. Their commonest gong you can
+neither make nor explain. They are a law-abiding people, without castes,
+accustomed to rise by merit to highest distinctions, and capable of the
+noblest training, when their idolatry, which is waxing old as a garment,
+shall be folded up as a vesture and changed for _that_ whose years shall
+not fail. The English ambassador assures us that the Chinese negotiator of
+the late treaty was a splendid gentleman, and a diplomatist to move in any
+court of Europe. Shem, then, can mingle with Japheth in America.
+
+The Chinese must come. God will bring them. He will fulfil Benton's noble
+thought. The railroad must complete the voyage of Columbus. The statue of
+the Genoese, on some peak of the Rocky Mountains, high above the flying
+cars, must point to the West, saying, "There is the East! There is India
+and Cathay."
+
+Let us, then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend _two ideas_,
+and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern philanthropist
+learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave is not sin
+_per se_. Let him learn that God nowhere says it is sin. Let him learn
+that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no law,
+there is no sin; and that _the golden rule_ may exist in the relations of
+slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil _in certain
+circumstances_. Let him learn that _equality_ is only the highest form of
+social life; that _subjection_ to authority, even _slavery_, may, in
+_given conditions_, be _for a time_ better than freedom to the slave, of
+any complexion. Let him learn that _slavery_, like _all evils_, has its
+_corresponding_ and _greater good_; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded _compared with his master_, is _elevated_ and _ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa_. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself. And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+_God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual_.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away, in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny.
+
+Ham will be ever lower than Shem; Shem will be ever lower than Japheth.
+All will rise in the Christian grandeur to be revealed. Ham will be lower
+than Shem, because he was sent to Central Africa. Man south of the
+Equator--in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa--is
+inferior to his Northern brother. The _blessing_ was upon Shem in his
+magnificent Asia. The _greater blessing_ was upon Japheth in his
+man-developing Europe. _Both blessings_ will be combined, in America,
+_north of the Zone_, in commingled light and life. I see it all in the
+first symbolical altar of Noah on that mound at the base of Ararat. The
+father of all living men bows before the incense of sacrifice, streaming
+up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all
+flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of
+the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness,
+near the long-necked giraffe, type of his _Africa_,--his magnificent wife,
+seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her
+long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered with gems from
+mines before the flood. Higher up is Shem, leaning his arm over that
+mouse-colored horse,--his _Arab_ steed. His wife, in pure white linen,
+feeds the elephant, and plays with his lithe proboscis,--the mother of
+Terah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, and Christ. And yet she looks
+up, and bows in mild humility, to _her_ of Japheth, seated amid plumed
+birds, in robes like the sky. Her noble lord, meanwhile, high above all,
+stands, with folded arms, following that eagle which wheels up towards
+Ararat, displaying his breast glittering with stars and stripes of scarlet
+and silver,--radiant heraldry, traced by the hand of God. Now he purifies
+his eye in the sun, and now he spreads his broad wings in symbolic flight
+to the _West_, until lost to the prophetic eye of Japheth, under the bow
+of splendors set that day in the cloud. God's covenant with man,--oh, may
+the bow of covenant between us be here to-day, that the waters of _this
+flood_ shall never again threaten our beloved land!
+
+
+
+
+Speech Delivered in the General Assembly
+New York, 1856.
+
+
+
+The circumstances, under which this speech was delivered, are sufficiently
+shown in the statement below.
+
+It was not a hasty production. After being spoken, it was prepared for the
+"Journal of Commerce," with the greatest care I could give to it: most of
+it was written again and again. Unlike Pascal, who said, as to his longest
+and inferior sixteenth letter, that he had not had time to make it
+shorter, I had time; and I did condense in that one speech the matured
+reflections of my whole life. I am calmly satisfied I am right. I am sure
+God has said, and does say, "Well done."
+
+The speech brings to view a wide range of thought, all belonging to the
+subject of slavery, of immense importance. As introductory,--there is the
+question of the abolition agitation the last thirty years; then, what is
+right and wrong, and the foundation of moral obligation; then, the
+definition of sin; next, the origin of human government, and the
+relations, in which God has placed men under his rule of subjection;
+finally, the word of God is brought to sustain all the positions taken.
+
+The challenge to argue the question of slavery from the Bible was thrown
+down on the floor of the Assembly, as stated. Presently I took up the
+gauntlet, and made this argument. The challenger never claimed his glove,
+then nor since; nor has anybody, so far as I know, attempted to refute
+this speech. Nothing has come to my ears (save as to two points, to be
+noticed hereafter) but reckless, bold denial of God's truth, infidel
+affirmation without attempt at proof, and denunciations of myself.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_ having said that he would argue the question on the Bible at
+a following time, Dr. Ross rose, when he took his seat, and, taking his
+position on the platform near the Moderator's chair, said,--
+
+"I accept the challenge given by Dr. Wisner, to argue the question of
+slavery from the Scriptures."
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--Does the brother propose to go into it here?
+
+_Dr. Ross_.--Yes, sir.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--Well, I did not propose to go into it here.
+
+_Dr. Ross_.--You gave the challenge, and I accept it.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--I said I would argue it at a proper time; but it is no
+matter. Go ahead.
+
+_Dr. Beman_ hoped the discussion would be ruled out. He did not think it a
+legitimate subject to go into,--Moses and the prophets, Christ and his
+apostles, and all intermediate authorities, on the subject of what the
+General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America had done.
+
+_Judge Jessup_ considered the question had been opened by this report of
+the majority: after which _Dr. Beman_ withdrew his objection, and _Dr.
+Ross_ proceeded.
+
+I am not a slave-holder. Nay, I have shown some self-denial in that
+matter. I emancipated slaves whose money-value would now be $40,000. In
+the providence of God, my riches have entirely passed from me. I do not
+mean that, like the widow, I gave all the living I had. My estate was then
+greater than that slave-property. I merely wish to show I have no selfish
+motive in giving, as I shall, the true Southern defence of slavery.
+(Applause.) I speak from Huntsville, Alabama, my present home. That gem of
+the South, that beautiful city where the mountain softens into the
+vale,--where the water gushes, a great fountain, from the rock,--where
+around that living stream there are streets of roses, and houses of
+intelligence and gracefulness and gentlest hospitality,--and, withal,
+where so high honor is ever given to the ministers of God.
+
+Speaking then from that region where "_Cotton is king_," I affirm,
+contrary as my opinion is to that most common in the South, that the
+slavery agitation has accomplished and will do great good. I said so, to
+ministerial and political friends, twenty-five years ago. I have always
+favored the agitation,--just as I have always countenanced discussion
+upon all subjects. I felt that the slavery question needed examination.
+I believed it was not understood in its relations to the Bible and human
+liberty. Sir, the light is spreading North and South. 'Tis said, I know,
+this agitation has increased the severity of slavery. True, but for a
+moment only, in the days of the years of the life of this noble problem.
+Farmers tell us that deep ploughing in poor ground will, for a year or
+two, give you a worse crop than before you went so deep; but that that
+deep ploughing will turn up the under-soil, and sun and air and rain will
+give you harvests increasingly rich. So, this moral soil, North and
+South, was unproductive. It needed deep ploughing. For a time the harvest
+was worse. Now it is becoming more and more abundant. The political
+controversy, however fierce and threatening, is only for power. But the
+moral agitation is for the harmony of the Northern and Southern mind, in
+the right interpretations of Scripture on this great subject, and, of
+course, for the ultimate union of the hearts of all sensible people, to
+fulfil God's intention,--to bless the white man and the black man in
+America. I am sure of this. I take a wide view of the progress of the
+destiny of this vast empire. I see God in America. I see him in the North
+and in the South. I see him more honored in the South to-day than he was
+twenty-five years ago; and that that higher regard is due, mainly, to the
+agitation of the slavery question. Do you ask how? Why, sir, this is the
+how. Twenty-five years ago the religious mind of the South was leavened
+by wrong Northern training, on the great point of the right and wrong of
+slavery. Meanwhile, powerful intellects in the South, following the mere
+light of a healthy good sense, guided by the common grace of God, reached
+the very truth of this great matter,--namely, that the relation of the
+master and slave is not sin; and that, notwithstanding its admitted
+evils, it is a connection between the highest and the lowest races of
+man, revealing influences which may be, and will be, most benevolent for
+the ultimate good of the master and the slave,--conservative on the
+Union, by preserving the South from all forms of Northern fanaticism, and
+thereby being a great balance-wheel in the working of the tremendous
+machinery of our experiment of self-government. This seen result of
+slavery was found to be in absolute harmony with the word of God. These
+men, then, of highest grade of thought, who had turned in scorn from
+Northern notions, now see, in the Bible, that these notions are false
+and silly. They now read the Bible, never examined before, with growing
+respect. God is honored, and his glory will be more and more in their
+salvation. These are some of the moral consummations of this agitation in
+the South. The development has been twofold in the North. On the one
+hand, some anti-slavery men have left the light of the Bible, and
+wandered into the darkness until they have reached the blackness of the
+darkness of infidelity. Other some are following hard after, and are
+throwing the Bible into the furnace,--are melting it into iron, and
+forging it, and welding it, and twisting it, and grooving it into the
+shape and significance and goodness and gospel of Sharpe's rifles. Sir,
+are you not afraid that some of your once best men will soon have no
+better Bible than that?
+
+But, on the other hand, many of your brightest minds are looking intensely
+at the subject, in the same light in which it is studied by the highest
+Southern reason. Ay, sir, mother-England, old fogy as she is, begins to
+open her eyes. What, then, is our gain? Sir, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in many of
+its conceptions, could not have been written twenty-five years ago. That
+book of genius,--over which I and hundreds in the world have freely
+wept,--true in all its facts, false in all its impressions,--yea, as false
+in the prejudice it creates to Southern social life as if Webster, the
+murderer of Parkman, may be believed to be a personification of the
+_elite_ of honor in Cambridge, Boston, and New England. Nevertheless,
+Uncle Tom's Cabin could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Dr.
+Nehemiah Adams's "_South-Side View_" could not have been written
+twenty-five years ago. Nor Dr. Nathan Lord's "_Letter of Inquiry_." Nor
+Miss Murray's book. Nor "_Cotton is King_". Nor Bledsoe's "_Liberty and
+Slavery"_. These books, written in the midst of this agitation, are all of
+high, some the highest, reach of talent and noblest piety; all give, with
+increasing confidence, the present Southern Bible reading on Slavery. May
+the agitation, then, go on! I know the New School Presbyterian church has
+sustained some temporary injury. But God is honored in his word. The
+reaction, when the first abolition-movement commenced, has been succeeded
+by the sober second thought of the South. The sun, stayed, is again
+travelling in the greatness of his strength, and will shine brighter and
+brighter to the perfect day.
+
+My only fear, Mr. Moderator, is that, as you Northern people are so prone
+to go to extremes in your zeal and run every thing into the ground, you
+may, perhaps, become _too pro-slavery;_ and that we may have to take
+measures against your coveting, over much, our daughters, if not our
+wives, our men-servants, our maid-servants, our houses, and our lands.
+(Laughter.)
+
+Sir, I come now to the Bible argument. I begin at the beginning of
+eternity! (Laughter.) WHAT is RIGHT AND WRONG? _That's the question of
+questions_.
+
+Two theories have obtained in the world. The one is, that right and wrong
+are eternal facts; that they exist _per se_ in the nature of things; that
+they are ultimate truths above God; that he must study, and does study, to
+know them, as really as man. And that he comprehends them more clearly
+than man, only because he is a better student than man. Now, sir, _this
+theory is atheism_. For if right and wrong are like mathematical
+truths--fixed facts--then I may find them out, as I find out mathematical
+truths, without instruction from God. I do not ask God to tell me that one
+and one make two. I do not ask him to reveal to me the demonstrations of
+Euclid. I thank him for the mind to perceive. But I perceive mathematical
+relations without his telling me, because they exist independent of his
+will. If, then, moral truths, if right and wrong, if rectitude and sin,
+are, in like manner, fixed, eternal facts,--if they are out from and above
+God, like mathematical entities,--then I may find them for myself. I may
+condescend, perhaps, to regard the Bible as a hornbook, in which God, an
+older student than I, tells _me_ how to _begin_ to learn what he had to
+study; or I may decline to be taught, through the Bible, how to learn
+right and wrong. I may think the Bible was good enough, may be, for the
+Israelite in Egypt and in Canaan; good enough for the Christian in
+Jerusalem and Antioch and Rome, but not good enough, even as a hornbook,
+for me,--the man of the nineteenth century,--the man of Boston, New York,
+and Brooklyn! Oh, no. I may think I need it not at all. What next? Why,
+sir, if I may think I need not God to teach me moral truth, I may think I
+need him not to teach me any thing. What next? The irresistible conclusion
+is, I may think I can live without God; that Jehovah is a myth,--a name; I
+may bid him stand aside, or die. Oh, sir, _I will be_ the fool to say
+there is no God. This is the result of the notion that right and wrong
+exist in the nature of things.
+
+The other theory is, that right and wrong are results brought into being,
+mere contingencies, means to good, made to exist solely by the will of
+God, expressed through his word; or, when his will is not thus known, he
+shows it in the human reason by which he rules the natural heart. This is
+so; because God, in making all things, saw that in the relations he would
+constitute between himself and intelligent creatures, and among
+themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass. In his benevolent
+wisdom, he then _willed_ LAW, to control this _natural good and evil_. And
+he thereby made _conformity_ to that law to be _right_, and
+_non-conformity_ to be _wrong_. Why? Simply because he saw it to be good,
+and made it to be right; not because _he saw it to be right_, but because
+he _made it to be right_.
+
+Hence, the ten specific commandments of the one moral law of love are just
+ten rules which God made to regulate the natural good and evil which he
+knew would be in the ten relations, which he himself constituted between
+himself and man, and between man and his neighbor. The Bible settles the
+question:--_sin is the transgression of the law, and where there is no law
+there is no sin_.
+
+I must-advance one step further. _What is sin_, as a mental state? Is
+it some quality--some concentrated essence--some elementary moral
+particle in the nature of things--something black, or red, like
+crimson, in the constitution of the soul, or the soul and body as
+amalgamated? No. Is it self-love? No. Is it selfishness? No. What is
+it? Just exactly, _self-will._ Just that. I, the creature, WILL _not
+submit_ to _thy_ WILL, God, the Creator. It is the I AM, _created_, who
+dares to defy and dishonor the I AM, not created,--the Lord God, the
+Almighty, Holy, Eternal.
+
+_That_ IS SIN, _per se_. And that is all of it,--so help me God! Your
+child there--John--says to his father, "I WILL _not to submit_ to your
+will." "Why not, John?" And he answers and says, "Because I WILL _not_."
+There, sir, John has revealed _all of sin_, on earth or in hell. Satan has
+never said--can never say--more. "I, Satan, WILL NOT, because I WILL _not
+to submit_ to thee, God; MY WILL, not thine, shall be."
+
+This beautiful theory is the ray of light which leads us from night, and
+twilight, and fog, and mist, and mystification, on this subject, to clear
+day. I will illustrate it by the law which has controlled and now
+regulates the most delicate of all the relations of life,--viz.: that of
+the intercourse between the sexes. I take this, because it presents the
+strongest apparent objections to my argument.
+
+Cain and Abel married their sisters. Was it wrong in the nature of things?
+[Here Dr. Wisner spoke out, and said, "Certainly."] I deny it. What an
+absurdity, to suppose that God could not provide for the propagation of
+the human race from one pair, without _requiring them to sin!_ Adam's sons
+and daughters must have married, had they remained in innocence. They must
+then have sinned in Eden, from the very necessity of the command upon the
+race:--"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." (Gen. i. 28).
+What pure nonsense! There, sir!--_that_, my one question, Dr. Wisner's
+reply, and my rejoinder, bring out, perfectly, the two theories of right
+and wrong. Sir, Abraham married his half-sister. And there is not a word
+forbidding such marriage, until God gave the law (Lev. xviii.) prohibiting
+marriage in certain degrees of consanguinity. That law made, then, such
+marriage _sin_. But God gave no such law in the family of Adam; because he
+made, himself, the marriage of brother and sister the way, and the only
+way, for the increase of the human race. _He commanded them thus to marry.
+They would have sinned had they not thus married_; for they would have
+transgressed his law. Such marriage was not even a natural evil, in the
+then family of man. But when, in the increase of numbers, it became a
+natural evil, physical and social, God placed man on a higher platform for
+the development of civilization, morals, and religion, and then made the
+law regulating marriages in the particulars of blood. But he still left
+polygamy untouched. [Here Dr. Wisner again asked if Dr. R. regarded the
+Bible as sustaining the polygamy of the Old Testament.] Dr. R.--Yes, sir;
+yes, sir; yes, sir. Let the reporters mark _that_ question, and my answer.
+(Laughter.) My principle vindicates God from unintelligible abstractions.
+I fearlessly tell what the Bible says. In its strength, I am not afraid of
+earth or hell. I fear only God. God made no law against polygamy, in the
+beginning. Therefore it was no sin for a man to have more wives than one.
+God sanctioned it, and made laws in regard to it. Abraham had more wives
+than one; Jacob had, David had, Solomon had. God told David, by the mouth
+of Nathan, when he upbraided him with his ingratitude for the blessings
+he had given him, and said, "And I gave thee thy master's house, and _thy
+master's wives_ into thy bosom." (2 Sam. xvii. 8.)
+
+God, in the gospel, places man on another platform, for the revelation of
+a nobler social and spiritual life. He now forbids polygamy. _Polygamy now
+is sin_--not because it is in itself sin. No; but because God forbids
+it,--to restrain the natural and social evil, and to bring out a higher
+humanity. And see, sir, how gently in the gospel the transition from the
+lower to the higher table-land of our progress upward is made. Christ and
+his apostles do not declare polygamy to be sin. The new law is so wisely
+given that nothing existing is rudely disturbed. The minister of God,
+unmarried, must have only one wife at the same time. This law, silently
+and gradually, by inevitable and fair inference of its meaning, and from
+the example of the apostles, passed over the Christian world. God, in the
+gospel, places us in this higher and holier ground and air of love. We
+sin, then, if we marry the sister, and other near of kin; and we sin if we
+marry, at the same time, more wives than one, not because there is sin in
+the thing itself, whatever of natural evil there might be, but because in
+so doing we transgress God's law, given to secure and advance the good of
+man. I might comment in the same way on every one of the ten commandments,
+but I pass on.
+
+The subject of slavery, in this view of _right and wrong_, is seen in the
+very light of heaven. And you, Mr. Moderator, know that, if the view I
+have presented be true, I have got you. (Great laughter.)
+
+[The Moderator said, very pleasantly--Yes--_if_--but it is a _long if_.]
+(Continued laughter.)
+
+Dr. R. touched the Moderator on the shoulder, and said, Yes, _if_--it is a
+_long if_; for it is this:--_if_ there is a God, he is not Jupiter, bowing
+to the Fates, but God, the sovereign over the universe he has created, in
+which he makes right, by making law to be known and obeyed by angels and
+men, in their varied conditions.
+
+He gave Adam _that_ command,--sublime in its simplicity, and intended to
+vindicate the principle I am affirming,--that there is no right and wrong
+in the nature of things. There was no right or wrong, _per se_, in eating
+or willing to eat of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
+
+But God made the law,--_Thou shall not eat of that tree_. As if he had
+said,--I seek to _test_ the submission of your will, freely, to my will.
+And, that your test may be perfect, I will let your temptation be
+nothing more than your natural desire for that fruit. Adam sinned. What
+was the sin?
+
+Adam said, in heart, MY WILL, _not thine_, SHALL BE. _That_ was the
+sin,--_the simple transgression of God's law_, when there was neither sin
+nor evil in the _thing_ which God forbade to be done.
+
+Man fell and was cursed. The law of the control of the superior over the
+inferior is now to begin, and is to go on in the depraved conditions of
+the fallen and cursed race. And, FIRST, God said to the woman, "_Thy
+desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." There,_ in
+that law, is _the beginning of government ordained of God. There_ is the
+beginning of the rule of the superior over the inferior, bound to obey.
+_There_, in the family of Adam, is the germ of the rule in the tribe,--the
+state. Adam, in his right, from God, to rule over his wife and his
+children, had _all the authority_ afterwards expanded in the patriarch and
+the king. This simple, beautiful fact, there, on the first leaf of the
+Bible, solves the problem, whence and how has man right to rule over man.
+In that great fact God gives his denial to the idea that government over
+man is the result of a social compact, in which each individual man living
+in a state of natural liberty, yielded some of that liberty to secure the
+greater good of government. Such a thing never was; such a thing never
+could have been. _Government was ordained and established before the first
+child was born:_--"HE SHALL RULE OVER THEE." Cain and Abel were born in a
+_state_ as perfect as the empire of Britain or the rule of these United
+States. All that Blackstone, and Paley, and Hobbs, or anybody else, says
+about the social compact, is flatly and fully denied and upset by the
+Bible, history, and common sense. Let any New York lawyer--or even a
+Philadelphia lawyer--deny this if he dares. _Life, liberty, and the
+pursuit of happiness_ never were the _inalienable_ right of the
+_individual_ man.
+
+His self-control, in all these particulars, _from the beginning_, was
+subordinate to the good of the family,--the empire. The command to Noah
+was,--"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
+(Gen. ix. 6.)
+
+This command to shed blood was, and is, in perfect harmony with the
+law,--"Thou shalt not kill." There is nothing right or wrong in _the
+taking of life_, per se, or in itself considered. It may or it may not be
+a natural good or evil. As a _general fact_, the taking of life is a
+natural evil. Hence, "Thou shalt not kill" is the general rule, to
+preserve the good there is in life. To take life under the forbidden
+conditions is sin, simply because God forbids it under those conditions.
+The sin is not in taking life, but in transgressing God's law.
+
+But _sometimes_ the taking of life will secure a greater good. God, then,
+commands that life be taken. Not to take life, under the commanded
+conditions, is sin,--solely because God then commands it.
+
+This power over life, for the good of the one great family of man, God
+_delegated_ to Noah, and through him to the tribe, the clan, the kingdom,
+the empire, the democracy, the republic, as they may be governed by chief,
+king, emperor, parliament, or congress. Had Ham killed Shem, Noah would
+have commanded Japheth to slay him. So much for the origin of the power
+over life: now for the power over liberty.
+
+The right to take life included the right over liberty. But God intended
+the rule of the superior over the inferior, in relations of service,
+should _exemplify human depravity, his curse and his overruling blessing_.
+
+The rule and the subordination which is essential to the existence of the
+family, God made commensurate with mankind; for _mankind is only the
+congeries of families_. When Ham, in his antediluvian recklessness,
+laughed at his father, God took occasion to give to the world the rule of
+the superior over the inferior. _He cursed him. He cursed him because he
+left him unblessed_. The withholding of the father's blessing, in the
+Bible, was curse. Hence Abraham prayed God, when Isaac was blessed, that
+Ishmael might not be passed by. Hence Esau prayed his father, when Jacob
+was blessed, that he might not be left untouched by his holy hands. Ham
+was cursed to render service, forever, to Shem and Japheth. The _special_
+curse on Canaan made the general curse on Ham conspicuous, historic, and
+explanatory, simply because his descendants were to be brought under the
+control of God's peculiar people. Shem was blessed to rule over Ham.
+Japheth was blessed to rule over both. God sent Ham to Africa, Shem to
+Asia, Japheth to Europe. Mr. Moderator, you have read Guyot's "_Earth and
+Man_." That admirable book is a commentary upon this part of Genesis. It
+is the philosophy of geography. And it is the philosophy of the rule of
+the higher races over the inferior, written on the very face of the earth.
+He tells you why the continents are shaped as they are shaped; why the
+mountains stand where they stand; why the rivers run where they run; why
+the currents of the sea and the air flow as they flow. And he tells you
+that the earth south of the Equator makes the inferior man. That the
+oceanic climate makes the inferior man in the Pacific Islands. That South
+America makes the inferior man. That the solid, unindented Southern Africa
+makes the inferior man. That the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent Asia
+makes the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent man. That Europe, indented by
+the sea on every side, with its varied scenery, and climate, and Northern
+influences, makes the varied intellect, the versatile power and life and
+action, of the master-man of the world. And it is so. Africa, with here
+and there an exception, has never produced men to compare with the men of
+Asia. For six thousand years, save the unintelligible stones of Egypt, she
+has had no history. Asia has had her great men and her name. But Europe
+has ever shown, and now, her nobler men and higher destiny. Japheth has
+now come to North America, to give us his past greatness and his
+transcendent glory. (Applause.) And, sir, I thank God our mountains stand
+where they stand; and that our rivers run where they run. Thank God they
+run not across longitudes, but across latitudes, from north to south. If
+they crossed longitudes, we might fear for the Union. But I hail the
+Union,--made by God, strong as the strength of our hills, and ever to live
+and expand,--like the flow and swell of the current of our streams.
+(Applause.)
+
+These two theories of Right and Wrong,--these two ideas of human
+liberty,--the right, in the nature of things, or the right as made by
+God,--the liberty of the individual man, of Atheism, of Red Republicanism,
+of the devil,--or the liberty of man, in the family, in the State, the
+liberty from God,--these two theories now make the conflict of the world.
+This anti-slavery battle is only part of the great struggle: God will be
+victorious,--and we, in his might.
+
+I now come to particular illustrations of the world-wide law that service
+shall be rendered by the inferior to the superior. The relations in which
+such service obtains are very many. Some of them are these:--husband and
+wife; parent and child; teacher and scholar; commander and
+soldier,--sailor; master and apprentice; master and hireling; master and
+slave. Now, sir, all these relations are ordained of God. They are all
+directly commanded, or they are the irresistible law of his providence, in
+conditions which must come up in the progress of depraved nature. The
+relations themselves are all good in certain conditions. And there may be
+no more of evil in the lowest than in the highest. And there may be in the
+lowest, as really as in the highest, the fulfilment of the commandment to
+love thy neighbor as thyself, and of doing unto him whatsoever thou
+wouldst have him to do unto thee.
+
+Why, sir, the wife everywhere, except where Christianity has given her
+elevation, is _the slave_. And, sir, I say, without fear of saying too
+strongly, that for every sigh, every groan, every tear, every agony of
+stripe or death, which has gone up to God from the relation of master and
+slave, there have been more sighs, more groans, more tears, and more agony
+in the rule of the husband over the wife. Sir, I have admitted, and do
+again admit, without qualification, that every fact in Uncle Tom's Cabin
+has occurred in the South. But, in reply, I say deliberately, what one of
+your first men told me, that he who will make the horrid examination will
+discover in New York City, in any number of years past, more cruelty from
+husband to wife, parent to child, _than in all the South from master to
+slave_ in the same time. I dare the investigation. And you may extend it
+further, if you choose,--to all the results of honor and purity. I fear
+nothing on this subject. I stand on rock,--the Bible,--and therefore, just
+before I bring the Bible, to which all I have said is introductory, I will
+run a parallel between the relation of master and slave and that of
+husband and wife. I will say nothing of the grinding oppression of capital
+upon labor, in the power of the master over the hireling--the crushed
+peasant--the chain-harnessed coal-pit woman, a thousand feet under ground,
+working in darkness, her child toiling by her side, and another child not
+born; I will say nothing of the press-gang which fills the navy of
+Britain--the conscription which makes the army of France--the terrible
+floggings--the awful court-martial--the quick sentence--the
+lightning-shot--the chain, and ball, and every-day lash--the punishment of
+the soldier, sailor, slave, who had run away. I pass all this by: I will
+run the parallel between the slave and wife.
+
+Do you say, The slave is held to _involuntary service?_ So is the wife.
+Her relation to her husband, in the immense majority of cases, is made for
+her, and not by her. And when she makes it for herself, how often, and how
+soon, does it become involuntary! How often, and how soon, would she
+throw off the yoke if she could! O ye wives, I know how superior you are
+to your husbands in many respects,--not only in personal attraction,
+(although in that particular, comparison is out of place,) in grace, in
+refined thought, in passive fortitude, in enduring love, and in a heart to
+be filled with the spirit of heaven. Oh, I know all this. Nay, I know you
+may surpass him in his own sphere of boasted prudence and worldly wisdom
+about dollars and cents. Nevertheless, he has authority, from God, to rule
+over you. You are under service to him. You are bound to obey him _in all
+things_. Your service is very, very, very often involuntary from the
+first, and, if voluntary at first, becomes hopeless necessity afterwards.
+I know God has laid upon the husband to love you as Christ loved the
+church, and in that sublime obligation has placed you in the light and
+under the shadow of a love infinitely higher, and purer, and holier than
+all talked about in the romances of chivalry. But the husband may not so
+love you. He may rule you with the rod of iron. What can you do? Be
+divorced? God forbids it, save for crime. Will you say that you are
+free,--that you will go where you please, do as you please? Why, ye dear
+wives, your husbands may forbid. And listen, you cannot leave New York,
+nor your palaces, any more than your shanties. No; you cannot leave your
+parlor, nor your bedchamber, nor your couch, if your husband commands you
+to stay there! What can you do? Will you run away, with your stick and
+your bundle? He can advertise you!! What can you do? You can, and I fear
+some of you do, wish him, from the bottom of your hearts, at the bottom of
+the Hudson. Or, in your self-will, you will do just as you please. (Great
+laughter.)
+
+[A word on the subject of divorce. One of your standing denunciations on
+the South is the terrible laxity of the marriage vow among the slaves.
+Well, sir, what does your Boston Dr. Nehemiah Adams say? He says, after
+giving eighty, sixty, and the like number of applications for divorce, and
+nearly all granted at individual quarterly courts in New England,--he says
+he is not sure but that the marriage relation is as enduring among _the
+slaves in the South_ as it is among white people in New England. I only
+give what Dr. Adams says. I would fain vindicate the marriage relation
+from this rebuke. But one thing I will say: you seldom hear of a divorce
+in Virginia or South Carolina.]
+
+But to proceed:--
+
+Do you say the slave is _sold and bought?_ So is the wife the world over.
+Everywhere, always, and now as the general fact, however done away or
+modified by Christianity. The savage buys her. The barbarian buys her. The
+Turk buys her. The Jew buys her. The Christian buys her,--Greek, Armenian,
+Nestorian, Roman Catholic, Protestant. The Portuguese, the Spaniard, the
+Italian, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the New
+England man, the New Yorker,--especially the upper ten,--_buy the
+wife_--in many, very many cases. She is seldom bought in the South, and
+never among the slaves themselves; for they always marry for love.
+(Continued laughter.) Sir, I say the wife is bought in the highest
+circles, too often, as really as the slave is bought. Oh, she is not sold
+and purchased in the public market. But come, sir, with me, and let us
+take the privilege of spirits out of the body to glide into that gilded
+saloon, or into that richly comfortable family room, of cabinets, and
+pictures, and statuary: see the parties, there, to sell and buy that human
+body and soul, and make her a chattel! See how they sit, and bend towards
+each other, in earnest colloquy, on sofa of rosewood and satin,--_Turkey_
+carpet (how befitting!) under feet, sunlight over head, softened through
+stained windows: or it is night, and the gas is turned nearly off, and the
+burners gleam like stars through the shadow from which the whisper is
+heard, in which that old ugly brute, with gray goatee--how fragrant!--bids
+one, two, five, ten hundred thousand dollars, and _she_ is knocked off to
+him,--that beautiful young girl asleep up there, amid flowers, and
+innocent that she is sold and bought. Sir, that young girl would as soon
+permit a baboon to embrace her, as that old, ignorant, gross, disgusting
+wretch to approach her. Ah, has she not been sold and bought for money?
+But--But what? But, you say, she freely, and without parental authority,
+accepted him. Then she sold herself for money, and was guilty of _that_
+which is nothing better than legal prostitution. I know what I say; you
+know what I say. Up there in the gallery you know: you nod to one another.
+Ah! you know the parties. Yes, you say: All true, true, true. (Laughter.)
+
+Now, Mr. Moderator, I will clinch all I have said by nails sure, and
+fastened from the word of God.
+
+There is King James's English Bible, with its magnificent dedication. I
+bring the English acknowledged translation. And just one word more to
+push gently aside--for I am a kind man to those poor, deluded anti-slavery
+people--their last argument. It is _that_ this English Bible, in those
+parts which treat of slavery, don't give the ideas which are found in the
+original Hebrew and Greek. Alas for the common people!--alas for this good
+old translation! Are its days numbered? No, sir; no, sir. The Unitarian,
+the Universalist, the Arminian, the Baptist, when pressed by this
+translation, have tried to find shelter for their false isms by making or
+asking for a new rendering. And now the anti-slavery men are driving hard
+at the same thing. (Laughter.) Sir, shall we permit our people everywhere
+to have their confidence in this noble translation undermined and
+destroyed by the isms and whims of every or any man in our pulpits? I
+affirm, whatever be our perfect liberty of examination into God's meaning
+in all the light of the original languages, that there is a respect due to
+this received version, and that great caution should be used, lest we
+teach the people to doubt its true rendering from the original word of
+God. I protest, sir, against having a Doctor-of-Divinity _priest_, Hebrew
+or Greek, to tell the people what God has spoken on the subject of
+slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin
+priest,--I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,--I would as soon go to
+Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,--I would as soon have the Pope at once in
+his fallible infallibility,--as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery
+Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible
+rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet
+produced this Bible, in its plain unanswerable authority, for the relation
+of master and slave, but the anti-slavery man ran away into the fog of
+_his_ Hebrew or Greek, (laughter,) or he jabbered the nonsense that God
+permitted the _sin_ of slaveholding among the Jews, but that he don't do
+it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it
+right, they know, then and now. Having thus taken the last puff of wind
+out of the sails of the anti-slavery phantom ship, turn to the
+twenty-first chapter of Exodus, vs. 2-5. God, in these verses, gave the
+Israelites his command how they should buy and hold the Hebrew
+servant,--how, under certain conditions, he went free,--how, under other
+circumstances, he might be held to service forever, with his wife and her
+children. There it is. Don't run into the Hebrew. (Laughter.)
+
+But what have we here?--vs. 7-11:--"And if a man sell his daughter to be a
+maid-servant, she shall not go out as the men-servants do. If she please
+not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her
+be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power,
+seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he hath betrothed her
+unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he
+take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage
+shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall
+she go out free without money." Now, sir, the wit of man can't dodge that
+passage, unless he runs away into the Hebrew. (Great laughter.) For what
+does God say? Why, this:--that an Israelite might sell his own daughter,
+not only into servitude, but into polygamy,--that the buyer might, if he
+pleased, give her to his son for a wife, or take her to himself. If he
+took her to himself, and she did not please him, he should not sell her
+unto a strange nation, but should allow her to be redeemed by her family.
+But, if he took him another wife before he allowed the first one to be
+redeemed, he should continue to give the first one _food_, her _raiment_,
+and her _duty of marriage_; that is to say, _her right to his bed_. If he
+did not do _these three things_, she should go out free; _i.e._ cease to
+be his slave, without his receiving any money for her. There, sir, God
+sanctioned the Israelite father in selling his daughter, and the Israelite
+man to buy her, into slavery and into polygamy. And it was then right,
+because God made it right. In verses 20 and 21, you have these
+words:--"And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die
+under his hand, he shall be surely punished; notwithstanding, if he
+continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."
+What does this passage mean? Surely this:--if the master gave his slave a
+hasty blow with a rod, and he died under his hand, he should be punished.
+But, if the slave lived a day or two, it would so extenuate the act of the
+master he should not be punished, inasmuch as he would be in that case
+sufficiently punished in losing his money in his slave. Now, sir, I affirm
+that God was more lenient to the degraded Hebrew master than Southern laws
+are to the higher Southern master in like cases. But there you have what
+was the divine will. Find fault with God, ye anti-slavery men, if you
+dare. In Leviticus, xxv. 44-46, "Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which
+thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them
+shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the
+strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their
+families that are with you, which they beget in your land: and they shall
+be your 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."
+
+Sir, I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command
+his people to buy slaves from the heathen round about them, and from the
+stranger, and of their families sojourning among them. The passage has no
+other meaning. Did God merely permit sin?--did he merely tolerate a
+dreadful evil? God does not say so anywhere. He gives his people law to
+buy and hold slaves of the heathen forever, on certain conditions, and to
+buy and hold Hebrew slaves in variously-modified particulars. Well, how
+did the heathen, then, get slaves to sell? Did they capture them in
+war?--did they sell their own children? Wherever they got them, they sold
+them; and God's law gave his people the right to buy them.
+
+God in the New Testament made no law prohibiting the relation of master
+and slave. But he made law regulating the relation under Greek and Roman
+slavery, which was the most oppressive in the world.
+
+God saw that these regulations would ultimately remove the evils in the
+Greek and Roman systems, and do it away entirely from the fitness of
+things, as there existing; for Greek and Roman slaves, for the most part,
+were the equals in all respects of their masters. AEsop was a slave;
+Terence was a slave. The precepts in Colossians iv. 18, 23, 1 Tim. vi.
+1-6, and other places, show, unanswerably, that God as really sanctioned
+the relation of master and slave as those of husband and wife, and parent
+and child; and that all the obligations of the moral law, and Christ's law
+of love, might and must be as truly fulfilled in the one relation as in
+the other. The fact that he has made the one set of relations permanent,
+and the other more or less dependent on conditions of mankind, or to pass
+away in the advancement of human progress, does not touch the question. He
+sanctioned it under the Old Testament and the New, and ordains it now
+while he sees it best to continue it, and he now, as heretofore, proclaims
+the duty of the master and the slave. Dr. Parker's admirable explanation
+of Colossians, and other New Testament passages, saves me the necessity of
+saying any thing more on the Scripture argument.
+
+One word on the Detroit resolutions, and I conclude. Those resolutions of
+the Assembly of 1850 decide that slavery is sin, unless the master holds
+his slave as a guardian, or under the claims of humanity.
+
+Mr. Moderator, I think we had on this floor, yesterday, proof conclusive
+that those resolutions mean any thing or nothing; that they are a fine
+specimen of Northern skill in platform-making; that it put in a plank
+here, to please this man,--a plank there, to please that man,--a plank for
+the North, a broad board for the South. It is Jackson's judicious tariff.
+It is a gum-elastic conscience, stretched now to a charity covering all
+the multitude of our Southern sins, contracted now, giving us hardly a
+fig-leaf of righteousness. It is a bowl of punch,--
+
+  A little sugar to make it sweet,
+    A little lemon to make it sour,
+  A little water to make it weak,
+    A little brandy to give it power. (Laughter.)
+
+As a Northern argument against us, it is a mass of lead so heavy that it
+weighed down even the strong shoulders of Judge Jessup. For, sir, when he
+closed his speech, I asked him a single question I had made ready for him.
+It was this:--"Do you allow that Mr. Aiken, of South Carolina, may, under
+the claims of humanity, hold three thousand slaves, or must he emancipate
+them?" The Judge staggered, and stammered, and said, "No man could rightly
+hold so many." I then asked, "How many may he hold, in humanity?" The
+Judge saw his fatal dilemma. He recovered himself handsomely, and fairly
+said, "Mr. Aiken might hold three thousand slaves, in harmony with the
+Detroit action." I replied, "Then, sir, you have surrendered the whole
+question of Southern slavery." And, sir, the Judge looked as if he felt he
+had surrendered it. And every man in this house, capable of understanding
+the force of that question, felt it had shivered the whole anti-slavery
+argument, on those resolutions, to atoms. Why, sir, if a man can hold
+three slaves, with a right heart and the approbation of God, he may hold
+thirty, three hundred, three thousand, or thirty thousand. It is a mere
+question of heart, and capacity to govern. The Emperor of Russia holds
+sixty millions of slaves: and is there a man in this house so much of a
+fool as to say that God regards the Emperor of Russia a sinner because he
+is the master of sixty millions of slaves? Sir, that Emperor has certainly
+a high and awful responsibility upon him. But, if he is good as he is
+great, he is a god of benevolence on earth. And so is every Southern
+master. His obligation is high, and great, and glorious. It is the same
+obligation, in kind, he is under to his wife and children, and in some
+respects immensely higher, by reason of the number and the tremendous
+interests involved for time and eternity in connection with this great
+country, Africa, and the world. Yes, sir, _I know_, whether Southern
+masters fully know it or not, that _they hold from God_, individually and
+collectively, _the highest and the noblest responsibility ever given by
+Him to individual private men on all the face of the earth._ For God has
+intrusted to them to train millions of the most degraded in form and
+intellect, but, at the same time, the most gentle, the most amiable, the
+most affectionate, the most imitative, the most susceptible of social and
+religious love, of all the races of mankind,--to train them, and to give
+them civilization, and the light and the life of the gospel of Jesus
+Christ. And I thank God he has given this great work to that type of the
+noble family of Japheth best qualified to do it,--to the Cavalier
+stock,--the gentleman and the lady of England and France, born to command,
+and softened and refined under our Southern sky. May they know and feel
+and fulfil their destiny! Oh, may they "know that they also have a Master
+in heaven."
+
+
+
+
+Letter from Dr. Ross.
+
+
+
+I need only say, in reference to this letter, that my friends
+having questioned my position as to the good of the agitation, I
+wrote the following letter to vindicate that point, as given, in
+the New York speech:--
+
+HUNTSVILLE, ALA., July 14, 1856.
+
+_Brother Blackburn_:--I affirmed, in my New York speech, that the Slavery
+agitation has done, and will accomplish, good.
+
+Your very kind and courteous disagreement on that point I will make the
+occasion to say something more thereon, without wishing you, my dear
+friend, to regard what I write as inviting any discussion.
+
+I said _that_ agitation has brought out, and would reveal still more
+fully, the Bible, in its relation to slavery and liberty,--also the
+infidelity which long has been, and is now, leavening with death the whole
+Northern mind. And that it would result in the triumph of the _true_
+Southern interpretation of the Bible; to the honor of God, and to the
+good of the master, the slave, the stability of the Union, and be a
+blessing to the world. To accomplish this, the sin _per se_ doctrine will
+be utterly demolished. That doctrine is the difficulty in every _Northern
+mind,_ (where there is any difficulty about slavery,) whether they confess
+it or not. Yes, the difficulty with every Northern man is, that _the
+relation of_ master and slave is felt _to be_ sin. I know that to be the
+fact. I have talked with all grades of Northern men, and come in contact
+with all varieties of Northern mind on this subject. And I know that the
+man who says and tries to believe, and does, partially in sober judgment,
+believe, that slavery is not sin, yet, _in his feelings, in his educated
+prejudices_, he feels that slavery is sin.
+
+Yes, _that_ is the difficulty, and _that_ is the whole of the difficulty,
+_between the North and the South_, so far as the question is one of the
+Bible and morals. Now, I again say, that that _sin per se_ doctrine will,
+in this agitation, be utterly demolished. And when that is done,--when the
+North will know and feel fully, perfectly, that the relation of master and
+slave is not sin, but sanctioned of God,--then, and not till then, the
+North and South can and will, without anger, consider the following
+questions:--Whether slavery, as it exists in the United States, all
+things considered, be or be not a great good, and the greatest good for a
+time, notwithstanding its admitted evils? Again, whether these evils can
+or cannot be modified and removed? Lastly, whether slavery itself can or
+cannot pass away from this land and the world? Now, sir, the moment the
+sin question is settled, then all is peace. For these other questions
+belong entirely to another category of morals. They belong entirely to the
+category of _what is_ wise _to realize_ good. This agitation will bring
+this great result. And therefore I affirm the agitation to be good.
+
+There is another fact also, the result, in great measure, of this
+agitation, which in my view proves it to have been and to be of great
+good. I mean the astonishing rise and present stability of the slave-power
+of the United States. This fact, when examined, is undeniable. And it is
+equally undeniable that it has been caused, in great part, by the slavery
+question in all its bearings. It is a wonderful development made by God.
+And I must believe he intends thereby either to destroy or bless this
+great Union. But, as I believe he intends to bless, therefore I am
+fortified in affirming the good there has been and is in this agitation.
+Let me bring out to view this astonishing fact.
+
+1. Twenty-five years ago, and previously, the whole slave-holding South
+and West had a strong tendency to emancipation, in some form. But the
+abolition movement then began, and arrested that Southern and Western
+leaning to emancipation. Many people have said, and do say, that that
+_arrest_ was and is a great evil. I say it was and is a great good. Why?
+Answer: It was and would now be premature. Had it been carried out, it
+would have been and would now be evil, immense, inconceivable,--to master,
+slave, America, Africa, and the world; because neither master, slave,
+America, Africa, the world, were, or are, ready for emancipation. God has
+a great deal to do before he is ready for emancipation. He tells us so by
+this _arrest_ put upon that tendency to emancipation years ago. For He put
+it into the hearts of abolitionists _to make the arrest_. And He stopped
+the Southern movement all the more perfectly by permitting Great Britain
+to emancipate Jamaica, and letting that experiment prove, as it has, a
+perfect failure and a terrible warning. JAMAICA IS DESTROYED. And now,
+whatever be done for its negroes must be done with the full admission that
+what has been attempted was in violation of the duty Britain owed to
+those negroes. But her failure in seeing and doing her duty, God has given
+to us to teach us knowledge; and, through us, to instruct the world in the
+demonstration of the problem of slavery.
+
+2. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to give Texas to the South. Texas, a territory so vast that
+a bird, as Webster said, can't fly over it in a week. Many in the South
+did not want Texas. But many longer-headed ones did want it. And Northern
+men voted and gave to the South exactly what these longer-headed Southern
+statesmen wanted. This, I grant, was Northern anti-slavery fatuity,
+utterly unaccountable but that God made them do it.
+
+3. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to vote for Polk, Dallas, and Texas. This gave us the
+Mexican War; and that immense territory, its spoil,--a territory which,
+although it may not be favorable for slave-labor, has increased, and will,
+in many ways, extend the slave-power.
+
+4. This leads me to say that God put it into the hearts of many Northern
+men--especially abolitionists--to believe what Great Britain
+said,--namely, that _free trade_ would result in slave-emancipation. _But
+lo! the slave-holder wanted free trade_. So Northern abolitionists helped
+to destroy the _tariff policy_, and thus to expand the demand for, and the
+culture of, cotton. Now, see, the gold of California has _perpetuated free
+trade_ by enabling our merchants to meet the enormous demand for specie
+created by free trade. So California helps the slave-power. But the
+abolitionists gave us Polk, the Mexican War, and California.
+
+5. God put it into the hearts of the North, and especially abolitionists,
+to stimulate the settlement of new free States, and to be the ardent
+friends of an immense foreign emigration. The result has been to send down
+to the South, with railroad speed and certainty, corn, wheat, flour, meal,
+bacon, pork, beef, and every other imaginable form of food, in quantity
+amazing, and so cheap that the planter can spread wider and wider the
+culture of cotton.
+
+6. God has, by this growth of the Northwest, made the demand for cotton
+enormous in the North and Northwest. Again, he has made English and French
+experiments to procure cotton somewhere else than from the United States
+_dead failures_,--in the East Indies, Egypt, Algeria, Brazil. God has
+thus given to the Southern planter an absolute monopoly. A monopoly so
+great that he, the Southern planter, sits now upon his throne of cotton
+and wields the commercial sceptre of the world. Yes, it is the Southern
+planter who says to-day to haughty England, Go to war, if you dare;
+dismiss Dallas, if you dare. Yes, he who sits on the throne of the
+cotton-bag has triumphed at last over him who sits on the throne of the
+wool-sack. England is prostrate at his feet, as well as the abolitionists.
+
+7. God has put it into the hearts of abolitionists to prevent half a
+million of free negroes from going to Liberia; and thereby the
+abolitionists have made them consumers of slave-products to the extension
+of the slave-power. And, by thus keeping them in America, the
+abolitionists have so increased their degradation as to prove all the more
+the utter folly of emancipation in the United States.
+
+8. God has permitted the anti-slavery men in the North, in England, in
+France, and everywhere, so to blind themselves in hypocrisy as to give the
+Southern slave-holder his last perfect triumph over them; for God tells
+the planter to say to the North, to England, to France, to all who buy
+cotton, "Ye men of Boston, New York, London, Paris,--ye hypocrites,--ye
+brand me as a pirate, a kidnapper, a murderer, a demon, fit only for hell,
+and yet ye buy my blood-stained cotton. O ye hypocrites!--ye Boston
+hypocrites! why don't ye throw the cotton in the sea, as your fathers did
+the tea? Ye Boston hypocrites! ye say, _if we had been in the days of our
+fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the
+slave-trade!_ Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the
+children of them who, in fact, kidnapped and bought in blood, and sold the
+slave in America! for now, ye hypocrites, ye buy the blood-stained cotton
+in quantity so immense, that _ye_ have run up the price of slaves to
+be more than a thousand dollars,--the average of old and young! O ye
+hypocrites! ye denounce slavery; then ye bid it live, and not die,--in
+that ye buy sugar, rice, tobacco, and, above all, cotton! Ye hypocrites!
+ye abuse the devil, and then fall down and worship him!--ye
+hypocrites,--ye New England hypocrites,--ye Old England hypocrites,--ye
+French hypocrites,--ye Uncle Tom's Cabin hypocrites,--ye Beecher
+hypocrites,--ye Rhode Island Consociation hypocrites! Oh, your holy
+twaddle stinks in the nostrils of God, and he commands me to lash you
+with my scorn, and his scorn, so long as ye gabble about the sin of
+slavery, and then bow down to me, and buy and spin cotton, and thus work
+for me as truly as my slaves! O ye fools and blind, fill ye up the measure
+of your folly, and blindness, and shame! And this ye are doing. Ye have,
+like the French infidels, made _reason_ your goddess, and are exalting her
+above the Bible; and, in your unitarianism and neology and all modes of
+infidelity, ye are rejecting and crucifying the Son of God."
+
+Now, my brother, this controlling slave-power is a world-wide fact. Its
+statistics of bales count by millions; its tonnage counts by hundreds of
+thousands; its manufacture is reckoned by the workshops of America and
+Europe; its supporters are numbered by all who must thus be clothed in the
+world. This tremendous power has been developed in great measure by the
+abolition agitation, controlled by God. I believe, then, as I have already
+said, that God intends one of two things. He either intends to destroy the
+United States by this slave-power, or he intends to bless my country and
+the world by the unfoldings of his wisdom in this matter. I believe he
+will bless the world in the working out of this slavery. I rejoice, then,
+in the agitation which has so resulted, and will so terminate, to reveal
+the Bible, and bless mankind.
+
+Your affectionate friend,
+
+F.A. Ross.
+
+REV. A. BLACKBURN.
+
+
+
+
+What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?
+
+
+
+My position as to this all-important question, in my New York speech, was
+made subject of remark in the "Presbyterian Herald," Louisville, Kentucky,
+to which I replied at length in the "Presbyterian Witness," Knoxville,
+Tennessee. No rejoinder was ever made to that reply. But, recently, an
+extract from the younger Edwards was submitted to me. To that I gave the
+following letter. The subject is of the first and the last importance, and
+bears directly, as set forth in my New York speech, on infidelity, and, of
+course, the slavery question:--
+
+Mr. Editor:--In your paper of Tuesday, 24th ult., there is an article,
+under this head, giving the argument of Edwards (the son) against my views
+as to _the foundation of moral obligation_.
+
+I thank the writer for his argument, and his courteous manner of
+presenting it. In my third letter to Mr. Barnes, I express my preparation
+to meet "_all comers_" on this question; and I am pleased to see this
+"_comer_". If my views cannot be refuted by Edwards, I may wait long
+for an "_uglier customer_."
+
+A word, introductory, to your correspondent. He says, "His [Dr. Ross's]
+theory was advanced and argued against in a former age." By this, I
+understand him to express his belief that my theory has been rejected
+heretofore. Well. It may, nevertheless, be the true theory. The Copernican
+astronomy was argued against in a former age and rejected; yet it has
+prevailed. Newton's law of gravitation was argued against and rejected by
+a whole generation of philosophers on the continent of Europe; yet it has
+prevailed. And now all school-boys and girls would call anybody a fool who
+should deny it. Steam, in all its applications, was argued against and
+rejected; yet it has prevailed. So the electric telegraph; and, to go back
+a little, the theory of vaccination,--the circulation of the blood,--a
+thousand things; yea, Edwards's (the father) theory of virtue, although
+received by many, has been argued against, and by many rejected; yet it
+will prevail. Yea, his idea of the unity of the race in Adam was and is
+argued against and rejected; yet it will prevail. I feel, therefore, no
+fear that my theory of moral obligation will not be acknowledged because
+it was argued against and rejected by many in a former age, and may be
+now. Nay; facts to prove it are accumulating,--facts which were not
+developed in Edwards's day,--facts showing, irresistibly, that Edwards's
+theory, which is _that_ most usually now held, is what I say it is,--_the
+rejection of revelation, infidelity, and atheism_. The evidence amounts to
+demonstration.
+
+The question is in a nutshell; it is this:--_Shall man submit to the
+revealed will of God_, or _to his own will?_ That is the naked question
+when the fog of confused ideas and unmeaning words is lifted and
+dispersed.
+
+My position, expressed in the speech delivered in the General Assembly,
+New York, May, 1856, is this:--"God, in making all things, saw that, in
+the relations he would constitute between himself and intelligent
+creatures, and among themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass.
+In his benevolent wisdom, he then _willed_ LAW to control this _good_ and
+_evil_; and he thereby made _conformity_ to that law to be _right_, and
+_non-conformity_ to be _wrong_. Why? Simply because he saw it to be
+_good_, and _made it to be_ RIGHT; not because _he saw it to be right_,
+but because _he made it to be right_."
+
+Your correspondent replies to this theory in the following words of
+Edwards:--"Some hold that the foundation of moral obligation is
+primarily in the will of God. But the will of God is either benevolent
+or not. If it be benevolent, and on that account the foundation of moral
+obligation, it is not the source of obligation merely because it is the
+will of God, but because it is benevolent, and is of a tendency to
+promote happiness; and this places the foundation of obligation in a
+tendency to happiness, and not primarily in the will of God. But if the
+will of God, and that which is the expression of it, the divine law, be
+allowed to be not benevolent, and are foundation of obligation, we are
+obliged to conform to them, whatever they be, however malevolent and
+opposite to holiness and goodness the requirements be. But this, I
+presume, none will pretend." Very fairly and strongly put; that's to say,
+if I understand Edwards, he supposes, if God was the devil and man what
+he is, then man would not be under obligation to obey the devil's will!
+That's it! Well, I suppose so too; and I reckon most _Christians_ would
+agree to that statement, Nay, more: I presume nobody ever taught that the
+mere naked _will_, abstractly considered, if it could be, from the
+_character_ of God, was the ground of moral obligation? Nay, I think
+nobody ever imagined that the notion of an infinite Creator presupposes
+or includes the idea that he is a malevolent Being! I agree, then, with
+Edwards, that the ultimate ground of obligation _is_ in the _fact_ that
+God is benevolent, or is a good God. I said _that_ in my speech quoted
+above. I formally stated that "_God, in his benevolent wisdom, willed law
+to control the natural good and evil_," &c. What, then, is the point of
+disagreement between my view and Edwards's? It is in _the different ways
+by which we_ GET AT _the_ FACT _of divine benevolence_. I hold that the
+REVEALED WORD _tells us who God is and what he does_, and is, therefore,
+the ULTIMATE GROUND OF OBLIGATION. But Edwards holds that HUMAN REASON
+_must tell us who God is and what he does_, and IS, therefore, the
+PRIMARY GROUND OF OBEDIENCE. _That_ is my issue with Edwards and others;
+and it is as broad an issue as _faith in revelation_, or the REJECTION OF
+IT. I do not charge that Edwards did, or that all who hold with him do,
+deny the word of God; but I do affirm that their argument does. The
+matter is plain. For what is revelation? It is that God has appeared in
+person, and _told_ man in WORD that he is GOD; and _told_ him first in
+WORD (to be expanded in studying _creation_ and _providence_) that God is
+a Spirit, eternal, infinite in power, wisdom, goodness, holiness,--the
+Creator, Preserver, Benefactor. That WORD, moreover, he proved by
+highest evidence--namely, supernatural evidence--to be _absolute,
+perfect_ TRUTH as to all FACT affirmed _of him_ and _what_ he _does_.
+REVELATION, as claimed in the Bible, was and is THAT THING.
+
+Man, then, having this revelation; is under obligation ever to believe
+every jot and tittle of that WORD. He at first, no doubt, knew little of
+the meaning of some _facts_ declared; nay, he may have comprehended
+nothing of the sense or scope of many _facts_ affirmed. Nay, he may now,
+after thousands of years, know most imperfectly the meaning of that WORD.
+But he was and he is, notwithstanding, to believe with absolute faith the
+WORD,--that God _is_ all he says he is, and _does_ all he says he
+does,--however that WORD may _go beyond_ his reason, or _surprise_ his
+feelings, or _alarm_ his conscience, or _command_ his will.
+
+This statement of what revelation is, settles the whole question as
+presented by Edwards. For REVELATION, as explained, does FIX _forever the
+foundation of man's moral obligation in the benevolence of God_,
+PRIMARILY, as it is _expressed_ in the word of God. REVELATION does then,
+in that sense, FIX _obligation in the_ MERE WILL OF GOD; for, the moment
+you attempt to establish the foundation _somewhere else_, you have
+abandoned the ground of revelation. You have left the WILL OF GOD _in his
+word_, and you have made your rule of right to be the WILL OF MAN _in the_
+SELF _of the_ HEART. The proof of what I here say is so plain, even as the
+writing on the tables of Habakkuk's vision, that he may run that readeth
+it. Read, then, even as on the _tables_.
+
+God _says_ in his WORD, "I am all-powerful, all-wise, the Creator." "You
+may be," says Edwards, "but I want _primary foundation_ for my faith; and
+I can't take your _word_ for it. I must look first into _nature_ to see if
+evidence of infinite power and wisdom is there,--to see if evidence of a
+Creator is there,--and if thou art he!"
+
+Again, God _says_ in his word, "I am benevolent, and _my will_ in my law
+is expression of that benevolence." "You may tell the truth," Edwards
+replies, "but I want _primary ground_ for my belief, and I must hold your
+word suspended until I examine into my reason, my feelings, my conscience,
+my will,--to see if your WORD _harmonizes_ with my HEART,--to see if what
+you reveal tends to _happiness_ IN MY NOTION OF HAPPINESS; _or tends to
+right_ IN MY NOTION OF RIGHT!" That's it. That's the theory of Edwards,
+Barnes, and others.
+
+And what is this but the attempt to know the divine attributes and
+character in _some other way_ than through the divine WORD? And what is
+this but the denial of the divine WORD, except so far as it agrees with
+the knowledge of the attributes and character of God, obtained in THAT
+_some other way?_ And what is this but to make the word of God
+_subordinate_ to the teaching of the HUMAN HEART? And what is this but to
+make the WILL _of God_ give place to the WILL _of man?_ And what is this
+but the REJECTION OF REVELATION? Yet this is the result (though not
+intended by him) of the whole scheme of obligation, maintained by Edwards
+and by all who agree with him.
+
+Carry it out, and what is the progress and the end of it? This. Human
+reason--the human heart--will be supreme. Some, I grant, will hold to a
+revelation of some sort. A thing more and more transcendental,--a thing
+more and more of fog and moonshine,--fog floating in German cellars from
+fumes of lager-beer, and moonshine gleaming from the imaginations of the
+drinkers. Some, like Socrates and Plato, will have a God supreme,
+personal, glorious, somewhat like the true; and with him many inferior
+deities,--animating the stars, the earth, mountains, valleys, plains, the
+sea, rivers, fountains, the air, trees, flowers, and all living things.
+Some will deny a personal God, and conceive, instead, the intelligent mind
+of the universe, without love. Some will contend for mere law,--of
+gravitation and attraction; and some will suggest that all is the result
+of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Here, having passed through the
+shadows and the darkness, we have reached the blackness of
+infidelity,--blank atheism. No God--yea, all the way the "_fools_" were
+saying in their hearts, no God. What now is man? Alas! some, the Notts and
+Gliddons, tell us, man was indeed _created_ millions of ages ago, the Lord
+only knows when, in swarms like bees to suit the zones of the
+earth,--while other some, the believers in the _vestiges of creation_, say
+man is the result of development,--from fire, dust, granite, grass, the
+creeping thing, bird, fish, four-footed beast, monkey. Yea, and some of
+these last philosophers are even now going to Africa to try to find men
+they have heard tell of, who still have tails and are jumping and climbing
+somewhere in the regions around the undiscovered sources of the Nile.
+
+This is the progress and the result of the Edwards theory; because, deny
+or hesitate about revelation, and man cannot prove, _absolutely_, any of
+the things we are considering. Let us see if he can. Edwards writes, "On
+the supposition that the will or law of God is the primary foundation,
+reason, and standard of right and virtue, every attempt _to prove the
+moral perfection or attributes of God is absurd_." Here, then, Edwards
+believes, that, to reach the primary foundation of right and virtue, he
+must not take God's word as to his perfection or attributes, no matter how
+fully _God_ may have _proved_ his word: no; but he, Edwards, he, man, must
+first _prove_ them in _some other way_. And, of course, he believes he can
+reach such primary foundation by such other proof. Well, let us see how he
+goes about it. I give him, to try his hand, the easiest
+attribute,--"POWER." I give him, then, all creation, and providence
+besides, as his _black-board_, on which to work his demonstration. I give
+him, then, the lifetime of Methuselah, in which to reach his conclusion of
+proof.--Well, I will now suppose we have all lived and waited that long
+time: what is his _proof_ OF INFINITE POWER? Has he found the EXHIBITION
+of _infinite power?_ No. He has found _proof_ of GREAT POWER; but he has
+not reached the DISPLAY of _infinite power_. What then is his _faith_ in
+infinite power after such _proof?_ Why, just this: he INFERS _only_, that
+THE POWER, _which did the things he sees, can go on, and on, and on, to
+give greater, and greater, and greater manifestations of itself!_ VERY
+GOOD: _if so be, we can have no better proof_. But _that_ PROOF is
+infinitely below ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. And all
+manifestations of power to a _finite creature_, even to the archangel
+Michael, during countless millions of ages, never gives, because it never
+can give to him, ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. But the word of GOD
+gives the PROOF ABSOLUTE, _and in a moment of time!_ "I AM THE ALMIGHTY!"
+The _perfect proof_ is in THAT WORD OF GOD.
+
+I might set Edwards to work to prove the _infinite wisdom_, the _infinite
+benevolence_, the _infinite holiness_--yea, the EXISTENCE--of God. And he,
+finite man, in any examination of creation or providence, must fall
+infinitely below the PERFECT PROOF.
+
+So then I tell Edwards, and all agreeing with him, that _it is absurd_ to
+attempt to _prove_ the moral perfection and attributes of God, if he
+thereby seeks to reach the HIGHEST EVIDENCE, _or if he thereby means to
+find the_ PRIMARY GROUND _of moral obligation_.
+
+Do I then teach that man should not seek the _proof_ there is, of the
+perfection and attributes of God, in _nature and providence_? No. I hold
+that such proof unfolds the _meaning_ of the FACTS declared in the WORD of
+God, and is all-important, as such expansion of meaning. But I say, by
+authority of the Master, that _the highest proof, the absolute proof, the
+perfect proof_, of the FACTS as to _who God is, and what he does_, and the
+PRIMARY OBLIGATION _thereupon, is in the_ REVEALED WORD.
+
+FRED. A. ROSS.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., April 3, 1857.
+
+N.B.--In notice of last Witness's extract from Erskine, I remark that
+Thomas Erskine was, and may yet be, a lawyer of Edinburgh. He wrote
+_three works_:--_one_ on the _Internal Evidences_, the _next_ on
+_Faith_, the _last_ on the _Freeness of the Gospel_. They are all
+written with great ability, and contain much truth. But all have in them
+fundamental _untruths_. There is least in the Evidences; more in the
+essay on Faith; most in the tract on the Freeness of the Gospel,--which
+last has been utterly refuted, and has passed away. His _Faith_ is,
+also, not republished. The Evidences is good, like good men,
+notwithstanding the evil.
+
+
+
+
+Letters to Rev. A. Barnes.
+
+
+
+
+Introduction.
+
+
+
+As part of the great slavery discussion, Rev. A. Barnes, of Philadelphia,
+published, in October, 1856, a pamphlet, entitled, "The CHURCH and
+SLAVERY." In this tract he invites every man to utter his views on the
+subject. And, setting the example, he speaks his own with the greatest
+freedom and honesty.
+
+In the same freedom of speech, I have considered his views unscriptural,
+false, fanatical, and infidel. Therefore, while I hold him in the highest
+respect, esteem, and affection, as a divine and Christian gentleman, and
+cherish his past relations to me, yet I have in these letters written to
+him, and of him, just as I would have done had he lived in France or
+Germany, a stranger to me, and given to the world the refined scoff of the
+one, or the muddy transcendentalism of the other.
+
+My first letter is merely a glance at some things in his pamphlet, in
+which I show wherein I agree and disagree with him,--_i.e._ in our
+estimate of the results of the agitation; in our views of the Declaration
+of Independence; in our belief of the way men are made infidels; and in
+our appreciation of the testimonies of past General Assemblies.
+
+The other letters I will notice in similar introductions.
+
+These letters first appeared as original contributions to the Christian
+Observer, published and edited by Dr. A. Converse, Philadelphia.
+
+I take this occasion to express my regard for him, and my sense of the
+ability with which he has long maintained the rights and interests of the
+Presbyterian body, to which we both belong; and the wise and masterly way
+in which he has vindicated, from the Bible, the truth on the slavery
+question. To him, too, the public is indebted for the first exhibition of
+Mr. Barnes's errors in his recent tract which has called forth my reply.
+
+
+
+
+No. I.
+
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+_Dear Sir_:--You have recently published a tract:--"The Church and
+Slavery."
+
+"The opinion of each individual," you remark, "contributes to form public
+sentiment, as the labor of the animalcule in the ocean contributes to the
+coral reefs that rise above the waves."
+
+True, sir, and beautifully expressed. But while, in harmony with your
+intimation, I must regard you one of the animalcules, rearing the coral
+reef of public opinion, I cannot admit your disclaimer of "special
+influence" among them in their work. Doubtless, sir, you have "special
+influence,"--and deserve to have. I make no apology for addressing you. I
+am one of the animalcules.
+
+I agree, and I disagree, with you. I harmonize in your words,--"The
+present is eminently a time when the views of every man on the subject of
+slavery should be uttered in unambiguous tones." I agree with you in this
+affirmation; because the subject has yet to be fully understood; because,
+when understood, if THE BIBLE does _not_ sanction the system, the MASTER
+must cease to be the master. The SLAVE must cease to be the slave. He must
+be _free_, AND EQUAL IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE. _That_ is your
+"_unambiguous tone_". Let it be heard, if _that_ is the word of God.
+
+But if THE BIBLE _does_ sanction the system, then _that_ "unambiguous
+tone" will silence abolitionists who admit the Scriptures; it will satisfy
+all good men, and give peace to the country. That is the "_tone_" I want
+men to hear. Listen to it in the past and present speech of providence.
+The time was when _you_ had the very _public sentiment_ you are now trying
+to form. From Maine to Louisiana, the American mind was softly yielding to
+the impress of emancipation, in some hope, however vague and imaginary.
+Southern as well as Northern men, in the church and out of it, not having
+sufficiently studied the word of God, and, under our own and French
+revolutionary excitement, looking only at the evils of slavery, wished it
+away from the land. It was a _mistaken_ public sentiment. Yet, such as it
+was, you had it, and it was doing your work. It was Quaker-like, mild and
+affectionate. It did not, however, work fast enough for you. You thought
+that the negro, with his superior attributes of body and mind and higher
+advantages of the nineteenth century, might reach, in a day, the liberty
+and equality which the Anglo-American had attained after the struggle of
+his ancestors during a thousand years! You got up the agitation. You got
+it up in the Church and State. You got it up over the length and breadth
+of this whole land. Let me show you some things you have secured, as the
+results of your work.
+
+
+
+_First Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+1. The most consistent abolitionists, affirming the sin of slavery, on the
+maxim of created equality and unalienable right, after torturing the Bible
+for a while, to make it give the same testimony, felt they could get
+nothing from the book. They felt that the God of the Bible disregarded the
+thumb-screw, the boot, and the wheel; that he would not speak for them,
+but against them. These consistent men have now turned away from the
+word, in despondency; and are seeking, somewhere, an abolition Bible, an
+abolition Constitution for the United States, and an abolition God.
+
+This, sir, is the _first result_ of your agitation:--the very van of your
+attack repulsed, and driven into infidelity.
+
+
+
+_A Second Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+2. Many others, and you among them, are trying in exactly the same way
+just mentioned to make the Bible speak against slave-holding. You get
+nothing by torturing the English version. People understand English. Nay,
+you get little by applying the rack to the Hebrew and Greek; even before a
+tribunal of men like you, who proclaim beforehand that Moses, in Hebrew,
+and Paul, in Greek, _must_ condemn slavery because "_it is a violation of
+the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence_." You find it
+difficult to persuade men that Moses and Paul were moved by the Holy Ghost
+to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson! You find it hard to make
+men believe that Moses saw in the mount, and Paul had vision in heaven,
+that this future _apostle of Liberty_ was inspired by Jesus Christ.
+
+You torture very severely. But the muscles and bones of those old men are
+tough and strong. They won't yield under your terrible wrenchings. You get
+only groans and mutterings. You claim these voices, I know, as testimony
+against slavery. But you cannot torture in secret as in olden times. When
+putting the question, you have to let men be present,--who tell us that
+Moses and Paul won't speak for you,--that they are silent, like Christ
+before Pilate's scourging-men; or, in groans and mutterings,--the voices
+of their sorrow and the tones of their indignation,--they rebuke your
+pre-judgment of the Almighty when you say if the Bible sanctions slavery,
+"it neither ought to be nor could be received by mankind as a divine
+revelation."
+
+This, sir, is the _second result_ you have gained by your agitation. You
+have brought a thousand Northern ministers of the gospel, with yourself,
+to the verge of the same denial of the word of God which they have made,
+who are only a little ahead of you in the road you are travelling.
+
+
+
+_A Third Result of Agitation._
+
+
+3. Meanwhile, many of your most pious men, soundest scholars, and
+sagacious observers of providence, have been led to study the Bible more
+faithfully in the light of the times. And they are reading it more and
+more in harmony with the views which have been reached by the highest
+Southern minds, to wit:--That the relation of master and slave is
+sanctioned by the Bible;--that it is a relation belonging to the same
+category as those of husband and wife, parent and child, master and
+apprentice, master and hireling;--that the relations of husband and wife,
+parent and child, _were ordained in Eden for man, as man_, and _modified
+after the fall_, while the relation of slavery, as a system of labor, is
+_only one form of the government ordained of God over fallen and degraded
+man_;--that the _evils_ in the system are _the same evils_ of OPPRESSION
+we see in the relation of husband and wife, and all other forms of
+government;--that slavery, as a relation, suited to the more degraded or
+the more ignorant and helpless types of a sunken humanity, is, like all
+government, intended _as the proof of the curse of such degradation, and
+at the same time to elevate and bless_;--that the relation of husband and
+wife, being for man, as man, _will ever be over him_, while slavery will
+remain so long as God sees it best, as a controlling power over the
+ignorant, the more degraded and helpless;--and that, when he sees it for
+the good of the country, he will cause it to pass away, if the slave can
+be elevated to liberty and equality, political and social, with his
+master, _in_ that country; or _out of_ that country, if such elevation
+cannot be given therein, but may be realized in some other land: all which
+result must be left to the unfoldings of the divine will, _in harmony with
+the Bible_, and not to a newly-discovered dispensation. These facts are
+vindicated in the Bible and Providence. In the Old Testament, they stare
+you in the face:--in the family of Abraham,--in his slaves, bought with
+his money and born in his house,--in Hagar, running away under her
+mistress's hard dealing with her, and yet sent back, as a fugitive slave,
+by the angel,--in the law which authorized the Hebrews to hold their
+brethren as slaves for a time,--in which parents might sell their children
+into bondage,--in which the heathen were given to the Hebrews as their
+slaves forever,--in which slaves were considered so much the money of
+their master, that the master who killed one by an unguarded blow was,
+under certain circumstances, sufficiently punished in his slave's death,
+because he thereby lost his money,--in which the difference between
+_man-stealing_ and _slave-holding_ is, by law, set forth,--in which the
+runaway from heathen masters may not be restored, because God gave him
+the benefits of an adopted Hebrew. In the New Testament:--wherein the
+slavery of Greece and Rome was recognised,--in the obligations laid on
+master and slave,--in the close connection of this obligation with the
+duties of husband and wife, parent and child,--in the obligation to return
+the fugitive slave to his master,--and _in the condemnation of every
+abolition principle_, "AS DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH." (1 Tim. vi. 1-5.)
+
+This view of slavery is becoming more and more, not only the settled
+decision of the Southern but of the best Northern mind, with a movement so
+strong that you have been startled by it to write the pamphlet now lying
+before me.
+
+This is the _third result_ you have secured:--to make many of the best men
+in the North see the infidelity of your philosophy, falsely so called, on
+the subject of slavery, in the clearer and clearer light of the
+Scriptures.
+
+
+
+_Another Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+4. The Southern slave-holder is now satisfied, as never before, that the
+relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible; and he feels, as
+never before, the obligations of the word of God. He no longer, in his
+ignorance of the Scriptures, and afraid of its teachings, will seek to
+defend his common-sense opinions of slavery by arguments drawn from "Types
+of Mankind," and other infidel theories; but he will look, in the light of
+the Bible, on all the good and evil in the system. And when the North, as
+it will, shall regard him holding from God this high power for great
+good,--when the North shall no more curse, but bid him God-speed,--then he
+will bless himself and his slave, in nobler benevolence. With no false
+ideas of created equality and unalienable right, but with the Bible in his
+heart and hand, he will do justice and love mercy in higher and higher
+rule. Every evil will be removed, and the negro will be elevated to the
+highest attainments he can make, and be prepared for whatever destiny God
+intends. This, sir, is the _fourth result_ of your agitation:--to make the
+Southern master _know_, from the Bible, his right to be a master, and his
+duty to his slave.
+
+These _four results_ are so fully before you, that I think you must see
+and feel them. You have brought out, besides, tremendous political
+consequences, giving astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on
+these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of
+the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep
+of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I
+rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly
+purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long
+latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and
+South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of
+God and to speak it to the land. I rejoice that all the South now know
+that God gives the right to hold slaves, and, with that right,
+obligations they must fulfil. I rejoice that the day has dawned in which
+the North and South will think and feel and act together on the subject
+of slavery. I thank God for the agitation. May he forgive the folly and
+wickedness of many who have gotten it up! May he reveal more and more,
+that surely the wrath of man shall praise him, while the remainder of
+wrath he will restrain!
+
+
+
+_Declaration of Independence_.
+
+
+I agree with you, sir, that _the second paragraph_ of the Declaration of
+Independence contains _five affirmations_, declared to be self-evident
+truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every
+thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to
+liberty,--to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to
+their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident
+truth, or a truth at all. On the contrary, that each one is contrary to
+the Bible; that each one, separately, is denied; and that all five,
+collectively, are denied and upset by the Bible, by the natural history of
+man, and by providence, in every age of the world. I say this now. In a
+subsequent communication, I will prove what I affirm. For the present I
+merely add, that the Declaration of Independence stands in no need of
+these false affirmations. It was, and is, a beautiful whole without them.
+It was, and is, without these imaginary maxims, the simple statement of
+the grievances the colonies had borne from the mother-country, and their
+right _as colonies_, when thus oppressed, to declare themselves
+independent. That is to say, the right given of God to oppressed children
+to seek protection in another family, or to set up for themselves somewhat
+before _twenty-one_ or natural maturity; right belonging to them _in the
+British family;_ right sanctioned of God; right blessed of God, in the
+resistance of the colonies _as colonies_--not as individual men--to the
+attempt of the mother-country to consummate her tyranny. But God gives no
+sanction to the affirmation that he has _created all men equal_; that this
+is _self-evident,_ and that he has given them _unalienable rights;_ that
+he has made government to _derive its power solely from their consent_,
+and that he has given them _the right to change that government in their
+mere pleasure_. All this--every word of it, every jot and tittle--is the
+liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times
+in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if
+Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed
+it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as
+time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru
+Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, Garrison, or Barnes.
+
+Sir, that paragraph is an _excrescence_ on the tree of our liberty. I pray
+you take it away. Worship it if you will, and in a manner imitate the
+Druid. He gave reverence to the _mistletoe_, but first he removed the
+_parasite_ from the noble tree. Do you the same. Cut away _this mistletoe_
+with golden knife, as did the Druid; enshrine its imaginary divinity in a
+grove or cave; then retire there, and leave our oak to stand in its glory
+in the light of heaven. Men have been afraid to say all this for years,
+just as they have been timid to assert that God has placed master and
+slave in the same relation as husband and wife. Public sentiment, which
+you once had and have lost, suppressed this utterance as the other. But
+now, men speak out; and I, for one, will tell you what the Bible reveals
+as to that part of the Declaration of Independence, as fearlessly as I
+tell you what it says of the system of slavery.
+
+
+
+_How Men are made Infidels_.
+
+
+I agree with you that some men have been, are, and will be, made infidels
+by hearing that God has ordained slavery as one form of his government
+over depraved mankind. But how does this fact prove that the Bible does
+not sanction slavery? Why, sir, you have been all your life teaching that
+some men are made infidels by hearing any truth of the Bible;--that some
+men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement,
+Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. True: and these men
+find "_great laws of their nature,--instinctive feelings_"--just such as
+you find against slavery, and not more perverted in them than in you,
+condemning all this Bible. And they hold now, with your sanction, that a
+book affirming such facts "_cannot be from God_."
+
+Sir, some men are made infidels by hearing the Ten Commandments, and they
+find "_great laws of their nature_," as strong in them as yours in you
+against slavery, warring against every one of these commandments. And
+they declare now, with your authority, that a book imposing such
+restraints upon human nature, "_cannot be from God_" Sir, what is it
+makes infidels? You have been wont to answer, "They _will not_ have God
+_to rule over them_. They _will not_ have the BIBLE _to control the great
+laws of their nature."_ Sir, that is the true answer. And you know that
+_the great instinct of liberty_ is only one of _three great laws_,
+needing special teaching and government:--that is to say, _the instinct
+to rule; the instinct to submit to be ruled; and the instinct for
+liberty._ You know, too, that the instinct _to submit_ is the strongest,
+the instinct _to rule_ is next, and that the _aspiration for liberty_ is
+the weakest. Hence you know the overwhelming majority of men have ever
+been willing to be slaves; masters have been next in number; while the
+few have struggled for freedom.
+
+The Bible, then, in proclaiming God's will _as to these three great
+impulses_, will be rejected by men, exactly as they have yielded forbidden
+control to the one or the other of them. The Bible will make infidels of
+_masters_, when God calls to them to rule right, or to give up rule, if
+they have allowed _the instinct of power_ to make them hate God's
+authority. Pharaoh spoke for all infidel rulers when he said, "_Who is the
+Lord that I should obey his voice?_"
+
+The Bible will make infidels of _slaves_, when God calls to them to aspire
+to be free, if they have permitted _the instinct of submission to_ make
+them hate his commands. The Israelites in the wilderness revealed ten
+times, in their murmuring, _the slave-instinct_ in all ages:--"_Would to
+God we had died in the wilderness!_"
+
+You know all this, and you condemn these infidels. Good.
+
+But, sir, you know equally well that the Bible will make infidels of men
+_affirming the instinct of liberty,_ when God calls them to learn of him
+how _much liberty_ he gives, and _how_ he gives it, and _when_ he gives
+it, if they have so yielded to this law of their nature as to make them
+despise the word of the Lord. Sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram spoke out
+just what the liberty-and-equality men have said in all time:--"_Ye, Moses
+and Aaron, take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy,
+every one of them: wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the
+congregation?"_ Verily, sir, these men were intensely excited by "_the
+great law of our nature,--the great instinct of freedom."_ Yea, they told
+God to his face they had looked within, and found the _higher law of
+liberty and equality--the eternal right--in their intuitional
+consciousness_; and that they would not submit to his will in the
+elevation of Moses and Aaron _above them_.
+
+Verily, sir, you, in the spirit of Korah, now proclaim and say, "Ye
+masters, and ye white men who are not masters, North and South, ye take
+too much upon you, seeing the negro is created your equal, and, by
+unalienable right, is as free as you, and entitled to all your political
+and social life. Ye take, then, too much upon you in excluding him from
+your positions of wealth and honor, from your halls of legislation, and
+from your palace of the nation, and from your splendid couch, and from
+your fair women with long hair on that couch and in that gilded chariot:
+wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the negro?"
+
+Verily, sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram said all we have ever heard from
+abolition-platforms or now listen to from you. But the Lord made the
+earth swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram!
+
+I agree with you then, sir, fully, that some men have been, are, and will
+be, made infidels by hearing that God, in the Bible, has ordained slavery.
+But I hold this to be no argument against the fact that the Bible does so
+teach, because men are made infidels by any other doctrine or precept they
+hate to believe.
+
+Sir, no man has said all this better than you. And I cannot express my
+grief that you--in the principle now avowed, _that every man must
+interpret the Bible as he chooses to reason and feel_--sanction all the
+infidelity in the world, obliterate your "_Notes_" on the Bible, and deny
+the preaching of your whole life, so far as God may, in his wrath, permit
+you to expunge or recall the words of the wisdom of your better day.
+
+
+
+_Testimonies of General Assemblies_.
+
+
+I agree with you that the Presbyterian Church, both before and since its
+division, has testified, after a fashion, against slavery. But some of its
+action has been very curious testimony. I know not how the anti-slavery
+resolutions of 1818 were gotten up; nor how in some Assemblies since. I
+can guess, however, from what I do know, as to how such resolutions passed
+in Buffalo in 1853, and in New York in 1856. I know that in Buffalo they
+were at first voted down by a large majority. Then they were reconsidered
+in mere courtesy to men who said they wanted to speak. So the resolutions
+were passed after some days, in which the _screws_ were applied and
+turned, in part, _by female hands_, to save the chairman of the committee
+from _the effects_ of the resolutions being finally voted down!
+
+I know that, in New York, the decision of the Assembly to spread the
+minority report on the minutes was considered, in the body and out of it,
+as a Southern victory; for it revealed, however glossed over, that many in
+the house, who could not vote directly for the minority report, did in
+fact prefer it to the other.
+
+I was not in Detroit in 1850; but I think it was established in New York
+last May that that Detroit testimony was so admirably worded that both
+Southern and Northern men might vote for it with clear consciences!
+
+I need not pursue the investigation. I admit that, after this sort, you
+have the stultified abstractions of the New School Presbyterian
+Church,--while I have its common sense; you have its Delphic words,--I
+have its actions; you have the traditions of the elders making void the
+word of God,--I have the providence of God restraining the church from
+destroying itself and our social organization under folly, fanaticism, and
+infidelity.
+
+You, sir, seem to acknowledge this; for, while you appear pleased with the
+testimony of the New School Presbyterian Church, such as it is, you lament
+that the Old School have not been true to the resolutions of 1818,--that,
+in that branch of the church, it is questionable whether those resolutions
+could now be adopted. You lament the silence of the Episcopal, the
+Southern Methodist, and the Baptist denominations; you might add the
+Cumberland Presbyterian Church. And you know that in New England, in New
+York, and in the Northwest, many testify against _us_ as a pro-slavery
+body. You lament that so many members of the church, ministers of the
+gospel, and editors of religious papers, defend the system; you lament
+that so large a part of the religious literature of the land, though
+having its seat North and sustained chiefly by Northern funds, shows a
+perpetual deference to the slave-holder; you lament that, after fifty
+years, nothing has been done to arrest slavery; you lament and ask, "Why
+should this be so?" In saying this, you acknowledge that, while you have
+been laboring to get and have reached the abstract testimony of the
+church, all diluted as it is, the common-sense fact has been and is more
+and more brought out, in the providence of God, that _the slave-power has
+been and is gaining ground in the United States_. In one word, you have
+contrived to get, in confused utterance, the voice of the Sanhedrim; while
+Christ himself has been preaching in the streets of our Jerusalem the true
+meaning of slavery as one form of his government over fallen men.
+
+These, then, are some of the things I promised to show as the results of
+your agitation. This is the "_tone_" of the past and present speech of
+Providence on the subject of slavery. You seem disturbed. I feel sure
+things are going on well as to that subject. Speak on, then, "in
+unambiguous tones." But, sir, when you desire to go from words to
+actions,--when you intimate that the constitution of the Presbyterian
+Church may be altered to permit such action, or that, without its
+alteration, the church can detach itself from slavery by its existing laws
+or the modification of them,--then I understand you to mean that you
+desire to deal, in fact, with slave-holders as _offenders_. Then, sir,
+_you mean to exscind the South_; for it is absurd to imagine that you
+suppose the South will submit to such action. You mean, then, to _exscind
+the South, or to exscind yourself and others_, or to _compel the South to
+withdraw_. Your tract, just published, is, I suppose, intended by you to
+prepare the next General Assembly for such movement? What then? Will you
+make your "American Presbyterian," and your Presbyterian House, effect
+that great change in the religious literature of the land whereby the
+subject of slave-holding shall be approached _precisely_ as you deal with
+"theft, highway-robbery, or piracy?" Will you, then, by act of Assembly,
+Synod, Presbytery, Session, deny your pulpits, and communion-bread and
+wine, to slave-holding ministers, elders, and members? Will you, then,
+tell New England, and especially little Rhoda, We have purified our skirts
+from the blood: forgive us, and take us again to your love? What then?
+Will you then ostracize the South and compel the abolition of slavery?
+Sir, do you bid us fear these coming events, thus casting their shadow
+before from the leaves of your book?
+
+Sir, you may destroy the integrity of the New School Presbyterian Church.
+So much evil you may do; but you will hereby only add immensely to the
+great power and good of the Old School; and you will make disclosures of
+Providence, unfolding a consummation of things very different from the end
+you wish to accomplish for your country and the world.
+
+I write as one of the animalcules contributing to the coral reef of
+public opinion.
+
+F. A. Ross.
+
+
+
+
+No. II.
+
+Government Over Man a Divine Institute.
+
+
+
+This letter is the examination and refutation of the infidel theory of
+human government foisted into the Declaration of Independence.
+
+I had written this criticism in different form for publication, before Mr.
+Barnes's had appeared. I wrote it to vindicate my affirmation in the
+General Assembly which met in New York, May last, on this part of the
+Declaration. My views were maturely formed, after years of reflection, and
+weeks--nay months--of carefully-penned writing.
+
+And thus these truths, from the Bible, Providence, and common sense, were
+like rich freight, in goodly ship, waiting for the wind to sail; when lo,
+Mr. Barnes's abolition-breath filled the canvas, and carried it out of
+port into the wide, the free, the open sea of American public thought.
+There it sails. If pirate or other hostile craft comes alongside, the good
+ship has guns.
+
+I ask that this paper be carefully read more than once, twice, or three
+times. Mr. Barnes, I presume, will not so read it. He is committed.
+Greeley may notice it with his sparkling wit, albeit he has too much sense
+to grapple with its argument. The Evangelist-man will say of it, what he
+would say if Christ were casting out devils in New York,--"He casteth
+out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils." Yea, this
+Evangelist-man says that my version of the golden rule is "diabolical;"
+when truly that version is the _word_ of the Spirit, as Christ's casting
+out devils was the _work_ of the Holy Ghost.
+
+Gerrett Smith, Garrison, Giddings, do already agree with me, that they are
+right if Jefferson spoke the truth. Yea, whether the Bible be true, is no
+question with them no more than with him. Yea, they hold, as he did, that
+whether there be one God or twenty, it matters not: the fact either way,
+in men's minds, neither breaks the leg nor picks the pocket. (See
+Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.) Messrs. Beecher and Cheever will find
+nothing in me to aid them in speaking to the mobs of Ephesus and Antioch.
+They are making shrines, and crying, Great is Diana. Mrs. Stowe is on the
+Dismal Swamp, with Dred for her Charon, to paddle her light canoe, by the
+fire-fly lamps, to the Limbo of Vanity, of which she is the queen. None of
+these will read with attention or honesty, if at all, this examination of
+what Randolph long ago said was a _fanfaronade of nonsense_. These are all
+wiser "than seven men that can render a reason."
+
+But there are thousands, North and South, who will read this refutation,
+and will feel and acknowledge that in the light of God's truth the notion
+of created equality and unalienable right is falsehood and infidelity.
+
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--In my first letter I promised to prove that the paragraph in
+the Declaration of Independence, which contains the affirmation of
+created equality and unalienable rights, has no sanction from the word of
+God. I now meet my obligation.
+
+The time has come when civil liberty, as revealed in the Bible and in
+Providence, must be re-examined, understood, and defended against infidel
+theories of human rights. The slavery question has brought on this
+conflict; and, strange as it may seem, the South, the land of the slave,
+is summoned by God to defend the liberty he gives; while the North, the
+clime of the free, misunderstands and changes the truth of God into a
+lie,--claiming a liberty he does not give. Wherefore is this? I reply:---
+
+God, when he ordained government over men, gave to the individual man
+RIGHTS, _only_ as he is under government. He first established the family;
+hence all other rule is merely the family expanded. The _good_ of the
+family limited the _rights_ of every member. God required the family, and
+then the state, so to rule as to give to every member the _good_ which is
+his, in harmony with the welfare of the whole; and he commanded the
+individual to seek _that good_, and NO MORE.
+
+Now, mankind being depraved, government has ever violated its obligation
+to rule for the benefit of the entire community, and has wielded its
+power in oppression. Consequently, the governed have ever struggled to
+secure the good which was their right. But, in this struggle, they have
+ever been tempted to go beyond the limitation God had made, and to seek
+supposed good, not given, in rights, prompted by _self-will_, destructive
+of the state.
+
+Government thus ever existing in oppression, and people thus ever rising
+up against despotism, have been the history of mankind.
+
+The Reformation was one of the many convulsions in this long-continued
+conflict. In its first movements, men claimed the liberty the Bible
+grants. Soon they ran into licentiousness. God then stayed the further
+progress of emancipation in Europe, because the spread of the asserted
+liberty would have made infidelity prevail over that part of the
+continent where the Reformation was arrested. God preferred Romanism,
+and other despotisms, modified as they were by the struggle, to rule for
+a time, than have those countries destroyed under the sway of a
+licentious freedom.
+
+In this contest the North American colonies had their rise, and they
+continued the strife with England until they declared themselves
+independent.
+
+That "Declaration" affirmed not only the liberty sanctioned of the Bible,
+but also the liberty constituting infidelity. Its first paragraph, to the
+word "_separation_," is a noble introduction. Omit, then, what follows,
+to the sentence beginning "_Prudence will dictate_," and the paper, thus
+expurgated, is complete, and is then simply the complaint of the colonies
+against the government of England, which had oppressed them beyond
+further submission, and the assertion of their right to be free and
+independent States.
+
+This declaration was, in that form, nothing more than the affirmation of
+the right God gives to children, in a family, applied to the colonies, in
+regard to their mother-country. That is to say, children have, from God,
+RIGHT, AS CHILDREN, when cruelly treated, to secure the good to which they
+are entitled, as children, IN THE FAMILY. They may secure _this_ good by
+becoming part of another family, or by setting up for themselves, if old
+enough. So the colonies had, from God, _right_ as colonies, when oppressed
+beyond endurance, to exchange the British family for another, or, if of
+sufficient age, to establish their own household. The Declaration, then,
+in that complaint of oppression and affirmation of right, in the colonies,
+to be independent, asserts liberty sanctioned by the word of God. And
+therefore the pledge to _that_ Declaration, of "lives, fortune, and sacred
+honor," was blessed of Heaven, in the triumph of their cause.
+
+But the Declaration, in the part I have omitted, affirms other things, and
+very different. It asserts facts and rights as appertaining to man, not in
+the Scriptures, but contrary thereto. Here is the passage:--
+
+  "We hold these truths to be self-evident,--that all men are created
+  equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
+  unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
+  pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are
+  instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
+  the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
+  destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
+  abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation
+  on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to
+  them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
+
+_This is the affirmation of the liberty claimed by infidelity._ It teaches
+as a fact _that_ which is not true; and it claims as right _that_ which
+God has not given. It asserts nothing new, however. It lays claim to that
+individual right beyond the limitation God has put, which man has ever
+asserted when in his struggle for liberty he has refused to be guided and
+controlled by the word and providence of his Creator.
+
+The paragraph is a chain of four links, each of which is claimed to be a
+self-evident truth.
+
+The _first_ and controlling assertion is, "that ALL MEN ARE CREATED
+EQUAL;" which proposition, as I understand it, is, that _every man and
+woman on earth is created with equal attributes of body and mind_.
+
+_Secondly_, and consequently, that every individual has, by virtue of his
+or her being created the equal of each and every other individual, the
+right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, _so in his or her
+own keeping that that right is unalienable without his or her consent_.
+
+_Thirdly_, it follows, that government among men must derive its just
+powers only from the _consent_ of the governed; and, as the governed are
+the aggregate of individuals, _then each person must consent to be thus
+controlled before he or she can be rightfully under such authority_.
+
+_Fourthly_, and finally, that whenever any form of government becomes
+destructive of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+_as each such individual man or woman may think_, then each such person
+may rightly set to work to alter or abolish such form, and institute a new
+government, on such principles and in such form as to them shall seem most
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.
+
+This is the celebrated averment of created equality, and unalienable right
+to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, with the necessary
+consequences. I have fairly expanded its meaning. It is the old infidel
+averment. It is not true in any one of its assertions.
+
+
+
+_All Men not created equal_.
+
+
+It is not a truth, _self-evident,_ that all men are created equal.
+Webster, in his dictionary, defines "Self-evident--Evident without proof
+or reason: clear conviction upon a bare presentation to the mind, as that
+two and three make five."
+
+Now, I affirm, and you, I think, will not contradict me, that the
+position, "_all men are created equal"_ is _not_ self-evident; that the
+nature of the case makes it impossible for it to be self-evident. For the
+created nature of man is not in the class of things of which such
+self-evident propositions can by possibility be predicated. It is equally
+clear and beyond debate, that it is not _self-evident_ that all men have
+_unalienable rights_, that governments derive their just powers from the
+_consent_ of the governed, and may be altered or abolished whenever _to
+them_ such rights may be better secured. All these assertions can be known
+to be true or false only from revelation of the Creator, or from
+examination and induction of reasoning, covering the nature and the
+obligations of the race on the whole face of the earth. What revelation
+and examination of facts do teach, I will now show. The whole
+battle-ground, as to the truth of this series of averments, is on the
+first affirmation, "_that all men are created equal_." Or, to keep up my
+first figure, the strength of the chain of asserted truths depend on
+_that_ first link. It must then stand the following perfect trial.
+
+God reveals to us that he created man in his image, _i.e._ a spirit
+endowed with attributes resembling his own,--to reason, to form rule of
+right, to manifest various emotions, to will, to act,--and that he gave
+him a body suited to such a spirit, (Gen. i. 26, 27, 28;) that he created
+MAN "_male and female_," (Gen. i. 27;) that he made the woman "_out of the
+man_," (Gen. ii. 23;) that he made "_the man the image and glory of God_,
+but the woman _the glory of the man_. For the man is not of the woman, but
+the woman of the man. Neither was the man _created for the woman_, but the
+woman _for the man_," (1 Cor. xi.;) that he made the woman to be the
+weaker vessel, (1 Pet. iii. 7.) Here, then, God created _the race_ to be
+in the beginning TWO,--a male and a female MAN; one of them _not equal_ to
+the other _in attributes of body and mind_, and, as we shall see
+presently, not equal in rights as to government. Observe, this inequality
+was fact as to the TWO, in the perfect state wherein they were _created_.
+
+But these two fell from that perfect state, became depraved, and began to
+be degraded in body and mind. This statement of the original inequality in
+which man was created controls all that comes after, in God's providence
+and in the natural history of the race.
+
+_Providence_, in its comprehensive teaching, "says that God, soon after
+the flood, subjected the races to all the influences of the different
+zones of the earth;"--"That he hath made of one blood all nations of men
+for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times
+before appointed and the bounds of their habitation; that they should
+seek the Lord if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he
+be not far from every one of us." (Acts xvii. 26, 27.)
+
+These "bounds of their habitation" have had much to do in the natural
+history of man; for "_all men_" have been "_created_," or, more
+correctly, _born_, (since the race was "created" once only at the first,)
+with attributes of body and mind derived from the TWO unequal parents,
+and these attributes, in every individual, the combined result of the
+parental natures. "_All men_," then, come into the world under influences
+upon the amalgamated and transmitted body and mind, from depravity and
+degradation, sent down during all the generations past; and, therefore,
+under causes of inequality, acting on each individual from climate, from
+scenery, from food, from health, from sickness, from love, from hatred,
+from government, inconceivable in variety and power. Under such causes,
+to produce infinite shades of inequality, physical and mental, in
+birth--if "all men" were created equal (_i.e._ born equal) in attributes
+of body and mind--such "creation" would be a violation of all the known
+analogies in the world of life.
+
+Do, then, the facts in man's natural history exhibit this departure from
+the laws of life and spirit? Do they prove that "all men are created
+equal"? Do they show that every man and every woman of Africa, Asia,
+Europe, America, and the islands of the seas, is created each one equal in
+body and mind to each other man or woman on the face of the earth, and
+that this has always been?
+
+Need I extend these questions? Methinks, sir, I hear you say, what others
+have told me, that the "Declaration" is not to be understood as affirming
+what is so clearly false, but merely asserts that all men are "created
+equal" in _natural rights._
+
+I reply that _that_ is _not_ the meaning of the clause before us; for
+_that_ is the meaning of the next sentence,--the _second_ in the series we
+are considering.
+
+There are, as I have said, four links to the chain of thought in this
+passage:--1. That all men are created equal. 2. That they are endowed by
+the Creator with certain unalienable rights. 3. That government derives
+its just powers from the consent of the governed. 4. That the people may
+alter and abolish it, &c.
+
+These links are logical sequences. All men--man and woman--are created
+equal,--equal in _attributes of body and mind_; (for _that_ is the only
+sense in which they could be _created_ equal;) _therefore_ they are
+endowed with right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,
+unalienable, except in their consent; _consequently_ such consent is
+essential to all rightful government; and, _finally_ and _irresistibly_,
+the people have supreme right to alter or abolish it, &c.
+
+The meaning, then, I give to that first link, and to the chain following,
+_is_ the sense, because, if you deny that meaning to the _first link_,
+then the others have no logical truth whatever. Thus:--
+
+If all men are _not_ created equal in attributes of body and mind, then
+the _inequality_ may be _so great_ that such men cannot be endowed with
+right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, unalienable save in
+their _consent_; then government over such men cannot rightfully rest upon
+their _consent_; nor can they have right to alter or abolish government in
+their mere determination.
+
+Yea, sir, you concede every thing if you admit that the "Declaration"
+does _not_ mean to affirm that all men are "_created_" _equal in body
+and mind_.
+
+I will suppose in the Alps a community of Cretins,--_i.e._ deformed and
+helpless idiots,--but among them many from the same parents, who, in body
+and mind, by birth are comparatively _Napoleons_. Now, this _inequality_,
+physical and mental, by birth, makes it impossible that the government
+over these Cretins can be in their "_consent_." _The Napoleons must rule_.
+The Napoleons must absolutely control their "life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness," for the good of the community. Do you reply that I have taken
+an extreme case? that everybody admits sensible people must govern natural
+fools? Ay, sir, there is the rub. _Natural fools_! Are some men, then,
+"_created_" natural fools? Very well. Then you also admit that some men
+are _created_ just a degree above natural fools!--and, consequently, that
+men are "_created_" in all degrees, gradually rising in the scale of
+intelligence. Are they not "_created_" just above the brute, with savage
+natures along with mental imbecility and physical degradation? Must the
+Napoleons govern the Cretins without their "consent"? Must they not also
+govern without their "consent" these types of mankind, whether one, two,
+three, thirty, or three hundred degrees above the Cretins, if they are
+still greatly inferior by nature? Suppose the Cretins removed from the
+imagined community, and a colony of Australian ant-catchers or California
+lizard-eaters be in their stead: must not the Napoleons govern these? And,
+if you admit inequality to be in birth, then that inequality is the very
+ground of the reason why the Napoleons must govern the ant-catchers and
+lizard-eaters. Remove these, and put in their place an importation of
+African negroes. Do you admit _their inferiority by_ "CREATION?" Then the
+same control over them must be the irresistible fact in common sense and
+Scripture of God. _The Napoleons must govern_. They must govern without
+asking "consent,"--if the inequality be such that "_consent_" would be
+evil, and not good, in the family--the state.
+
+Yea, sir, if you deny that the "Declaration" asserts "all men are created
+equal" in body and mind, then you admit the inequality may be such as to
+make it impossible that in such cases men have rights unalienable save in
+their "consent;" and you admit it to be impossible that government in such
+circumstances can exist in such "_consent_" But, if you affirm the
+"Declaration" _does_ mean that men are "_created_ equal" in attributes of
+body and mind, then you hold to an equality which God, in his word, and
+providence, and the natural history of man, denies to be truth.
+
+I think I have fairly shown, from Scripture and facts, that the first
+averment is not the truth; and have reduced it to an absurdity. I will now
+regard the second, third, and fourth links of the chain.
+
+I know they are already broken; for, the whole chain being but an electric
+current from a vicious imagination, I have destroyed the whole by breaking
+the first link. Or was it but a cluster from a poisonous vine, then I have
+killed the branches by cutting the vine. I will, however, expose the other
+three sequences by a distinct argument covering them all.
+
+
+
+_Authority Delegated to Adam_.
+
+
+God gave to Adam sovereignty over the human race, in his first
+decree:--"_He shall rule over thee_." _That_ was THE INSTITUTION OF
+GOVERNMENT. It was not based on the "_consent_" of Eve, the governed. It
+was from God. He gave to Adam like authority to rule his children. It was
+not derived from their "_consent_". It was from God. He gave Noah the same
+sovereignty, with express power over life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness. It was not founded in "_consent_" of Shem, Ham, and Japheth,
+and their wives. It was from God. He then determined the habitations of
+men on all the face of the earth, and _indicated_ to them, in every clime,
+the _form_ and _power_ of their governments. He gave, directly, government
+to Israel. He just as truly gave it to Idumea, to Egypt, and to Babylon,
+to the Arab, to the Esquimaux, the Caffre, the Hottentot, and the negro.
+
+God, in the Bible, decides the matter. He says, "Let every soul be subject
+unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that
+be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
+the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
+damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.
+Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou
+shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for
+good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid, for he beareth not the
+sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath
+upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for
+wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also:
+for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
+Render, therefore, to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due;
+custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor." (Rom.
+xiii. 1-7.)
+
+Here God reveals to us that he has _delegated to government his own_ RIGHT
+_over life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness_; and that that RIGHT is
+not, in any sense, from the "_consent_" of the governed, but is directly
+from him. Government over men, whether in the family or in the state, is,
+then, as directly from God as it would be if he, in visible person, ruled
+in the family or in the state. I speak not only of the RIGHT simply to
+govern, but the _mode_ of the government, and the _extent_ of the power.
+Government _can do_ ALL which God _would do,--just_ THAT,--_no more, no
+less_. And it is _bound to do just_ THAT,--_no more, no less_. Government
+is responsible to God, if it fails to do _just_ THAT which He himself
+would do. It is under responsibility, then, to rule in righteousness. It
+must not oppress. It must _give_ to every individual "_life, liberty, and
+pursuit of happiness_," in harmony with the _good_ of the family,--the
+state,--_as God himself would give it_,--_just_ THAT, _no more, no less_.
+
+This passage of Scripture settles the question, From whence has
+government RIGHT to rule, and what is the _extent_ of its power? The
+RIGHT is from God, and the EXTENT of the power is _just_ THAT to which
+God would exercise it if he were personally on the earth. God, in this
+passage, and others, settles, with equal clearness, from whence is the
+OBLIGATION to _submit_ to government, and what is the _extent_ of the
+duty of obedience? The OBLIGATION to submit is not from individual RIGHT
+to consent or not to consent to government,--but the OBLIGATION _to
+submit_ is directly from God.
+
+The EXTENT of the duty of obedience is equally revealed--in this wise: so
+long as the government rules in righteousness, the duty is perfect
+obedience. So soon, however, as government requires _that_ which God, in
+his word, _forbids the subject to do_, he must obey God, and not man. He
+must refuse to obey man. But, inasmuch as the obligation to submit to
+authority of government is so great, the subject must _know_ it is the
+will of God, that he shall refuse to obey, before he assumes the
+responsibility of resistance to the powers that be. His _conscience_ will
+not justify him before God, if he mistakes his duty. _He may be all the
+more to blame for having_ SUCH A CONSCIENCE. Let him, then, be CERTAIN he
+can say, like Peter and John, "Whether it be right, in the sight of God,
+to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
+
+But, when government requires _that_ which God _does not forbid_ the
+subject to do, although _in that_ the government may have transcended the
+line of its righteous rule, the subject must, nevertheless,
+submit,--_until_ oppression has gone to _the point_ at which _God makes_
+RESISTANCE _to be duty._ And _that point_ is when RESISTANCE will clearly
+be _less of evil, and more of good_, TO THE COMMUNITY, than further
+submission.
+
+_That_ is the rule of _duty_ God gives to the _whole_ people, or to the
+_minority_, or to the _individual_, to guide them in resistance to the
+powers that be.
+
+It is irresistibly _certain_ that _He who ordains_ government _has, alone,
+the right to alter or abolish it_,--that He who institutes the powers that
+be has, alone, the right to say when and how the people, in whole or in
+part, may resist. So, then, the people, in whole, or in part, have no
+right to resist, to alter, or abolish government, simply because _they_
+may deem it destructive of the end for which it was instituted; but they
+may resist, alter, or abolish, _when it shall be seen that God so regards
+it_. This places the great fact where it must be placed,--_under the_
+CONTROL _of the_ BIBLE _and_ PROVIDENCE.
+
+
+
+_Illustrations_.
+
+
+I will conclude with one or two illustrations. God, in his providence,
+ordains the Russian form of government,--_i.e._ He places the sovereignty
+in one man, because He sees that such government can secure, for a time,
+more good to that degraded people than any other form. Now, I ask, Has the
+emperor _right_, from God, to change at once, in his mere "_consent_," the
+_form_ of his government to _that_ of the United States? No. God forbids
+him. Why? Because he would thereby destroy the good, and bring immense
+evil in his empire. I ask again, Have the Russian serfs and nobles,--yea,
+all,--"consenting," the right, from God, to make that change? No. For the
+government of the United States is not suited to them. And, in such an
+attempt, they would deprive themselves of the blessings they now have, and
+bring all the horrors of anarchy.
+
+Do you ask if I then hold, that God ordains the Russian type of rule to be
+perpetual over that people? No. The emperor is bound to secure all of
+"_life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness_," to each individual,
+consistent with the good of the nation. And he is to learn his obligation
+from the Bible, and faithfully apply it to the condition of his subjects.
+_He will thus gradually elevate them_; while they, on their part, are
+bound to strive for this elevation, in all the ways in which God may show
+them the good, and the right, which, more and more, will belong to them in
+their upward progress. The result of such government and such obedience
+would be that of a father's faithful training, and children's
+corresponding obedience. The Russian people would thus have, gradually,
+that measure of liberty they could bear, under the one-man power,--and
+then, in other forms, as they might be qualified to realize them. This
+development would be without convulsion,--as the parent gives place, while
+the children are passing from the lower to their higher life. It would be
+the exemplification of Carlyle's illustration of the snake. He says, A
+people should change their government only as a snake sheds his skin: the
+new skin is gradually formed under the old one,--and then the snake
+wriggles out, with just a drop of blood here and there, where the old
+jacket held on rather tightly.
+
+God ordains the government of the United States. And _He places_ the
+_sovereignty_ in the _will_ of the majority, because He has trained the
+people, through many generations in modes of government, to such an
+elevation in moral and religious intelligence, that such sovereignty is
+best suited to confer on them the highest right, as yet, to "life,
+liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But God requires that _that will
+of the majority_ be in perfect submission to Him. Once more then I
+inquire,--Whether the people of this country, yea all of them consenting,
+have right from God, to abolish now, at this time, our free institutions,
+and set up the sway of Russia? No. But why? There is one answer only. He
+tells us that our happiness is in this form of government, and in it, its
+developed results.
+
+
+
+_The "Social Compact" not recognised in the Divine Institute_.
+
+
+Here I pause. So, then, God gives no sanction to the notion of a SOCIAL
+COMPACT. He never gave to man individual, isolated, natural rights,
+unalienably in his keeping. He never made him a Caspar Hauser, in the
+forest, without name or home,--a Melchisedek, in the wilderness, without
+father, without mother, without descent,--a Robinson Crusoe, on his
+island, in skins and barefooted, waiting, among goats and parrots, the
+coming of the canoes and the savages, to enable him to "_consent_" if he
+would, to the relations of social life.
+
+And, therefore, those five sentences in that second paragraph of the
+Declaration of Independence are not the truth; so, then, it is not
+_self-evident_ truth that all men are created equal. So, then, it is not
+the truth, in fact, that they are created equal. So, then, it is not the
+truth that God has endowed all men with unalienable right to life,
+liberty, and pursuit of happiness. So, then, it is not the truth that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So,
+then, it is not the truth that the people have right to alter or abolish
+their government, and institute a new form, whenever to them it shall seem
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.
+
+The manner in which these unscriptural dogmas have been modified or
+developed in the United States, I will examine in another paper.
+
+I merely add, that the opinions of revered ancestors, on these questions
+of right and their application to American slavery, must now, as never
+before, be brought to the test of the light of the Bible. F.A. Ross.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 1857.
+
+
+
+
+Man-Stealing.
+
+
+
+This argument on the abolition charge, against the slave-holder,--that he
+is a man-stealer,--covers the whole question of slavery, especially as it
+is seen in the Old Testament. The headings in the letter make the subject
+sufficiently clear.
+
+
+
+No. III.
+
+
+
+Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--In my first letter, I merely touched some points in your tract,
+intending to notice them more fully in subsequent communications. I have,
+in my second paper, sufficiently examined the imaginary maxims of created
+equality and unalienable rights.
+
+In this, I will test your views by Scripture more directly. "To the law
+and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is
+because there is no light in them." (Isaiah viii. 20).
+
+The abolitionist charges the slave-holder with being a _man-stealer_. He
+makes this allegation in two affirmations. First, that the slave-holder
+is thus guilty, because, the negro having been kidnapped in Africa,
+therefore those who now hold him, or his children, in bondage, lie under
+the guilt of that first act. Secondly, that the slave-holder, by the very
+fact that he is such, is guilty of stealing from the negro his unalienable
+right to freedom.
+
+This is the charge. It covers the whole subject. I will meet it in all
+its parts.
+
+
+
+_The Difference between Man-Stealing and Slave-Holding, as set forth in
+the Bible_.
+
+
+The Bible reads thus: (Exodus xxi. 16:)--"He that stealeth a man
+and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be
+put to death."
+
+What, then, is it to kidnap or steal a man? Webster informs us--To kidnap
+is "to steal a human being, a man, woman, or child; or to seize and
+forcibly carry away any person whatever, from his own country or state
+into another." The idea of "_seizing and forcibly carrying away"_ enters
+into the meaning of the word in all the definitions of law.
+
+The crime, then, set forth in the Bible was not _selling_ a man: but
+selling a _stolen_ man. The crime was not having a man _in his hand as a
+slave_; but......in _his_ hand, as a slave, a _stolen_ man. And hence, the
+penalty of _death_ was affixed, not to selling, buying, or holding man, as
+a slave, but to the specific offence of _stealing and selling, or holding_
+a man _thus stolen, contrary to this law_. Yea, it was _this law_, and
+this law _only_, which made it _wrong_. For, under some circumstances, God
+sanctioned the seizing and forcibly carrying away a man, woman, or child
+from country or state, into slavery or other condition. He sanctioned the
+utter destruction of every male and every married woman, and child, of
+Jabez-Gilead, and the seizure, and forcibly carrying away, four hundred
+virgins, unto the camp to Shiloh, and there, being given as wives to the
+remnant of the slaughtered tribe of Benjamin, in the rock Rimmon. Sir,
+how did that destruction of Jabez-Gilead, and the kidnapping of those
+young women, differ from the razing of an African village, and forcibly
+seizing, and carrying away, those not put to the sword? The difference is
+in this:--God commanded the Israelites to seize and bear off those young
+women. But he forbids the slaver to kidnap the African. Therefore, the
+Israelites did right; therefore, the trader does wrong. The Israelites,
+it seems, gave wives, in that way, to the spared Benjamites, because they
+had sworn not to give their daughters. But there were six hundred of these
+Benjamites. Two hundred were therefore still without wives. What was done
+for them? Why, God authorized the elders of the congregation to tell the
+two hundred Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of
+Shiloh, when they came out to dance, in the feast of the Lord, on the
+north side of Bethel. And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them
+wives, "whom they caught:" (Judges xxi.) God made it right for those
+Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of Shiloh. But he
+makes it wrong for the trader to catch his slaves of the sons or daughters
+of Africa. Lest you should try to deny that God authorized this act of the
+children of Israel, although I believe he did order it, let me remind you
+of another such case, the authority for which you will not question.
+
+Moses, by direct command from God, destroyed the Midianites. He slew all
+the males, and carried away all the women and children. He then had all
+the married women and male children killed; but all the virgins,
+thirty-two thousand, were divided as spoil among the people. And
+_thirty-two_ of these virgins, _the Lord's tribute_, were given unto
+Eleazar, the priest, "as the Lord commanded Moses." (Numbers xxxi.)
+
+Sir, Thomas Paine rejected the Bible on this fact among his other
+objections. Yea, _his_ reason, _his_ sensibilities, _his_ great law of
+humanity, _his_ intuitional and eternal sense of right, made it impossible
+for him to honor such a God. And, sir, on your now avowed principles of
+interpretation, which are those of Paine, you sustain him in his rejection
+of the books of Moses and all the word of God.
+
+God's command _made it right_ for Moses to destroy the Midianites and make
+slaves of their daughters; and I have dwelt upon these facts, to reiterate
+what I hold to be THE FIRST TRUTH IN MORALS:--that a thing is right, not
+because it is ever so _per se_, but because God _makes it right_; and, of
+course, a thing is wrong, not because it is so in the nature of things,
+but because God makes it wrong. I distinctly have taken, and do take, that
+ground in its widest sense, and am prepared to maintain it against all
+comers. He made it right for the sons of Adam to marry their sisters. He
+made it right for Abraham to marry his half-sister. He made it right for
+the patriarchs, and David and Solomon, to have more wives than one. He
+made it right when he gave command to kill whole nations, sparing none. He
+made it right when he ordered that nations, or such part as he pleased,
+should be spared and enslaved. He made it right that the patriarchs and
+the Israelites should hold slaves in harmony with the system of servile
+labor which had long been in the world. He merely modified that system to
+suit his views of good among his people. So, then, when he saw fit, they
+might capture men. So, then, when he forbade the individual Israelite to
+steal a man, he made it crime, and the penalty death. So, then, that crime
+was not the mere _stealing_ a man, nor the _selling_ a man, nor the
+_holding_ a man,--but the _stealing and selling_, or _holding_, a man
+_under circumstances thus forbidden of God_.
+
+
+
+_Was the Israelite Master a Man-Stealer?_
+
+
+I now ask, Did God intend to make man-stealing and slave-holding the same
+thing? Let us see. In that very chapter of Exodus (xxi.) which contains
+the law against man-stealing, and only four verses further on, God says,
+"If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his
+hand, he shall be surely punished: notwithstanding, if he continue a day
+or two he shall not be punished; for he is his money." (Verses 20, 21.)
+
+Sir, that man was not a hired servant. He was bought with money. He was
+regarded by God _as the money_ of his master. He was his slave, in the
+full meaning of a slave, then, and now, bought with money. God, then, did
+not intend the Israelites to understand, and not one of them ever
+understood, from that day to this, that Jehovah in his law to Moses
+regarded the slave-holder as a man-stealer. Man-stealing was a specific
+offence, with its specific penalty. Slave-holding was one form of God's
+righteous government over men,--a government he ordained, with various
+modifications, among the Hebrews themselves, and with sterner features in
+its relation to heathen slaves.
+
+In Exodus xxi. and Leviticus xxv., various gradations of servitude were
+enacted, with a careful particularity which need not be misunderstood.
+Among these, a Hebrew man might be a slave for six years, and then go free
+with his wife, if he were married when he came into the relation; but if
+his master had given him a wife, and she had borne him sons or daughters,
+the wife and her children should be her master's, and he should go out by
+himself. That is, the man by the law became free, while his wife and
+children remained slaves. If the servant, however, plainly said, "I love
+my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his
+master brought him unto the judges, also unto the doorpost, and his master
+bored his ear through with an awl, and he served him forever." (Ex. xxi.
+1-6.) Sir, you have urged discussion:--give us then your views of that
+passage. Tell us how that man was separated from his wife and children
+according to _the eternal right_. Tell us what was the condition of the
+woman in case the man chose to "go out" without her? Tell us if the Hebrew
+who thus had his ear bored by his master with an awl was not a slave for
+life? Tell us, lastly, whether those children were not slaves? And, while
+on that chapter, tell us whether in the next verses, 7-11, God did not
+allow the Israelite father to sell his own daughter into bondage and into
+polygamy by the same act of sale?
+
+I will not dwell longer on these milder forms of slavery, but read to you
+the clear and unmistakable command of the Lord in Leviticus xxv. 44,
+46:--"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be
+of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and
+bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn
+among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you,
+which they beget in your land: and they shall be your possession: and ye
+shall take them for an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit
+them for a possession; and they shall be your bondmen forever."
+
+Sir, the sun will grow dim with age before that Scripture can be tortured
+to mean any thing else than just what it says; that God commanded the
+Israelites to be slave-holders in the strict and true sense over the
+heathen, in manner and form therein set forth. Do you tell the world that
+this cannot be the sense of the Bible, because it is "a violation of the
+first principles of the American Declaration of Independence;" because it
+grates upon your "instinct of liberty;" because it reveals God in
+opposition to the "spirit of the age;" because, if it be the sense of the
+passage, then "the Bible neither ought to be, nor can be, received by
+mankind as a divine revelation"? _That_ is what you say: _that_ is what
+Albert Barnes affirms in his philosophy. But what if God in his word says,
+"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have shall be of the
+heathen that are round about you"? What if we may then choose between
+Albert Barnes's philosophy and God's truth?
+
+Or will you say, God, under the circumstances, _permitted_ the Israelites
+_to sin_ in the matter of slave-holding, just as he permitted them _to
+sin_ by living in polygamy. _Permitted_ them _to sin!_ No, sir; God
+_commanded_ them to be slave-holders. He _made it_ the law of their social
+state. He _made it_ one form of his ordained government among them.
+Moreover, you take it for granted all too soon, that the Israelites
+committed sin in their polygamy. God sanctioned their polygamy. It was
+therefore not sin in them. It was right. But God now forbids polygamy,
+under the gospel; and now it is sin.
+
+Or will you tell us the iniquity of the Canaanites was then full, and
+God's time to punish them had come? True; but the same question comes
+up:--Did God punish the Canaanites by placing them in the relation of
+slaves to his people, by express command, which compelled them to sin?
+That's the point. I will not permit you to evade it. In plainer
+words:--Did God command the Hebrews to make slaves of their fellow-men, to
+buy them and sell them, to regard them as their money? He did. Then, did
+the Hebrews sin when they obeyed God's command? No. Then they did what was
+right, and it was right because God made it so. Then _the Hebrew
+slave-holder was not a man-stealer_. But, you say, the Southern
+slave-holder is. Well, we shall see presently.
+
+Just here, the abolitionist who professes to respect the Scriptures is
+wont to tell us that the whole subject of bondage among the Israelites was
+so peculiar to God's ancient dispensation, that no analogy between that
+bondage and Southern slavery can be brought up. Thus he attempts to raise
+a dust out of the Jewish institutions, to prevent people from seeing that
+slaveholding then was the same thing that it is now. But, to sustain my
+interpretation of the plain Scriptures given, I will go back five hundred
+years before the existence of the Hebrew nation.
+
+I read at that time, (Gen. xiv. 14:)--"And when Abraham heard that his
+brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own
+house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them even unto Damascus,"
+&c. (Gen. xvii. 27:)--"And all the men of his house, born, in the house,
+and bought with the money of the stranger, were circumcised." (Gen. xx.
+14:)--"And Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and men-servants and
+women-servants, and gave them unto Abraham." (Gen. xxiv. 34, 35:)--"And he
+said, I am Abraham's servant; and the Lord hath blessed my master greatly,
+and he is become great; and he hath given him flocks and herds, and silver
+and gold, and men-servants and maid-servants, and camels and asses."
+
+
+
+_Was Abraham a Man-Stealer?_
+
+
+Sir, what is the common sense of these Scriptures? Why, that the
+slave-trade existed in Abraham's day, as it had long before, and has ever
+since, in all the regions of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, in which
+criminals and prisoners of war were sold,--in which parents sold their
+children. Abraham, then, it is plain, bought, of the sellers in this
+traffic, men-servants and maid-servants; he had them born in his house; he
+received them as presents.
+
+Do you tell me that Abraham, by divine authority, made these servants part
+of his family, social and religious? Very good. But still he regarded them
+as his slaves. He took Hagar as a wife, but he treated her as his
+slave,--yea, as Sarah's slave; and as such he gave her to be chastised,
+for misconduct, by her mistress. Yea, he never placed Ishmael, the son of
+the bondwoman, on a level with Isaac, the son of the freewoman. If, then,
+he so regarded Hagar and Ishmael, of course he never considered his other
+slaves on an equality with himself. True, had he been childless, he would
+have given his estate to Eliezer: but he would have given it to his slave.
+True, had Isaac not been born, he would have given his wealth to Ishmael;
+but he would nave given it to the son of his bondwoman. Sir, every
+Southern planter is not more truly a slave-holder than Abraham. And the
+Southern master, by divine authority, may, to-day, consider his slaves
+part of his social and religious family, just as Abraham did. His relation
+is just that of Abraham. He has slaves of an inferior type of mankind from
+Abraham's bondmen; and he therefore, for that reason, as well as from the
+fact that they are his slaves, holds them lower than himself. But,
+nevertheless, he is a slave-holder in no other sense than was Abraham. Did
+Abraham have his slave-household circumcised? Every Southern planter may
+have his slave-household baptized. I baptized, not long since, a
+slave-child,--the master and mistress offering it to God. What was done
+in the parlor might be done with divine approbation on every plantation.
+
+So, then, Abraham lived in the midst of a system of slave-holding exactly
+the same in nature with that in the South,--a system ordained of God as
+really as the other forms of government round about him. He, then, with
+the divine blessing, made himself the master of slaves, men, women, and
+children, by buying them,--by receiving them in gifts,--by having them
+born in his house; and he controlled them as property, just as really as
+the Southern master in the present day. I ask now, _was Abraham a
+man-stealer?_ Oh, no, you reiterate: but the Southern master is. Why?
+
+
+
+_Is the Southern Master a Man-Stealer_?
+
+
+Do you, sir, or anybody, contend that the Southern master seized his slave
+in Africa, and forcibly brought him away to America, contrary to law?
+That, and that alone, was and is kidnapping in divine and human statute.
+No. What then? Why, the abolitionist responds, The African man-stealer
+sold his victim to the slave-holder; he, to the planter; and the negro has
+been ever since in bondage: therefore _the guilt_ of the man-stealer has
+cleaved to sellers, buyers, and inheritors, to this time, and will
+through all generations to come. That is the charge.
+
+And it brings up the question so often and triumphantly asked by the
+abolitionist; _i.e._ "You," he says to the slave-holder,--"you admit it
+was wrong to steal the negro in Africa. Can the slave-holder, then, throw
+off wrong so long as he holds the slave at any time or anywhere
+thereafter?" I answer, yes; and my reply shall be short, yet conclusive. It
+is this:--_Guilt_, or criminality, is that state of a moral agent which
+results from _his_ actual commission of a crime or offence knowing it to
+be crime or violation of law. _That_ is the received definition of
+_guilt_, and _you_, I know, do accept it. The _guilt_, then, of kidnapping
+_terminated_ with the man-stealer, the seller, the buyer, and holders,
+who, knowingly and intentionally, carried on the traffic contrary to the
+divine law. THAT GUILT attaches in no sense whatever, as a personal, moral
+responsibility, to the present slave-holder. Observe, I am here
+discussing, _not the question of mere slave-holding,_ but whether the
+master, who has had nothing to do with the slave-trade, can _now_ hold the
+slave without the moral guilt of the man-stealer? I have said that _that_
+guilt, in no sense whatever, rests upon him; for he neither stole the
+man, nor bought him from the kidnapper, nor had any _complicity_ in the
+traffic. Here, I know, the abolitionist insists that the master _is_
+guilty of this _complicity_, unless he will at once emancipate the slave;
+because, so long as he holds him, he thereby, personally and _voluntarily,
+assumes the same relation which the original kidnapper or buyer held to
+the African_.
+
+This is Dr. Cheever's argument in a recent popular sermon. He thinks it
+unanswerable; but it has no weight whatever. It is met perfectly by adding
+_one_ word to his proposition. Thus:--_The master does_ NOT _assume the
+same relation which the original man-stealer or buyer held to the
+African_. The master's _relation_ to God and to his slave is now _wholly
+changed_ from that of the man-stealer, and those engaged in the trade; and
+his obligation is wholly different. What is his relation? and what is his
+obligation? They are as follows:----
+
+The master finds himself, with no taint of personal concern in the African
+trade, in a Christian community of white Anglo-Americans, holding control
+over his black fellow-man, who is so unlike himself in complexion, in
+form, in other peculiarities, and so unequal to himself in attributes of
+body and mind, that it is _impossible, in every sense_, to place him on a
+level with himself in the community. _This is his relation to the negro_.
+What, then, does God command him to do? Does God require him to send the
+negro back to his heathen home from whence he was stolen? That home no
+longer exists. But, if it did remain, does God command the master to send
+his Christianized slave into the horrors of his former African heathenism?
+No. God has placed the master under law entirely different from his
+command to the slave-trader. God said to the trader, _Let the negro
+alone_. But he says to the present master, _Do unto the negro all the good
+you can; make him a civilized man; make him a Christian man; lift him up
+and give him all he has a right to claim in the good of the whole
+community_. This the master can do; this he must do, and then leave the
+result with the Almighty.
+
+We reach the same conclusion by asking, What does God say to the
+negro-slave?
+
+Does he tell him to ask to be sent back to heathen Africa? No. Does he
+give him authority to claim a created equality and unalienable right to
+be on a level with the white man in civil and social relations? No. To
+ask the first would be to ask a great evil; to claim the second is to
+demand a natural and moral impossibility. No. God tells him to seek none
+of these things. But he commands him to know the facts in his case as
+they are in the Bible, and have ever been, and ever will be in
+Providence:--that he is not the white man's equal,--that he can never
+have his level--that he must not claim it; but that he can have, and
+ought to have, and must have, all of good, in his condition as a slave,
+until God may reveal a higher happiness for him in some other relation
+than that _he must ever_ have to the Anglo-American. The present
+slave-holder, then, by declining to emancipate his bondman, does not
+place himself in _the guilt_ of the man-stealer or of those who had
+complicity with him; but he stands _exactly_ in that NICK _of time and
+place_, in the course of Providence, where _wrong_, in the transmission
+of African slavery, _ends_, and _right begins_.
+
+I have, sir, fairly stated this, your strongest argument, and fully met
+it. _The Southern master is not a man-stealer._ The abolitionist--repulsed
+in his charge that the slave-owner is a kidnapper, either in fact or by
+voluntarily assuming any of the relations of the traffic--then makes his
+impeachment on his second affirmation, mentioned at the opening of this
+letter. That the slave-holder is, nevertheless, thus _guilty_, because,
+in the simple fact of being a master, he _steals_ from the negro his
+unalienable right to freedom.
+
+This, sir, looks like a new view of the subject. The crime forbidden in
+the Bible was stealing and selling a man; _i.e._ seizing and forcibly
+carrying away, from country or State, a human being--man, woman, or
+child--contrary to law, and selling or holding the same. But the
+abolitionist gives us to understand this crime rests on the slave-holder
+in another sense:--namely, that he steals from the negro a metaphysical
+attribute,--his unalienable right to liberty!
+
+This is a new sort of kidnapping. This is, I suppose, _stealing the man
+from himself_, as it is sometimes elegantly expressed,--_robbing him of
+his body and his soul_. Sir, I admit this is a strong figure of speech, a
+beautiful personification, a sonorous rhetorical flourish, which must make
+a deep impression on Dr. Cheever's people, Broadway, New York, and on your
+congregation, Washington Square, Philadelphia; but it is certainly not the
+Bible crime of man-stealing. And whether the Southern master is _guilty_
+of this sublimated thing will be understood by us when you prove that the
+negro, or anybody else, has such metaphysical right to be stolen,--such
+transcendental liberty not in subordination to the good of the whole
+people. In a word, sir, this refined expression is, after all, just the
+old averment that the slave-holder is guilty of _sin per se!_ That's it.
+
+I have given you, in reply, the Old Testament. In my next, I propose to
+inquire what the New Testament says in the light of the _Golden Rule_.
+
+F.A. Ross.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 31, 1857.
+
+
+
+
+The Golden Rule.
+
+
+
+This view of the Golden Rule is the only exposition of that great text
+which has ever been given in words sufficiently clear, and, with practical
+illustrations, to make the subject intelligible to every capacity. The
+explanation is the truth of God, and it settles forever the slavery
+question, so far as it rests on this precept of Jesus Christ.
+
+
+
+
+No. IV.
+
+
+
+Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--The argument against slave-holding, founded on the Golden Rule,
+is the strongest which can be presented, and I admit that, if it cannot be
+perfectly met, the master must give the slave liberty and equality. But if
+it can be absolutely refuted, then the slave-holder in this regard may
+have a good conscience; and the abolitionist has nothing more to say. Here
+is the rule.
+
+"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to
+you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets."
+(Matt. vii. 12.)
+
+In your "_Notes_," on this passage you thus write:--"This command has been
+usually called the Savior's _Golden Rule_; a name given to it on account
+of its great value.--_All that you_ EXPECT or DESIRE _of others, in
+similar circumstances_, DO TO THEM."
+
+This, sir, is your exposition of the Savior's rule of right. With all due
+respect, I decline your interpretation. You have missed the meaning by
+leaving out ONE word. Observe,--you do not say, All that you OUGHT to
+_expect_ or _desire_, &c., THAT _do to them_. No. But you make the
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE, _which every man_ ACTUALLY HAS _in similar
+circumstances_, THE MEASURE _of his_ DUTY _to every other man_. Or, in
+different words, you make, without qualification or explanation, the MERE
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE which every man,--with no instruction, or any sort
+of training,--wise or simple, good or bad, heathen, Mohammedan, nominal
+Christian,--WOULD HAVE _in similar circumstances_, THE LAW OF OBLIGATION,
+_always binding_ upon him TO DO THAT SAME THING _unto his neighbor!_
+
+Sir, you have left out _the very idea_ which contains the sense of that
+Scripture. It is this: Christ, in his rule, _presupposes_ that the man to
+whom he gives it _knows_, and from the Bible, (or providence, or natural
+conscience, _so far as in harmony_ with the Bible,) the _various
+relations_ in which God has placed him; and the _respective duties_ in
+those relations; _i.e._ The rule _assumes_ that he KNOWS what he OUGHT to
+_expect_ or _desire_ in similar circumstances.
+
+I will test this affirmation by several and varied illustrations. I will
+show how Christ, according to your exposition of his rule, speaks on the
+subject,--of _revenge, marriage, emancipation_,--_the fugitive from
+bondage_. And how he truly speaks on these subjects.
+
+
+
+_Revenge--Right according to your view of the Golden Rule_.
+
+
+Indian and Missionary--Prisoner tied to a tree, stuck over with burning
+splinters.
+
+Here is an Indian torturing his prisoner. The missionary approaches and
+beseeches him to regard _the Golden Rule_. "Humph!" utters the savage:
+"Golden Rule! what's that?" "Why" says the good man, "all that you
+_expect_ or _desired_ other Indians, in similar circumstances, do you
+even so to them." "Humph!" growls the warrior, with a fierce
+smile,--"Missionary--good: that's what I do now. If I was tied to that
+tree, I would _expect_ and _desire him_ to have _his_ revenge,--to do to
+me as I do to him; and I would sing my death-song, as he sings his.
+Missionary, your rule is Indian rule,--good rule, missionary. Humph!"
+And he sticks more splinters into his victim, brandishes his tomahawk,
+and yells.
+
+Sir, what has the missionary to say, after this perfect proof that you
+have mistaken the great law of right? Verily, he finds that the rule,
+with your explanation, tells the Indian to torture his prisoner. Verily,
+he finds that the wild man has the best of the argument. He finds he had
+left out the word OUGHT; and that he can't put it in, until he teaches
+the Indian things which as yet he don't know. Yea, he finds he gave the
+commandment too soon; for that he must begin back of that commandment,
+and teach the savage God's ordination of the relations in which he is to
+his fellow-men, before he can make him comprehend or apply the rule as
+Christ gives it.
+
+
+
+_Marriage--Void under your Interpretation of the Golden Rule_.
+
+
+Lucy Stone, and Moses--Lady on sofa, having just divorced herself--Moses,
+with the Tables of the Law, appears: she falls at his feet, and covers her
+face with her hands.
+
+This woman, everybody knows, was married some time since, after a fashion;
+that is to say, protesting publicly against all laws of wedlock, and
+entering into the relation so long only as she, or her husband, might
+continue pleased therewith.
+
+Very well. Then I, without insult to her or offense to my readers, suppose
+that about this time she has shown her unalienable right to liberty and
+equality by giving her husband a bill of divorcement. Free again, she
+reclines on her couch, and is reading the Tribune. It is mid-day. But
+there is a light, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about
+her. And _he_, who saw God on Sinai, stands before her, the glory on his
+face, and the tables of stone in his hands. The woman falls before him,
+veils her eyes with her trembling fingers, and cries out, "Moses, oh, I
+believed till now that thou practised deception, in claiming to be sent of
+God to Israel. But now, I know thou didst see God in the burning bush,
+and heard him speak that law from the holy mountain. Moses, I know ... I
+confess.".... And Moses answers, and says unto her, "Woman, thou art one
+of a great class in this land, who claim to be more just than God, more
+pure than their Maker, who have made their inward light their God. Woman,
+thou in '_convention_' hast uttered _Declaration of Independence_ from
+man. And, verily, thou hast asserted this claim to equality and
+unalienable right, even now, by giving thy husband his bill of
+divorcement, in thy sense of the Golden Rule. Yea, verily, thou hast done
+unto him all that thou _expectedst_ or _desiredst_ of him, in similar
+circumstances. And now thou thinkest thyself free again. Woman, thou art a
+sinner. Verily, thine inward light, and declaration of independence, and
+Golden Rule, do well agree the one with the other. Verily, thou hast
+learned of Jefferson, and Channing, and Barnes. But, woman,
+notwithstanding thou hast sat at the feet of these wise men, I, Moses, say
+thou art a sinner before the law, and the prophets, and the gospel. Woman,
+thy light is darkness; thy declaration of equality and right is vanity and
+folly; and thy Golden Rule is license to wickedness.
+
+"Woman, hast thou ears? Hear: I, by authority of God, ordained that the
+man should rule over thee. I placed thee, and children, and men-servants,
+and maid-servants, under the same law of subjection to the government
+ordained of God in the family,--the state. I for a time sanctioned
+polygamy, and made it right. I, for the hardness of men's hearts, allowed
+them, and made it right, to give their wives a bill of divorcement.
+Woman, hear. Paul, having the same Spirit of God, confirms my word. He
+commands _wives_, and children, and servants, after this manner:--'Wives,
+submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord;
+children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto
+the Lord; servants, obey in all things your masters according to the
+flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but in singleness of heart,
+fearing God.' Woman, Paul makes _that rule_ the same, and _that
+submission_, the same. The _manner_ of the rule he varies with the
+relations. He requires it to be, in the _love_ of the husband, even as
+Christ loved the church,--in the _mildness_ of the father, not provoking
+the children to anger, lest they be discouraged,--in _the justice and
+equity_ of the master, knowing that he also has a master in heaven:
+(Colossians.) Woman, hear. Paul says to thee, the man _now_ shall have
+one wife, and he _now_ shall not give her a bill of divorcement, save for
+crime. Woman, thou art not free from thy husband. Christ's Golden Rule
+must not be interpreted by thee as A. Barnes has rendered it; Christ
+_assumes_ that thou _believest_ God's truth,--that thou _knowest_ the
+relation of husband and wife, and the _obligations and rights_ of the
+same, _as in the Bible; then_, in the light of this _knowledge_, verily,
+thou art required to do what God says thou _oughtest_ to do. Woman, thou
+art a sinner. Go, sin no more. Go, find thy husband; see to it that he
+takes thee back. Go, submit to him, and honor him, and obey him."
+
+
+
+_Emancipation--Ruin--Golden Rule, in your meaning, carried out_.
+
+
+Island in the Tropics--Elegant houses falling to decay--Broad fields
+abandoned to the forest--Wharves grass-grown--Negroes relapsing into the
+savage state--A dark cloud over the island, through which the lightning
+glares, revealing, in red writing, these words:--"_Redeemed, regenerated,
+and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal
+emancipation"_.--[Gospel--according to Curran--and the British
+Parliament.]
+
+Jamaica, sir, to say nothing of St. Domingo, is illustration of your
+theory of the Golden Rule, in negro emancipation. You tell the Southern
+master that all he would _expect_ or _desire_, if he were a slave, he must
+do unto his bondman; that he must not pause to ask whether the relation of
+master and slave be ordained of God or not. No. You tell him, _if_ he
+would _expect_ or _desire_ liberty were he a slave, _that_ settles the
+question as to what he is to do! He must let his bondman go free. Yea,
+_that_ is what you teach: because the moment you put in the word OUGHT,
+and say, all that you OUGHT to _expect_ or _desire_,--_i.e._ all that you
+_know_ God commands you to _expect _ or _desire_ in your relations to men,
+_as established by him,_--THAT _do to them_. Sir, when you thus explain
+the Golden Rule, then your argument against slave-holding, so far as
+founded on this rule, is at once arrested; it is stopped short, in full
+career; it has to wait for reinforcement of FACT, which may never come up.
+For, suppose the FACT to be, that the relation of master and slave is one
+mode of the government ordained of God. Then, sir, the master, _knowing
+that_ FACT, and _knowing_ what the slave, _as a slave_, OUGHT to _expect_
+or _desire_, he, the master, then FULFILS THE GOLDEN RULE when he does
+that unto his slave which, in similar circumstances, he OUGHT to expect
+_to be done unto himself_. Now comes the question, OUGHT he then to
+_expect_ or _desire_ liberty and equality? THAT is the question of
+questions on this subject. And without hesitation I reply, The Golden Rule
+DECIDES _that question_ YEA or NAY, _absolutely_ and _perfectly_, as God's
+word or providence shows that the GOOD _of the family, the community, the
+state_, REQUIRES that the slave IS or IS NOT _to be set free and made
+equal_. THAT GOOD, _as God reveals it_, SETTLES THE QUESTION.
+
+Let the master then see to it, how he hears God's word as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, how he understands God's providence as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, that he makes no mistake as to THAT GOOD. For God will
+not hold him guiltless, if he will not hear what he tells him as to THAT
+GOOD. God will not justify him, if he has a bad conscience or blunders in
+his philosophy. God will punish him, if he fails to bless his land by
+letting the bond go free when, he OUGHT to emancipate. And God will punish
+him, if he brings a curse upon his country by freeing his slave when he
+OUGHT NOT to give him liberty.
+
+So, then, _the Golden Rule does not_, OF ITSELF, _reveal to man at all
+what are his_ RELATIONS _to his fellow-men; but it tells him what he is
+to_ DO, _when he_ ALREADY KNOWS THEM.
+
+So, then, you, sir, cannot be permitted to tell the world that this rule
+must emancipate all the negro slaves in the United States,--no matter how
+unprepared they may be,--no matter how degraded,--no matter how unlike and
+unequal to the white man by creation,--no matter if it be a natural and
+moral impossibility,--no matter: the Golden Rule must emancipate by
+authority of the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, and
+by obligation of the great law of liberty,--the intuitional consciousness
+of the eternal right!
+
+No. The Rule, as said, _presupposes_ that he who is required to obey it
+does already _know_ the relations in which God has placed him, and the
+respective duties in those conditions. Has God, then, established the
+relations of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave? Yes.
+Then the command comes. It says to the husband, To aid you in your known
+obligations to your wife,--to give you a lively sense of it,--suppose
+yourself to be the wife: whatsoever, therefore, you OUGHT, in that
+condition, to _expect_ or _desire_, that, as husband, do unto your wife.
+It says to the parent, Imagine yourself the child; and whatsoever, as
+such, you OUGHT to _expect_ or _desire, that_, as parent, do unto your
+child. It says to the master, Put yourself in the place of your slave;
+and whatsoever you OUGHT, in that condition, to _expect_ or _desire,
+that_, as master, do unto your slave. Let husband, parent, master, _know_
+his obligations from God, and obey the Rule.
+
+
+
+_Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule under your version_.
+
+
+Honorable Joshua R. Giddings and the Angel of the Lord--Hon. Gentleman at
+table--Nine runaway negroes dining with him--The Angel, uninvited, comes
+in and disturbs the feast.
+
+Giddings has boasted in Congress of having had nine fugitive slaves to
+break bread with him at one time. I choose, then, to imagine that, during
+the dinner, the angel who found Hagar by the fountain stands suddenly in
+the midst, and says to the negroes, "Ye slaves, whence came ye, and
+whither will ye go?" And they answer and say, "We flee from the face of
+our masters. This abolitionist told us to kill, and steal, and run away
+from bondage; and we have murdered and stolen and escaped. He, thou seest,
+welcomes us to liberty and equality. We _expect_ and _desire_ to be
+members of Congress, Governors of States, to marry among the great, and
+one of us to be President. Giddings, and all abolitionists, tell us that
+these honors belong to us equally as to white people, and will be given
+under the Golden Rule." And the angel of the Lord says to them, "Ye
+slaves, return unto your masters, and submit yourselves under their hands.
+I sent your fathers, and I send you, into bondage. I mean it unto good,
+and I will bring it to pass to save much people alive." Then, turning to
+the tempter, he says, "Thou, a statesman! thou, a reader of my word and
+providence! why hast thou not understood my speech to Hagar? I gave her, a
+slave, to Sarah. She fled from her mistress. I sent her back. Why hast
+thou not understood my word four thousand years ago,--that _the slave
+shall not flee from his master?_ Why hast thou also perverted my law in
+Deuteronomy, (xxiii. 15, 16?) I say therein, 'Thou shalt not deliver unto
+his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he
+shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall
+choose, in one of thy gates where it liketh him best: thou shalt not
+oppress him.' Why hast thou not known that I meant the _heathen slave_ who
+escaped from his _heathen master?_ I commanded, Israel, in such case, not
+to hold _him_ in bondage. I made this specific law for this specific fact.
+Why hast thou taught that, in this commandment, I gave license to all
+men-servants and maid-servants in the whole land of Israel to run away
+from their masters? Why hast thou thus made me, in one saying, contradict
+and make void all my laws wherein I ordained that the Hebrews should be
+slave-owners over their brethren during years, and over the heathen
+forever? Why hast thou in all this changed my Golden Rule? I, in that
+rule, _assume_ that men _know_ from revelation and providence the
+relations in which I have placed them, and their duties therein. I then
+command them to do unto others what they thus _know_ they _ought_ to do
+unto them in these relations; and I make the obligation quick and
+powerful, by telling every man to imagine himself in such conditions, and
+then he will _the better_ KNOW '_whatsoever_' he should do unto his
+neighbor. Why hast thou made void my law, by making me say, 'All that thou
+_expectest_ or _desirest_ of others, in similar circumstances, do to
+them'? I never imagined to give such license to folly and sin. Why hast
+thou imagined such license to iniquity? Verily, thou tempter, thou hast in
+thy Golden Rule made these slaves thieves and murderers, and art now
+eating with them the bread of sin and death.
+
+"Why hast thou tortured my speech wherein I say that I have made of _one
+blood_ all nations of men, to mean that I have created all men equal and
+endowed them with rights unalienable save in their consent? I never said
+that thing! I said that I made all men to descend from _one parentage!_
+That is what I say in that place! Why hast thou tortured that plain truth?
+Thou mightest as well teach that all 'the moving creatures that have life,
+and fowl that fly above the earth, in the open firmament of heaven,' are
+_created equal_, because I said I brought them forth _of the water_. Thou
+mightest as well say that 'all cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the
+earth, _are created equal_, because I said I brought them forth _of the
+earth_, as to affirm the _equality of men_ because I say they are _of one
+blood_. Nay, I have made men unequal as the leaves of the trees, the sands
+of the sea, the stars of heaven. I have made them so, in harmony with the
+infinite variety and inequality in every thing in my creation. And I have
+made them unequal in my _mercy_. Had I made all men equal in attributes of
+body and mind, then _unfallen man_ would never have realized the varied
+glories of his destiny. And had I given _fallen man_ equality of nature
+and unalienable rights, then I had made the earth an Aceldama and Valley
+of Gehenna. For what would be the _strife_ in all the earth among men
+equal in body and mind, equal in power, equal in depravity, equal in will,
+each one maintaining rights unalienable? When would the war end? Who would
+be the victors where all are giants? Who would sue for peace where none
+will submit? What would be _human social life?_ Who would be the weak, the
+loving? Who would seek or need forbearance, compassion, self-denying
+benevolence? Who would be the grateful? Who would be the humble, the meek?
+What would be _human_ virtue, what _human_ vice, what _human_ joy or
+sorrow? Nay, I have made men _unequal_ and given them _alienable rights_,
+that I might INSTITUTE HUMAN GOVERNMENT and reveal HUMAN CHARACTER.
+
+"Why hast thou been willingly ignorant of these first principles of the
+oracles of God, which would have made thee truly a Christian philosopher
+and statesman?"
+
+
+
+_Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule as Christ gave it_
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes and the Apostle Paul--Minister of the gospel in his
+study--Fugitive slave, converted under his preaching, inquiring whether it
+is not his duty to return to his master--Paul appears and rebukes the
+minister for wresting his Gospel.
+
+With all respect and affection for you, sir, I imagine a slave, having run
+away from his master and become a Christian under your preaching, might,
+with the Bible in his hands and the Holy Spirit in his heart, have,
+despite your training, question of conscience, whether he did right to
+leave his master, and ought not to go back. And I think how Paul would
+listen, and what he would say, to your interpretation of his Epistle to
+Philemon. I think he would say,--
+
+"I withstand thee to thy face, because thou art to be blamed. Why hast
+thou written, in thy '_Notes_,' that the word I apply to Onesimus may
+mean, not _slave_, but _hired servant?_ Why hast thou said this in
+unsupported assertion? Why hast thou given no respect to Robinson, and all
+thy wise men, who agree that the word wherein I express Onesimus's
+relation to Philemon never means a hired servant, but a _slave_,--the
+property of his master,--a living possession?
+
+"Why hast thou called in question the fact that Philemon was a
+slave-holder? Why hast thou taught that, if he was a slave-holder when he
+became a Christian, he could not _continue, consistently_, to be a
+slave-owner and a Christian,--that if he did so _continue_, he would not
+be in _good standing_, but an _offender_ in the church? (See Notes.)
+
+"I say Philemon was the master of Onesimus, in the real sense of a
+slave-owner, under Roman law, in which he had the right of life and death
+over him,--being thereby a master in possession of power unknown in the
+United States. And yet I call Philemon 'our dearly beloved and
+fellow-laborer,' I tell him that I send to him again Onesimus, who had
+been unprofitable to him in time past; but now, being a Christian, he
+would be profitable. I tell him, I send him again, not a slave, (only,)
+but above a slave, a Christian brother, beloved, specially to me, but how
+much more unto him, both _in the flesh_ and in the Lord. Dost thou know,
+Albert Barnes, what I mean by that word, _in the flesh?_ Verily, I knew
+the things wherein the master and the slave are beloved, the one of the
+other, in the best affections of human nature, and in the Lord! therefore
+I say to Philemon that he, _as master_, could receive Onesimus _as his
+slave_, and yet as a _brother_, MORE _beloved, by reason of his relation
+to him as master_, than I could regard him! Yea, verily,--and I say to
+thee, Albert Barnes, thou hast never been in the South, and thou dost not
+understand, and canst not understand, the force, or even the meaning, of
+my words _in the flesh_; i.e. _in the love of the master and the slave to
+one another_. But Philemon I knew would feel its power, and so I made that
+appeal to him.
+
+"Why hast thou said, that I did not send Onesimus back _by authority?_ I
+did send him back by authority,--yea, by authority of the Lord Jesus
+Christ? For it was my duty to send him again to Philemon, whether he had
+been willing to go or not; and it was his duty to go. But he was willing.
+So we both felt our obligations; and, when I commanded, he cheerfully
+obeyed. What else was my duty and his? Had I not said, in line upon line
+and in precept upon precept, 'Servants, obey in all things your masters
+according to the flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in
+singleness of heart, pleasing God'? (Coloss. iii. 22.) Had not Peter
+written, 'Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to
+the good and gentle, but also to the froward'? (1 Pet. ii. 18.) Onesimus
+had broken these commandments when he fled from his master. Was it not
+then of my responsibility to send him again to Philemon? And was it not
+Christ's law to him to return and submit himself under his master's hand?
+
+"Why, then, hast thou not understood my speech? Has it been even because
+thou couldst not _hear_ my word? What else has hindered? What more could I
+have said, than (in 1 Tim. vi. 1-5) I do say, to rebuke all abolitionists?
+Yea, I describe them--I show their principles--as fully as if I had called
+them by name in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, and said they would
+live in 1857.
+
+"And yet thou hast, in thy commentary on my letter to Timothy, utterly
+distorted, maimed, and falsified my meaning. Thou hast mingled truth and
+untruth so together as to make me say what was not and is not in my mind.
+For thou teachest the slave, while professing not so to teach him, that I
+tell him that he is _not_ to count his master worthy of all honor; that he
+_is_ to _despise_ him; that he is _not_ to do him service as to a
+Christian faithful and beloved. _No_. But thou teachest the slave, in my
+name, to regard his Christian master an _offender_ in the sight of
+Christ, if he _continues_ a slave-owner.
+
+"Thou tellest him to obey _only_ in the sense in which he is to submit to
+injustice, oppression, and cruelty; and that he is ever to seek to throw
+off the yoke in his created equality and unalienable right to liberty.
+(See Notes.)
+
+"This is what thou hast taught as my gospel. But I commanded thee to
+teach and exhort _just the contrary_. I commanded thee to say after this
+way:--'Let as many servants as are under the yoke, count their own
+masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not
+blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise
+them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they
+are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach
+and exhort.'
+
+"Thou, in thy 'Notes,' art compelled, though most unwillingly, to confess
+that I do mean _slaves_ in this place, in the full and proper sense; yea,
+slaves under the Roman law. Good. Then do I here tell slaves to count
+their masters, even when not Christians, worthy of all honor; and, when
+Christians, to regard them as faithful and beloved, and not to despise
+them, and to do them service? Yet, after all this, do I say to these same
+slaves that they have a created equality and unalienable right to liberty,
+under which, whenever they think fit, I command them to dishonor their
+masters, despise them, and run away! Sir, I did never so instruct slaves;
+nay, I did never command thee so to teach them. But I did and do exhort
+thee not so to train them; for I said then and say now to thee, 'If any
+man teach [slaves] otherwise, [than to honor their masters as faithful and
+beloved, and to do them service,] and consent not to wholesome words, even
+the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according
+to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and
+strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
+perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH,
+supposing that gain is godliness; from such withdraw thyself,'
+
+"What more could I have said to the abolitionists of my day? What more can
+I say to them in this day? _That_ which was true of them two thousand
+years ago, is true now. I rebuked abolitionists then, and I rebuke them
+now. I tell them the things in their hearts,--the things on their
+tongues,--the things in their hands,--are contrary to wholesome words,
+even the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. Canst thou _hear_ my words in
+this place without feeling how faithfully I have given the head, and the
+heart, and the words, and the doings of the men, from whom thou hast not
+withdrawn thyself?
+
+"Verily, thou canst not _hear_ my speech, and therefore thou canst not
+interpret my gospel. Thou believest it is impossible that I sanction
+slavery! Hence it is impossible for thee to understand my words: for I do
+sanction slavery. How? Thus:--
+
+"I found slavery in Asia, in Greece, in Rome. I saw it to be one mode of
+the government ordained of God. I regarded it, in most conditions of
+fallen mankind, necessarily and irresistibly part of such government, and
+therefore as natural, as wise, as good, in such conditions, as the other
+ways men are ruled in the state or the family.
+
+"I took up slavery, then, as such ordained government,--wise, good, yea
+best, in certain circumstances, until, in the elevating spirit and power
+of my gospel, the slave is made fit for the liberty and equality of his
+master, if he can be so lifted up. Hence I make the RULE of magistrate,
+subject, master and servant, parent and child, husband and wife, THE SAME
+RULE; _i.e._ I make it THE SAME RIGHT in the _superior_ to control the
+_obedience_ and the _service_ of the _inferior_, bound to obey, whatever
+the difference in the relations and service to be rendered. Yea, I give
+_exactly the same command_ to all in these relations; and thus, in all my
+words, I make it plainly to be understood that I regard slavery to be as
+righteous a mode of government as that of magistrate and subject, parent
+and child, husband and wife, during the circumstances and times in which
+God is pleased to have it continue. I saw all the injustice, the
+oppression, the cruelty, masters might be guilty of, and were and are now
+guilty of; but I saw no more injustice, oppression, and cruelty, in the
+relation of master and slave, than I saw in all other forms of rule,--even
+in that of husband and wife, parent and child. In my gospel I condemn
+wrong in all these states of life, while I fully sanction and sustain the
+relations themselves. I tell the magistrate, husband, father, master, how
+to rule; I tell the subject, wife, child, servant, how to submit. Hence, I
+command the slave not to flee from bondage, just as I require the subject,
+the wife, the child, not to resist or flee from obedience. I warn the
+slave, if he leaves his master he has sinned, and must return; and I make
+it the duty of all men to see to it, that _he shall go back_. Hence, I
+myself did what I command others to do: I sent Onesimus back to his
+master.
+
+"Thus I sanction slavery everywhere in the New Testament. But it is
+impossible for thee, with thy principles,--thy law of reason,--thy law of
+created equality and unalienable right,--thy elevation of the Declaration
+of Independence above the ordinance of God,--to sustain slavery. Nay, it
+is impossible for thee, with thy interpretation of Christ's Golden Rule,
+to recognise the system of servile labor; nay, it is impossible for thee
+to tell _this_ slave to return to his master as I sent Onesimus back;
+nay, thou art guarded by thy Golden Rule. Thou tellest him that, if thou
+hadst been in his place, thou wouldst have _expected, desired_ freedom,
+that thou wouldst have run away, and that thou wouldst not now return;
+that thou wouldst have regarded thy created equality and unalienable
+right as thy supreme law, and have disregarded and scorned all other
+obligations as _pretended revelation from God_. Therefore thou now doest
+unto him '_whatsoever_' thou wouldst _expect_ or _desire_ him to do unto
+thee in similar circumstances; _i.e._ thou tellest him he did right to
+run away, and will do right not to return! This is thy Golden Rule. But
+I did not instruct thee so to learn Christ. Nay, this slave knows thou
+hast not not given him the mind of Christ; nay, he knows that Christ
+commands thee to send him to his master again. And thus do what thou
+OUGHTEST to _expect_ or _desire_ in similar circumstances; yea, _do_ now
+_thy duty_, and this slave, like Onesimus, will bless thee for giving him
+a good conscience whenever he will return to his obedience. Thus Paul,
+the aged, speaks to thee."
+
+So, then, the Golden Rule is the whole Bible; yea, Christ says it is-"the
+law and the prophets;" yea, it is the Old Testament and the New condensed;
+and with ever-increasing glory of Providence in one sublime aphorism,
+which can be understood and obeyed only by those who _know_ what the
+Bible, or Providence, reveals as to man's varied conditions and his
+obligations therein.
+
+I think, sir, I have refuted your interpretation of the Golden Rule, and
+have given its true meaning.
+
+The slave-holder, then, may have a good conscience under this commandment.
+Let him so exercise himself as to have a conscience void of offence
+towards God and towards men.
+
+Yours, &c. F.A. Ross.
+
+
+
+
+Conclusion.
+
+
+
+I intended to, and may yet, in a subsequent edition, write two more
+letters to A. Barnes. The _one_, to show how infidelity has been passing
+off from the South to the North,--especially since the _Christian death_
+of Jackson; the other, to meet Mr. Barnes's argument founded on the spirit
+of the age.
+
+
+The End.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred A. Ross, D.D.
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+
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+Title: Slavery Ordained of God
+
+Author: Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9171]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 10, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD
+
+By
+
+Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+
+"The powers that be are ordained of God." Romans xiii. 1.
+
+
+TO
+The Men
+NORTH AND SOUTH,
+WHO HONOR THE WORD OF GOD
+AND
+LOVE THEIR COUNTRY.
+
+
+
+
+Preface.
+
+
+
+The book I give to the public, is not made up of isolated articles. It is
+one harmonious demonstration--that slavery is part of the government
+ordained in certain conditions of fallen mankind. I present the subject in
+the form of speeches, actually delivered, and letters written just as
+published. I adopt this method to make a readable book.
+
+I give it to the North and South--to maintain harmony among Christians,
+and to secure the integrity of the union of this great people.
+
+This harmony and union can be preserved only by the view presented in this
+volume,--_i.e._ that _slavery is of God_, and to continue for the good of
+the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family,
+until another and better destiny may be unfolded.
+
+The _one great idea_, which I submit to North and South, is expressed in
+the speech, first in order, delivered in the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, May 27, 1853. I therein say:--
+
+"Let us then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend _two
+ideas_, and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern
+philanthropist learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave
+is not sin _per se_. Let him learn that God says nowhere it is sin. Let
+him learn that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no
+law there is no sin, and that _the Golden Rule_ may exist in the
+relations of slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil _in
+certain circumstances_. Let him learn that _equality_ is only the highest
+form of social life; that _subjection_ to authority, even _slavery_, may,
+in _given conditions_, be _for a time_ better than freedom to the slave
+of any complexion. Let him learn that _slavery_, like _all evils_, has
+its _corresponding_ and _greater good_; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded _compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa_. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself: And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+_God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual_.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny."
+
+All which comes after, in the speech delivered in New York, 1856, and in
+the letters, is just the expansion of this one controlling thought, which
+must be understood, believed, and acted out North and South.
+
+The Author.
+
+Written in Cleveland, Ohio, May 28, 1857.
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+Speech Before the General Assembly at Buffalo
+Speech Before the General Assembly at New York
+Letter to Rev. A. Blackburn
+What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?
+
+Letters to Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+  I.--Results of the slavery agitation--Declaration of Independence--
+      The way men are made infidels--Testimonies of General Assemblies
+ II.--Government over man a divine institute
+III.--Man-stealing
+ IV.--The Golden Rule
+
+
+
+
+Speech Delivered at Buffalo, Before the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church.
+
+
+
+To understand the following speech, the reader will be pleased to
+learn--if he don't know already--that the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, before its division in 1838, and since,--both Old
+School and New School,--has been, for forty years and more, bearing
+testimony, after a fashion, against the system of slavery; that is to say,
+affirming, in one breath, that slave-holding is a "blot on our holy
+religion," &c. &c.; and then, in the next utterance, making all sorts of
+apologies and justifications for the slave-holder. Thus: this august body
+has been in the habit of telling the Southern master (especially in the
+Detroit resolutions of 1850) that he is a _sinner_, hardly meet to be
+called a _Christian_; but, nevertheless, if he will only sin "from
+unavoidable necessity, imposed by the laws of the States,"--if he will
+only sin under the "obligations of guardianship,"--if he will only sin
+"from the demands of humanity,"--why, then, forsooth, he may be a
+slave-holder as long as _he has a mind to_. Yea, he may hold one slave,
+one hundred or one thousand slaves, and till the day of judgment.
+
+Happening to be in attendance, as a member of the body, in Buffalo, May,
+1853, when, as usual, the system of slavery was touched, in a series of
+questions sent down to the church courts below, I made the following
+remarks, in good-natured ridicule of such preposterous and stultifying
+testimony; and, as an argument, opening the views I have since reproduced
+in the second speech of this volume, delivered in the General Assembly
+which convened in New York, May, 1856, and also in the letters
+following:--
+
+BUFFALO, FRIDAY, May 27, 1853.
+
+The order of the day was reached at a quarter before eleven, and the
+report read again,--viz.:
+
+"1. That this body shall reaffirm the doctrine of the second resolution
+adopted by the General Assembly, convened in Detroit, in 1850, and,
+
+"2. That with an express disavowal of any intention to be impertinently
+inquisitorial, and for the sole purpose of arriving at the truth, so as to
+correct misapprehensions and allay all causeless irritation, a committee
+be appointed of one from each of the synods of Kentucky, Tennessee,
+Missouri, and Virginia, who shall be requested to report to the next
+General Assembly on the following points:--1. The number of slave-holders
+in connection with the churches, and the number of slaves held by them. 2.
+The extent to which slaves are held from an unavoidable necessity imposed
+by the laws of the States, the obligations of guardianship, and the
+demands of humanity. 3. Whether the Southern churches regard the
+sacredness of the marriage relation as it exists among the slaves; whether
+baptism is duly administered to the children of the slaves professing
+Christianity, and in general, to what extent and in what manner provision
+is made for the religious well-being of the slave," &c. &c.
+
+Dr. Ross moved to amend the report by substituting the following,--with
+an express disavowal of being impertinently inquisitorial:--that a
+committee of _one_ from each of the Northern synods of ---- be appointed,
+who shall be requested to report to the next General Assembly,--
+
+1. The number of Northern church-members concerned, directly or
+indirectly, in building and fitting out ships for the African slave-trade,
+and the slave-trade between the States.
+
+2. The number of Northern church-members who traffic with slave-holders,
+and are seeking to make money by selling them negro-clothing, handcuffs,
+and cowhides.
+
+3. The number of Northern church-members who have sent orders to New
+Orleans, and other Southern cities, to have slaves sold, to pay debts
+owing them from the South. [See Uncle Tom's Cabin.]
+
+4. The number of Northern church-members who buy the cotton, sugar, rice,
+tobacco, oranges, pine-apples, figs, ginger, cocoa, melons, and a thousand
+other things, raised by slave-labor.
+
+5. The number of Northern church-members who have intermarried with
+slave-holders, and have thus become slave-owners themselves, or enjoy the
+wealth made by the blood of the slave,--especially if there be any
+Northern ministers of the gospel in such a predicament.
+
+6. The number of Northern church-members who are the descendants of the
+men who kidnapped negroes in Africa and brought them to Virginia and New
+England in former years.
+
+7. The aggregate and individual wealth of members thus descended, and what
+action is best to compel them to disgorge this blood-stained gold, or to
+compel them to give dollar for dollar in equalizing the loss of the South
+by emancipation.
+
+8. The number of Northern church-members, ministers especially, who have
+advocated _murder_ in resistance to the laws of the land.
+
+9. The number of Northern church-members who own stock in under-ground
+railroads, running off fugitive slaves, and in Sabbath-breaking railroads
+and canals.
+
+10. That a special commission be sent up Red River, to ascertain whether
+Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to death, (and who was a Northern
+_gentleman_,) be not still in connection with some Northern church in good
+and regular standing.
+
+11. The number of Northern church-members who attend meetings of
+Spiritual Rappers,--or Bloomers,--or Women's-Rights Conventions.
+
+12. The number of Northern church-members who are cruel husbands.
+
+13. The number of Northern church-members who are hen-pecked husbands.
+
+[As it is always difficult to know the temper of speaker and audience from
+a printed report, it is due alike to Dr. R., to the whole Assembly, and
+the galleries, to say, that he, in reading these resolutions, and
+throughout his speech, evinced great good-humour and kindness of feeling,
+which was equally manifested by the Assembly and spectators, repeatedly,
+while he was on the floor.]
+
+Dr. Ross then proceeded:--Mr. Moderator, I move this amendment in the best
+spirit. I desire to imitate the committee in their refinement and delicacy
+of distinction. I disavow all intention to be _impertinently_
+inquisitorial. I intend to be inquisitorial, as the committee say they
+are,--but not _impertinently_ so. No, sir; not at all; not at all.
+(Laughter.) Well, sir, we of the South, who desire the removal of the evil
+of slavery, and believe it will pass away in the developments of
+Providence, are grieved when we read your graphic, shuddering pictures of
+the "middle passage,"--the slave-ship, piling up her canvas, as the shot
+pours after her from English or American guns,--see her again and again
+hurrying hogshead after hogshead, filled with living slaves, into the
+deep, and, thus lightened, escape. Sir, what horror to believe that
+clipper-ship was built by the hands of Northern, noisy Abolition
+church-members! ["Yes, I know some in New York and Boston," said one in
+the crowd.] Again, sir, when we walk along your _Broadways_, and see, as
+we do, the soft hands of your church-members sending off to the South, not
+only clothing for the slave, but manacles and whips, manufactured
+expressly for him,--what must we think of your consistency of character?
+[True, true.] And what must we think of your self-righteousness, when we
+know your church-members order the sale of slaves,--yes, slaves such as
+St. Clair's,--and under circumstances involving all the separations and
+all the loathsome things you so mournfully deplore? Your Mrs. Stowe says
+so, and it is so, without her testimony. I have read that splendid, bad
+book. Splendid in its genius, over which I have wept, and laughed, and got
+mad, (here some one said, "All at the same time?") yes--all at the same
+time. Bad in its theology, bad in its morality, bad in its temporary evil
+influence here in the North, in England, and on the continent of Europe;
+bad, because her isolated cruelties will be taken (whether so meant by her
+or not) as the general condition of Southern life,--while her Shelbys, and
+St. Clairs, and Evas, will be looked upon as angel-visitors, lingering for
+a moment in that earthly hell. The _impression made by the book is a
+falsehood_.
+
+Sir, why do your Northern church-members and philanthropists buy Southern
+products at all? You know you are purchasing cotton, rice, sugar,
+sprinkled with blood, literally, you say, from the lash of the driver! Why
+do you buy? What's the difference between my filching this blood-stained
+cotton from the outraged negro, and your standing by, taking it from me?
+What's the difference? You, yourselves, say, in your abstractions, there
+is no difference; and yet you daily stain your hands in this horrid
+traffic. You hate the traitor, but you love the treason. Your ladies,
+too,--oh, how they shun the slave-owner _at a distance_, in _the
+abstract_! But alas, when they see him in the _concrete_,--when they see
+the slave-owner _himself_, standing before them,--not the brutal driver,
+but the splendid gentleman, with his unmistakable grace of carriage and
+ease of manners,--why, lo, behold the lady says, "Oh, fie on your
+slavery!--what a _wretch_ you are! But, indeed, sir, I love your
+sugar,--and truly, truly, sir, _wretch_ as you are, I love you too." Your
+gentlemen talk just the same way when they behold our matchless women. And
+well for us all it is, that your good taste, and hearts, can thus
+appreciate our genius, and accomplishments, and fascinations, and
+loveliness, and sugar, and cotton. Why, sir, I heard this morning, from
+one pastor only, of two or three of his members thus intermarried in the
+South. May I thus give the mildest rebuke to your inconsistency of
+conduct? (Much good-natured excitement.)
+
+Sir, may we know who are the descendants of the New England kidnappers?
+What is their wealth? Why, here you are, all around me. You, gentlemen,
+made the best of that bargain. And you have kept every dollar of your
+money from the charity of emancipating the slave. You have left us,
+unaided, to give millions. Will you now come to our help? Will you give
+dollar for dollar to equalize our loss? [Here many voices cried out, "Yes,
+yes, we will."]
+
+Yes, yes? Then pour out your millions. Good. I may thank you personally.
+My own emancipated slaves would to-day be worth greatly more than
+$20,000. Will you give me back $10,000? Good. I need it now.
+
+I recommend to you, sirs, to find out your advocates of _murder_,--your
+owners of stock in under-ground railroads,--your Sabbath-breakers for
+money. I particularly urge you to find Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to
+death. He is a Northern _gentleman_, although having a somewhat Southern
+name. Now, sir, you know the Assembly was embarrassed all yesterday by
+the inquiry how the Northern churches may find their absent members, and
+what to do with them. Here then, sir, is a chance for you. Send a
+committee up Red River. You may find Legree to be a Garrison, Phillips,
+Smith, or runaway husband from some Abby Kelly. [Here Rev. Mr. Smith
+protested against Legree being proved to be a Smith. Great laughter.
+[Footnote: This gentleman was soon after made a D.D., and I think in part
+for that witticism.]] I move that you bring him back to lecture on the
+_cuteness_ there is in leaving a Northern church, going South, changing
+his name, buying slaves, and calculating, without _guessing_, what the
+profit is of killing a negro with inhuman labor above the gain of
+treating him with kindness.
+
+I have little to say of spirit-rappers, women's-rights conventionists,
+Bloomers, cruel husbands, or hen-pecked. But, if we may believe your own
+serious as well as caricature writers, you have things up here of which we
+down South know very little indeed. Sir, we have no young Bloomers, with
+hat to one side, cigar in mouth, and cane tapping the boot, striding up to
+a mincing young gentleman with long curls, attenuated waist, and soft
+velvet face,--the boy-lady to say, "May I see you home, sir?" and the
+lady-boy to reply, "I thank ye--no; pa will send the carriage." Sir, we of
+the South don't understand your women's-rights conventions. Women have
+their wrongs. "The Song of the Shirt,"--Charlotte Elizabeth,--many, many
+laws,--tell her wrongs. But your convention ladies despise the Bible. Yes,
+sir; and we of the South are afraid _of them_, and _for you_. When women
+despise the Bible, what next? _Paris,--then the City of the Great Salt
+Lake,--then Sodom, before_ and _after the Dead Sea_. Oh, sir, if slavery
+tends in any way to give the _honour of chivalry_ to Southern young
+gentlemen towards ladies, and the exquisite delicacy and heavenly
+integrity and love to Southern maid and matron, it has then a glorious
+blessing with its curse.
+
+Sir, your inquisitorial committee, and the North so far as represented by
+them, (a small fraction, I know,) have, I take it, caught a Tartar this
+time. Boys say with us, and everywhere, I _reckon_, "You worry my dog, and
+I'll worry your cat." Sir, it is just simply a _fixed fact: the South will
+not submit to these questions_. No, not for an instant. We will not permit
+you to approach us at all. If we are morbidly sensitive, you have made us
+so. But you are directly and grossly violating the Constitution of the
+Presbyterian Church. The book forbids you to put such questions; the book
+forbids _you to begin discipline_; the book forbids your sending this
+committee to help common fame bear testimony against us; the book guards
+the honour of our humblest member, minister, church, presbytery, against
+all this impertinently-inquisitorial action. Have you a _prosecutor_, with
+his definite charge and witnesses? Have you _Common Fame_, with her
+specified charges and witnesses? Have you a request from the South that
+you send a committee to inquire into slanders? No. Then hands off. As
+gentlemen you may ask us these questions,--we will answer you. But,
+ecclesiastically, you cannot speak in this matter. You have no power to
+move as you propose.
+
+I beg leave to say, just here, that Tennessee [Footnote: At that time I
+resided in Tennessee.] will be more calm under this movement than any
+other slave-region. Tennessee has been ever high above the storm, North
+and South,--especially we of the mountains. Tennessee!--"there she
+is,--look at her,"--binding this Union together like a great, long,
+broad, deep stone,--more splendid than all in the temple of Baalbec or
+Solomon. Tennessee!--there she is, in her calm valour. I will not lower
+her by calling her unconquerable, for she has never been assailed; but I
+call her ever-victorious. King's Mountain,--her pioneer
+battles:--Talladega, Emucfau, Horse-shoe, New Orleans, San Jacinto,
+Monterey, the Valley of Mexico. Jackson represented her well in his
+chivalry from South Carolina,--his fiery courage from Virginia and
+Kentucky,--all tempered by Scotch-Irish Presbyterian prudence from
+Tennessee. We, in his spirit, have looked on this storm for years
+untroubled. Yes, Jackson's old bones rattled in their grave when that
+infamous disunion convention met in Nashville, and its members turned
+pale and fled aghast. Yes, Tennessee, in her mighty million, feels
+secure; and, in her perfect preparation to discuss this question,
+politically, ecclesiastically, morally, metaphysically, or physically,
+with the extreme North or South, she is willing and able _to persuade
+others to be calm_. In this connection, I wish to say, for the South to
+the North, and to the world, that we have no fears from our
+slave-population. There might be a momentary insurrection and bloodshed;
+but destruction to the black man would be inevitable. The Greeks and
+Romans controlled immense masses of white slaves,--many of them as
+intelligent as their lords. Schoolmasters, fabulists, and poets were
+slaves. Athens, with her thirty thousand freemen, governed half a
+million of bondmen. Single Roman patricians owned thirty thousand. If,
+then, the phalanx and the legion mastered such slaves for ages, when
+battle was physical force of man to man, how certain it is that
+infantry, cavalry, and artillery could hold in bondage millions of
+Africans for a thousand years!
+
+But, dear brethren, our Southern philanthropists do not seek to have this
+unending bondage; Oh, no, no. And I earnestly entreat you to "stand still
+and see the salvation of the Lord." Assume a masterly inactivity, and you
+will behold all you desire and pray for,--you will see _America liberated
+from the curse of slavery_.
+
+The great question of the world is, WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE
+AMERICAN SLAVE?--WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MASTER? The
+following _extract from the "Charleston Mercury"_ gives my view of the
+subject with great and condensed particularity:--
+
+"Married, Thursday, 26th inst., the Hon. Cushing Kewang, Secretary of
+State of the United States, to Laura, daughter of Paul Coligny,
+Vice-President of the United States, and one of our noblest Huguenot
+families. We learn that this distinguished gentleman, with his bride, will
+visit his father, the Emperor of China, at his summer palace, in Tartary,
+north of Pekin, and return to the Vice-President's Tea Pavilion, on Cooper
+River, ere the meeting of Congress." The editor of the "Mercury" goes on
+to say: "This marriage in high life is only one of many which have
+signalized that immense emigration from Christianized China during the
+last seventy-five years, whereby Charleston has a population of 1,250,000,
+and the State of South Carolina over 5,000,000,--an emigration which has
+wonderfully harmonized with the great exodus of the negro race to
+Africa." [Some gentleman here requested to know of Dr. Ross the date of
+the "Charleston Mercury" recording this marriage. The doctor replied, "The
+date is 27th May, 1953, exactly one hundred years from this day." Great
+laughter.]
+
+Sir, this is a dream; but it is not all a dream. No, I verily believe you
+have there the Gordian knot of slavery untied; you have there the solution
+of the problem; you have there the curtain up, and the last scene in the
+last act of the great drama of Ham.
+
+I am satisfied with the tendencies of things. I stand on the mountain-peak
+above the clouds. I see, far beyond the storm, the calm sea and blue sky;
+I see the Canaan of the African. I like to stand there on the Nebo of his
+exodus, and look across, not the Jordan, but the Atlantic. I see the
+African crossing as certainly as if I gazed upon the ocean divided by a
+great wind, and piled up in walls of green glittering glass on either
+hand, the dry ground, the marching host, and the pillar of cloud and of
+fire. I look over upon the Niger, black with death to the white man,
+instinct with life to the children of Ham. _There_ is the black man's
+home. Oh, how strange that you of the North see not how you degrade him
+when you keep him here! You will not let him vote; you will not let him
+rise to honors or social equality; you will not let him hold a pew in your
+churches. Send him away, then; tell him, begone. Be urgent, like the
+Egyptians: send him out of this land. _There_, in his fatherland, he will
+exhibit his own type of Christianity. He is, of all races, the most gentle
+and kind. The _man_, the most submissive; the _woman_, the most
+affectionate. What other slaves would love their masters better than
+themselves?--rock them and fan them in their cradles? caress them--how
+tenderly!--boys and girls? honor them, grown up, as superior beings? and,
+in thousands of illustrious instances, be willing to give life, and, in
+fact, die, to serve or save them? Verily, verily, this emancipated race
+may reveal the most amiable form of spiritual life, and the _jewel_ may
+glitter on the Ethiop's brow in meaning more sublime than all in the
+poet's imagery. Brethren, let them go; and, when they are gone,--ay,
+before they go away,--rear a monument; let it grow in greatness, if not on
+your highest mountain, in your hearts,--in lasting memory of the
+South,--in memory of your wrong to the South,--in memory of the
+self-denial of the South, and her philanthropy in training the slave to
+be free, enlightened, and Christian.
+
+Can all this be? Can this double emigration civilize Africa and more than
+re-people the South? Yes; and I regard the difficulties presented here, in
+Congress, or the country, as little worth. God intends both emigrations.
+And, without miracle, he will accomplish both. Difficulties! There are no
+difficulties. Half a million emigrate to our shores, from Ireland, and all
+Europe, every year. And you gravely talk of difficulties in the negro's
+way to Africa! Verily, God will unfold their destiny as fast, and as
+fully, as he sees best for the highest good of the slave, the highest good
+of the master, and the glory of Christ in Africa.
+
+And, sir, there are forty thousand Chinese in California. And in Cuba,
+this day, American gentlemen are cultivating sugar, with Chinese hired
+labor, more profitably than the Spaniards and their slaves. Oh! there is
+China--half the population of the globe--just fronting us across that
+peaceful sea,--her poor, living on rats and a pittance of red rice,--her
+rich, hoarding millions in senseless idolatry, or indulging in the
+luxuries of birds'-nests and roasted ice. Massed together, they must
+migrate. Where can they go? They must come to our shores. They must come,
+even did God forbid them. But he will hasten their coming. They can live
+in the extremest South. It is their latitude,--their side of the ocean.
+They can cultivate cotton, rice, sugar, tea, and the silkworm. Their
+skill, their manipulation, is unrivalled. Their commonest gong you can
+neither make nor explain. They are a law-abiding people, without castes,
+accustomed to rise by merit to highest distinctions, and capable of the
+noblest training, when their idolatry, which is waxing old as a garment,
+shall be folded up as a vesture and changed for _that_ whose years shall
+not fail. The English ambassador assures us that the Chinese negotiator of
+the late treaty was a splendid gentleman, and a diplomatist to move in any
+court of Europe. Shem, then, can mingle with Japheth in America.
+
+The Chinese must come. God will bring them. He will fulfil Benton's noble
+thought. The railroad must complete the voyage of Columbus. The statue of
+the Genoese, on some peak of the Rocky Mountains, high above the flying
+cars, must point to the West, saying, "There is the East! There is India
+and Cathay."
+
+Let us, then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend _two ideas_,
+and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern philanthropist
+learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave is not sin
+_per se_. Let him learn that God nowhere says it is sin. Let him learn
+that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no law,
+there is no sin; and that _the golden rule_ may exist in the relations of
+slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil _in certain
+circumstances_. Let him learn that _equality_ is only the highest form of
+social life; that _subjection_ to authority, even _slavery_, may, in
+_given conditions_, be _for a time_ better than freedom to the slave, of
+any complexion. Let him learn that _slavery_, like _all evils_, has its
+_corresponding_ and _greater good_; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded _compared with his master_, is _elevated_ and _ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa_. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself. And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+_God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual_.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away, in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny.
+
+Ham will be ever lower than Shem; Shem will be ever lower than Japheth.
+All will rise in the Christian grandeur to be revealed. Ham will be lower
+than Shem, because he was sent to Central Africa. Man south of the
+Equator--in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa--is
+inferior to his Northern brother. The _blessing_ was upon Shem in his
+magnificent Asia. The _greater blessing_ was upon Japheth in his
+man-developing Europe. _Both blessings_ will be combined, in America,
+_north of the Zone_, in commingled light and life. I see it all in the
+first symbolical altar of Noah on that mound at the base of Ararat. The
+father of all living men bows before the incense of sacrifice, streaming
+up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all
+flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of
+the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness,
+near the long-necked giraffe, type of his _Africa_,--his magnificent wife,
+seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her
+long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered with gems from
+mines before the flood. Higher up is Shem, leaning his arm over that
+mouse-colored horse,--his _Arab_ steed. His wife, in pure white linen,
+feeds the elephant, and plays with his lithe proboscis,--the mother of
+Terah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, and Christ. And yet she looks
+up, and bows in mild humility, to _her_ of Japheth, seated amid plumed
+birds, in robes like the sky. Her noble lord, meanwhile, high above all,
+stands, with folded arms, following that eagle which wheels up towards
+Ararat, displaying his breast glittering with stars and stripes of scarlet
+and silver,--radiant heraldry, traced by the hand of God. Now he purifies
+his eye in the sun, and now he spreads his broad wings in symbolic flight
+to the _West_, until lost to the prophetic eye of Japheth, under the bow
+of splendors set that day in the cloud. God's covenant with man,--oh, may
+the bow of covenant between us be here to-day, that the waters of _this
+flood_ shall never again threaten our beloved land!
+
+
+
+
+Speech Delivered in the General Assembly
+New York, 1856.
+
+
+
+The circumstances, under which this speech was delivered, are sufficiently
+shown in the statement below.
+
+It was not a hasty production. After being spoken, it was prepared for the
+"Journal of Commerce," with the greatest care I could give to it: most of
+it was written again and again. Unlike Pascal, who said, as to his longest
+and inferior sixteenth letter, that he had not had time to make it
+shorter, I had time; and I did condense in that one speech the matured
+reflections of my whole life. I am calmly satisfied I am right. I am sure
+God has said, and does say, "Well done."
+
+The speech brings to view a wide range of thought, all belonging to the
+subject of slavery, of immense importance. As introductory,--there is the
+question of the abolition agitation the last thirty years; then, what is
+right and wrong, and the foundation of moral obligation; then, the
+definition of sin; next, the origin of human government, and the
+relations, in which God has placed men under his rule of subjection;
+finally, the word of God is brought to sustain all the positions taken.
+
+The challenge to argue the question of slavery from the Bible was thrown
+down on the floor of the Assembly, as stated. Presently I took up the
+gauntlet, and made this argument. The challenger never claimed his glove,
+then nor since; nor has anybody, so far as I know, attempted to refute
+this speech. Nothing has come to my ears (save as to two points, to be
+noticed hereafter) but reckless, bold denial of God's truth, infidel
+affirmation without attempt at proof, and denunciations of myself.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_ having said that he would argue the question on the Bible at
+a following time, Dr. Ross rose, when he took his seat, and, taking his
+position on the platform near the Moderator's chair, said,--
+
+"I accept the challenge given by Dr. Wisner, to argue the question of
+slavery from the Scriptures."
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--Does the brother propose to go into it here?
+
+_Dr. Ross_.--Yes, sir.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--Well, I did not propose to go into it here.
+
+_Dr. Ross_.--You gave the challenge, and I accept it.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--I said I would argue it at a proper time; but it is no
+matter. Go ahead.
+
+_Dr. Beman_ hoped the discussion would be ruled out. He did not think it a
+legitimate subject to go into,--Moses and the prophets, Christ and his
+apostles, and all intermediate authorities, on the subject of what the
+General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America had done.
+
+_Judge Jessup_ considered the question had been opened by this report of
+the majority: after which _Dr. Beman_ withdrew his objection, and _Dr.
+Ross_ proceeded.
+
+I am not a slave-holder. Nay, I have shown some self-denial in that
+matter. I emancipated slaves whose money-value would now be $40,000. In
+the providence of God, my riches have entirely passed from me. I do not
+mean that, like the widow, I gave all the living I had. My estate was then
+greater than that slave-property. I merely wish to show I have no selfish
+motive in giving, as I shall, the true Southern defence of slavery.
+(Applause.) I speak from Huntsville, Alabama, my present home. That gem of
+the South, that beautiful city where the mountain softens into the
+vale,--where the water gushes, a great fountain, from the rock,--where
+around that living stream there are streets of roses, and houses of
+intelligence and gracefulness and gentlest hospitality,--and, withal,
+where so high honor is ever given to the ministers of God.
+
+Speaking then from that region where "_Cotton is king_," I affirm,
+contrary as my opinion is to that most common in the South, that the
+slavery agitation has accomplished and will do great good. I said so, to
+ministerial and political friends, twenty-five years ago. I have always
+favored the agitation,--just as I have always countenanced discussion
+upon all subjects. I felt that the slavery question needed examination.
+I believed it was not understood in its relations to the Bible and human
+liberty. Sir, the light is spreading North and South. 'Tis said, I know,
+this agitation has increased the severity of slavery. True, but for a
+moment only, in the days of the years of the life of this noble problem.
+Farmers tell us that deep ploughing in poor ground will, for a year or
+two, give you a worse crop than before you went so deep; but that that
+deep ploughing will turn up the under-soil, and sun and air and rain will
+give you harvests increasingly rich. So, this moral soil, North and
+South, was unproductive. It needed deep ploughing. For a time the harvest
+was worse. Now it is becoming more and more abundant. The political
+controversy, however fierce and threatening, is only for power. But the
+moral agitation is for the harmony of the Northern and Southern mind, in
+the right interpretations of Scripture on this great subject, and, of
+course, for the ultimate union of the hearts of all sensible people, to
+fulfil God's intention,--to bless the white man and the black man in
+America. I am sure of this. I take a wide view of the progress of the
+destiny of this vast empire. I see God in America. I see him in the North
+and in the South. I see him more honored in the South to-day than he was
+twenty-five years ago; and that that higher regard is due, mainly, to the
+agitation of the slavery question. Do you ask how? Why, sir, this is the
+how. Twenty-five years ago the religious mind of the South was leavened
+by wrong Northern training, on the great point of the right and wrong of
+slavery. Meanwhile, powerful intellects in the South, following the mere
+light of a healthy good sense, guided by the common grace of God, reached
+the very truth of this great matter,--namely, that the relation of the
+master and slave is not sin; and that, notwithstanding its admitted
+evils, it is a connection between the highest and the lowest races of
+man, revealing influences which may be, and will be, most benevolent for
+the ultimate good of the master and the slave,--conservative on the
+Union, by preserving the South from all forms of Northern fanaticism, and
+thereby being a great balance-wheel in the working of the tremendous
+machinery of our experiment of self-government. This seen result of
+slavery was found to be in absolute harmony with the word of God. These
+men, then, of highest grade of thought, who had turned in scorn from
+Northern notions, now see, in the Bible, that these notions are false
+and silly. They now read the Bible, never examined before, with growing
+respect. God is honored, and his glory will be more and more in their
+salvation. These are some of the moral consummations of this agitation in
+the South. The development has been twofold in the North. On the one
+hand, some anti-slavery men have left the light of the Bible, and
+wandered into the darkness until they have reached the blackness of the
+darkness of infidelity. Other some are following hard after, and are
+throwing the Bible into the furnace,--are melting it into iron, and
+forging it, and welding it, and twisting it, and grooving it into the
+shape and significance and goodness and gospel of Sharpe's rifles. Sir,
+are you not afraid that some of your once best men will soon have no
+better Bible than that?
+
+But, on the other hand, many of your brightest minds are looking intensely
+at the subject, in the same light in which it is studied by the highest
+Southern reason. Ay, sir, mother-England, old fogy as she is, begins to
+open her eyes. What, then, is our gain? Sir, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in many of
+its conceptions, could not have been written twenty-five years ago. That
+book of genius,--over which I and hundreds in the world have freely
+wept,--true in all its facts, false in all its impressions,--yea, as false
+in the prejudice it creates to Southern social life as if Webster, the
+murderer of Parkman, may be believed to be a personification of the
+_elite_ of honor in Cambridge, Boston, and New England. Nevertheless,
+Uncle Tom's Cabin could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Dr.
+Nehemiah Adams's "_South-Side View_" could not have been written
+twenty-five years ago. Nor Dr. Nathan Lord's "_Letter of Inquiry_." Nor
+Miss Murray's book. Nor "_Cotton is King_". Nor Bledsoe's "_Liberty and
+Slavery"_. These books, written in the midst of this agitation, are all of
+high, some the highest, reach of talent and noblest piety; all give, with
+increasing confidence, the present Southern Bible reading on Slavery. May
+the agitation, then, go on! I know the New School Presbyterian church has
+sustained some temporary injury. But God is honored in his word. The
+reaction, when the first abolition-movement commenced, has been succeeded
+by the sober second thought of the South. The sun, stayed, is again
+travelling in the greatness of his strength, and will shine brighter and
+brighter to the perfect day.
+
+My only fear, Mr. Moderator, is that, as you Northern people are so prone
+to go to extremes in your zeal and run every thing into the ground, you
+may, perhaps, become _too pro-slavery;_ and that we may have to take
+measures against your coveting, over much, our daughters, if not our
+wives, our men-servants, our maid-servants, our houses, and our lands.
+(Laughter.)
+
+Sir, I come now to the Bible argument. I begin at the beginning of
+eternity! (Laughter.) WHAT is RIGHT AND WRONG? _That's the question of
+questions_.
+
+Two theories have obtained in the world. The one is, that right and wrong
+are eternal facts; that they exist _per se_ in the nature of things; that
+they are ultimate truths above God; that he must study, and does study, to
+know them, as really as man. And that he comprehends them more clearly
+than man, only because he is a better student than man. Now, sir, _this
+theory is atheism_. For if right and wrong are like mathematical
+truths--fixed facts--then I may find them out, as I find out mathematical
+truths, without instruction from God. I do not ask God to tell me that one
+and one make two. I do not ask him to reveal to me the demonstrations of
+Euclid. I thank him for the mind to perceive. But I perceive mathematical
+relations without his telling me, because they exist independent of his
+will. If, then, moral truths, if right and wrong, if rectitude and sin,
+are, in like manner, fixed, eternal facts,--if they are out from and above
+God, like mathematical entities,--then I may find them for myself. I may
+condescend, perhaps, to regard the Bible as a hornbook, in which God, an
+older student than I, tells _me_ how to _begin_ to learn what he had to
+study; or I may decline to be taught, through the Bible, how to learn
+right and wrong. I may think the Bible was good enough, may be, for the
+Israelite in Egypt and in Canaan; good enough for the Christian in
+Jerusalem and Antioch and Rome, but not good enough, even as a hornbook,
+for me,--the man of the nineteenth century,--the man of Boston, New York,
+and Brooklyn! Oh, no. I may think I need it not at all. What next? Why,
+sir, if I may think I need not God to teach me moral truth, I may think I
+need him not to teach me any thing. What next? The irresistible conclusion
+is, I may think I can live without God; that Jehovah is a myth,--a name; I
+may bid him stand aside, or die. Oh, sir, _I will be_ the fool to say
+there is no God. This is the result of the notion that right and wrong
+exist in the nature of things.
+
+The other theory is, that right and wrong are results brought into being,
+mere contingencies, means to good, made to exist solely by the will of
+God, expressed through his word; or, when his will is not thus known, he
+shows it in the human reason by which he rules the natural heart. This is
+so; because God, in making all things, saw that in the relations he would
+constitute between himself and intelligent creatures, and among
+themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass. In his benevolent
+wisdom, he then _willed_ LAW, to control this _natural good and evil_. And
+he thereby made _conformity_ to that law to be _right_, and
+_non-conformity_ to be _wrong_. Why? Simply because he saw it to be good,
+and made it to be right; not because _he saw it to be right_, but because
+he _made it to be right_.
+
+Hence, the ten specific commandments of the one moral law of love are just
+ten rules which God made to regulate the natural good and evil which he
+knew would be in the ten relations, which he himself constituted between
+himself and man, and between man and his neighbor. The Bible settles the
+question:--_sin is the transgression of the law, and where there is no law
+there is no sin_.
+
+I must-advance one step further. _What is sin_, as a mental state? Is
+it some quality--some concentrated essence--some elementary moral
+particle in the nature of things--something black, or red, like
+crimson, in the constitution of the soul, or the soul and body as
+amalgamated? No. Is it self-love? No. Is it selfishness? No. What is
+it? Just exactly, _self-will._ Just that. I, the creature, WILL _not
+submit_ to _thy_ WILL, God, the Creator. It is the I AM, _created_, who
+dares to defy and dishonor the I AM, not created,--the Lord God, the
+Almighty, Holy, Eternal.
+
+_That_ IS SIN, _per se_. And that is all of it,--so help me God! Your
+child there--John--says to his father, "I WILL _not to submit_ to your
+will." "Why not, John?" And he answers and says, "Because I WILL _not_."
+There, sir, John has revealed _all of sin_, on earth or in hell. Satan has
+never said--can never say--more. "I, Satan, WILL NOT, because I WILL _not
+to submit_ to thee, God; MY WILL, not thine, shall be."
+
+This beautiful theory is the ray of light which leads us from night, and
+twilight, and fog, and mist, and mystification, on this subject, to clear
+day. I will illustrate it by the law which has controlled and now
+regulates the most delicate of all the relations of life,--viz.: that of
+the intercourse between the sexes. I take this, because it presents the
+strongest apparent objections to my argument.
+
+Cain and Abel married their sisters. Was it wrong in the nature of things?
+[Here Dr. Wisner spoke out, and said, "Certainly."] I deny it. What an
+absurdity, to suppose that God could not provide for the propagation of
+the human race from one pair, without _requiring them to sin!_ Adam's sons
+and daughters must have married, had they remained in innocence. They must
+then have sinned in Eden, from the very necessity of the command upon the
+race:--"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." (Gen. i. 28).
+What pure nonsense! There, sir!--_that_, my one question, Dr. Wisner's
+reply, and my rejoinder, bring out, perfectly, the two theories of right
+and wrong. Sir, Abraham married his half-sister. And there is not a word
+forbidding such marriage, until God gave the law (Lev. xviii.) prohibiting
+marriage in certain degrees of consanguinity. That law made, then, such
+marriage _sin_. But God gave no such law in the family of Adam; because he
+made, himself, the marriage of brother and sister the way, and the only
+way, for the increase of the human race. _He commanded them thus to marry.
+They would have sinned had they not thus married_; for they would have
+transgressed his law. Such marriage was not even a natural evil, in the
+then family of man. But when, in the increase of numbers, it became a
+natural evil, physical and social, God placed man on a higher platform for
+the development of civilization, morals, and religion, and then made the
+law regulating marriages in the particulars of blood. But he still left
+polygamy untouched. [Here Dr. Wisner again asked if Dr. R. regarded the
+Bible as sustaining the polygamy of the Old Testament.] Dr. R.--Yes, sir;
+yes, sir; yes, sir. Let the reporters mark _that_ question, and my answer.
+(Laughter.) My principle vindicates God from unintelligible abstractions.
+I fearlessly tell what the Bible says. In its strength, I am not afraid of
+earth or hell. I fear only God. God made no law against polygamy, in the
+beginning. Therefore it was no sin for a man to have more wives than one.
+God sanctioned it, and made laws in regard to it. Abraham had more wives
+than one; Jacob had, David had, Solomon had. God told David, by the mouth
+of Nathan, when he upbraided him with his ingratitude for the blessings
+he had given him, and said, "And I gave thee thy master's house, and _thy
+master's wives_ into thy bosom." (2 Sam. xvii. 8.)
+
+God, in the gospel, places man on another platform, for the revelation of
+a nobler social and spiritual life. He now forbids polygamy. _Polygamy now
+is sin_--not because it is in itself sin. No; but because God forbids
+it,--to restrain the natural and social evil, and to bring out a higher
+humanity. And see, sir, how gently in the gospel the transition from the
+lower to the higher table-land of our progress upward is made. Christ and
+his apostles do not declare polygamy to be sin. The new law is so wisely
+given that nothing existing is rudely disturbed. The minister of God,
+unmarried, must have only one wife at the same time. This law, silently
+and gradually, by inevitable and fair inference of its meaning, and from
+the example of the apostles, passed over the Christian world. God, in the
+gospel, places us in this higher and holier ground and air of love. We
+sin, then, if we marry the sister, and other near of kin; and we sin if we
+marry, at the same time, more wives than one, not because there is sin in
+the thing itself, whatever of natural evil there might be, but because in
+so doing we transgress God's law, given to secure and advance the good of
+man. I might comment in the same way on every one of the ten commandments,
+but I pass on.
+
+The subject of slavery, in this view of _right and wrong_, is seen in the
+very light of heaven. And you, Mr. Moderator, know that, if the view I
+have presented be true, I have got you. (Great laughter.)
+
+[The Moderator said, very pleasantly--Yes--_if_--but it is a _long if_.]
+(Continued laughter.)
+
+Dr. R. touched the Moderator on the shoulder, and said, Yes, _if_--it is a
+_long if_; for it is this:--_if_ there is a God, he is not Jupiter, bowing
+to the Fates, but God, the sovereign over the universe he has created, in
+which he makes right, by making law to be known and obeyed by angels and
+men, in their varied conditions.
+
+He gave Adam _that_ command,--sublime in its simplicity, and intended to
+vindicate the principle I am affirming,--that there is no right and wrong
+in the nature of things. There was no right or wrong, _per se_, in eating
+or willing to eat of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
+
+But God made the law,--_Thou shall not eat of that tree_. As if he had
+said,--I seek to _test_ the submission of your will, freely, to my will.
+And, that your test may be perfect, I will let your temptation be
+nothing more than your natural desire for that fruit. Adam sinned. What
+was the sin?
+
+Adam said, in heart, MY WILL, _not thine_, SHALL BE. _That_ was the
+sin,--_the simple transgression of God's law_, when there was neither sin
+nor evil in the _thing_ which God forbade to be done.
+
+Man fell and was cursed. The law of the control of the superior over the
+inferior is now to begin, and is to go on in the depraved conditions of
+the fallen and cursed race. And, FIRST, God said to the woman, "_Thy
+desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." There,_ in
+that law, is _the beginning of government ordained of God. There_ is the
+beginning of the rule of the superior over the inferior, bound to obey.
+_There_, in the family of Adam, is the germ of the rule in the tribe,--the
+state. Adam, in his right, from God, to rule over his wife and his
+children, had _all the authority_ afterwards expanded in the patriarch and
+the king. This simple, beautiful fact, there, on the first leaf of the
+Bible, solves the problem, whence and how has man right to rule over man.
+In that great fact God gives his denial to the idea that government over
+man is the result of a social compact, in which each individual man living
+in a state of natural liberty, yielded some of that liberty to secure the
+greater good of government. Such a thing never was; such a thing never
+could have been. _Government was ordained and established before the first
+child was born:_--"HE SHALL RULE OVER THEE." Cain and Abel were born in a
+_state_ as perfect as the empire of Britain or the rule of these United
+States. All that Blackstone, and Paley, and Hobbs, or anybody else, says
+about the social compact, is flatly and fully denied and upset by the
+Bible, history, and common sense. Let any New York lawyer--or even a
+Philadelphia lawyer--deny this if he dares. _Life, liberty, and the
+pursuit of happiness_ never were the _inalienable_ right of the
+_individual_ man.
+
+His self-control, in all these particulars, _from the beginning_, was
+subordinate to the good of the family,--the empire. The command to Noah
+was,--"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
+(Gen. ix. 6.)
+
+This command to shed blood was, and is, in perfect harmony with the
+law,--"Thou shalt not kill." There is nothing right or wrong in _the
+taking of life_, per se, or in itself considered. It may or it may not be
+a natural good or evil. As a _general fact_, the taking of life is a
+natural evil. Hence, "Thou shalt not kill" is the general rule, to
+preserve the good there is in life. To take life under the forbidden
+conditions is sin, simply because God forbids it under those conditions.
+The sin is not in taking life, but in transgressing God's law.
+
+But _sometimes_ the taking of life will secure a greater good. God, then,
+commands that life be taken. Not to take life, under the commanded
+conditions, is sin,--solely because God then commands it.
+
+This power over life, for the good of the one great family of man, God
+_delegated_ to Noah, and through him to the tribe, the clan, the kingdom,
+the empire, the democracy, the republic, as they may be governed by chief,
+king, emperor, parliament, or congress. Had Ham killed Shem, Noah would
+have commanded Japheth to slay him. So much for the origin of the power
+over life: now for the power over liberty.
+
+The right to take life included the right over liberty. But God intended
+the rule of the superior over the inferior, in relations of service,
+should _exemplify human depravity, his curse and his overruling blessing_.
+
+The rule and the subordination which is essential to the existence of the
+family, God made commensurate with mankind; for _mankind is only the
+congeries of families_. When Ham, in his antediluvian recklessness,
+laughed at his father, God took occasion to give to the world the rule of
+the superior over the inferior. _He cursed him. He cursed him because he
+left him unblessed_. The withholding of the father's blessing, in the
+Bible, was curse. Hence Abraham prayed God, when Isaac was blessed, that
+Ishmael might not be passed by. Hence Esau prayed his father, when Jacob
+was blessed, that he might not be left untouched by his holy hands. Ham
+was cursed to render service, forever, to Shem and Japheth. The _special_
+curse on Canaan made the general curse on Ham conspicuous, historic, and
+explanatory, simply because his descendants were to be brought under the
+control of God's peculiar people. Shem was blessed to rule over Ham.
+Japheth was blessed to rule over both. God sent Ham to Africa, Shem to
+Asia, Japheth to Europe. Mr. Moderator, you have read Guyot's "_Earth and
+Man_." That admirable book is a commentary upon this part of Genesis. It
+is the philosophy of geography. And it is the philosophy of the rule of
+the higher races over the inferior, written on the very face of the earth.
+He tells you why the continents are shaped as they are shaped; why the
+mountains stand where they stand; why the rivers run where they run; why
+the currents of the sea and the air flow as they flow. And he tells you
+that the earth south of the Equator makes the inferior man. That the
+oceanic climate makes the inferior man in the Pacific Islands. That South
+America makes the inferior man. That the solid, unindented Southern Africa
+makes the inferior man. That the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent Asia
+makes the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent man. That Europe, indented by
+the sea on every side, with its varied scenery, and climate, and Northern
+influences, makes the varied intellect, the versatile power and life and
+action, of the master-man of the world. And it is so. Africa, with here
+and there an exception, has never produced men to compare with the men of
+Asia. For six thousand years, save the unintelligible stones of Egypt, she
+has had no history. Asia has had her great men and her name. But Europe
+has ever shown, and now, her nobler men and higher destiny. Japheth has
+now come to North America, to give us his past greatness and his
+transcendent glory. (Applause.) And, sir, I thank God our mountains stand
+where they stand; and that our rivers run where they run. Thank God they
+run not across longitudes, but across latitudes, from north to south. If
+they crossed longitudes, we might fear for the Union. But I hail the
+Union,--made by God, strong as the strength of our hills, and ever to live
+and expand,--like the flow and swell of the current of our streams.
+(Applause.)
+
+These two theories of Right and Wrong,--these two ideas of human
+liberty,--the right, in the nature of things, or the right as made by
+God,--the liberty of the individual man, of Atheism, of Red Republicanism,
+of the devil,--or the liberty of man, in the family, in the State, the
+liberty from God,--these two theories now make the conflict of the world.
+This anti-slavery battle is only part of the great struggle: God will be
+victorious,--and we, in his might.
+
+I now come to particular illustrations of the world-wide law that service
+shall be rendered by the inferior to the superior. The relations in which
+such service obtains are very many. Some of them are these:--husband and
+wife; parent and child; teacher and scholar; commander and
+soldier,--sailor; master and apprentice; master and hireling; master and
+slave. Now, sir, all these relations are ordained of God. They are all
+directly commanded, or they are the irresistible law of his providence, in
+conditions which must come up in the progress of depraved nature. The
+relations themselves are all good in certain conditions. And there may be
+no more of evil in the lowest than in the highest. And there may be in the
+lowest, as really as in the highest, the fulfilment of the commandment to
+love thy neighbor as thyself, and of doing unto him whatsoever thou
+wouldst have him to do unto thee.
+
+Why, sir, the wife everywhere, except where Christianity has given her
+elevation, is _the slave_. And, sir, I say, without fear of saying too
+strongly, that for every sigh, every groan, every tear, every agony of
+stripe or death, which has gone up to God from the relation of master and
+slave, there have been more sighs, more groans, more tears, and more agony
+in the rule of the husband over the wife. Sir, I have admitted, and do
+again admit, without qualification, that every fact in Uncle Tom's Cabin
+has occurred in the South. But, in reply, I say deliberately, what one of
+your first men told me, that he who will make the horrid examination will
+discover in New York City, in any number of years past, more cruelty from
+husband to wife, parent to child, _than in all the South from master to
+slave_ in the same time. I dare the investigation. And you may extend it
+further, if you choose,--to all the results of honor and purity. I fear
+nothing on this subject. I stand on rock,--the Bible,--and therefore, just
+before I bring the Bible, to which all I have said is introductory, I will
+run a parallel between the relation of master and slave and that of
+husband and wife. I will say nothing of the grinding oppression of capital
+upon labor, in the power of the master over the hireling--the crushed
+peasant--the chain-harnessed coal-pit woman, a thousand feet under ground,
+working in darkness, her child toiling by her side, and another child not
+born; I will say nothing of the press-gang which fills the navy of
+Britain--the conscription which makes the army of France--the terrible
+floggings--the awful court-martial--the quick sentence--the
+lightning-shot--the chain, and ball, and every-day lash--the punishment of
+the soldier, sailor, slave, who had run away. I pass all this by: I will
+run the parallel between the slave and wife.
+
+Do you say, The slave is held to _involuntary service?_ So is the wife.
+Her relation to her husband, in the immense majority of cases, is made for
+her, and not by her. And when she makes it for herself, how often, and how
+soon, does it become involuntary! How often, and how soon, would she
+throw off the yoke if she could! O ye wives, I know how superior you are
+to your husbands in many respects,--not only in personal attraction,
+(although in that particular, comparison is out of place,) in grace, in
+refined thought, in passive fortitude, in enduring love, and in a heart to
+be filled with the spirit of heaven. Oh, I know all this. Nay, I know you
+may surpass him in his own sphere of boasted prudence and worldly wisdom
+about dollars and cents. Nevertheless, he has authority, from God, to rule
+over you. You are under service to him. You are bound to obey him _in all
+things_. Your service is very, very, very often involuntary from the
+first, and, if voluntary at first, becomes hopeless necessity afterwards.
+I know God has laid upon the husband to love you as Christ loved the
+church, and in that sublime obligation has placed you in the light and
+under the shadow of a love infinitely higher, and purer, and holier than
+all talked about in the romances of chivalry. But the husband may not so
+love you. He may rule you with the rod of iron. What can you do? Be
+divorced? God forbids it, save for crime. Will you say that you are
+free,--that you will go where you please, do as you please? Why, ye dear
+wives, your husbands may forbid. And listen, you cannot leave New York,
+nor your palaces, any more than your shanties. No; you cannot leave your
+parlor, nor your bedchamber, nor your couch, if your husband commands you
+to stay there! What can you do? Will you run away, with your stick and
+your bundle? He can advertise you!! What can you do? You can, and I fear
+some of you do, wish him, from the bottom of your hearts, at the bottom of
+the Hudson. Or, in your self-will, you will do just as you please. (Great
+laughter.)
+
+[A word on the subject of divorce. One of your standing denunciations on
+the South is the terrible laxity of the marriage vow among the slaves.
+Well, sir, what does your Boston Dr. Nehemiah Adams say? He says, after
+giving eighty, sixty, and the like number of applications for divorce, and
+nearly all granted at individual quarterly courts in New England,--he says
+he is not sure but that the marriage relation is as enduring among _the
+slaves in the South_ as it is among white people in New England. I only
+give what Dr. Adams says. I would fain vindicate the marriage relation
+from this rebuke. But one thing I will say: you seldom hear of a divorce
+in Virginia or South Carolina.]
+
+But to proceed:--
+
+Do you say the slave is _sold and bought?_ So is the wife the world over.
+Everywhere, always, and now as the general fact, however done away or
+modified by Christianity. The savage buys her. The barbarian buys her. The
+Turk buys her. The Jew buys her. The Christian buys her,--Greek, Armenian,
+Nestorian, Roman Catholic, Protestant. The Portuguese, the Spaniard, the
+Italian, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the New
+England man, the New Yorker,--especially the upper ten,--_buy the
+wife_--in many, very many cases. She is seldom bought in the South, and
+never among the slaves themselves; for they always marry for love.
+(Continued laughter.) Sir, I say the wife is bought in the highest
+circles, too often, as really as the slave is bought. Oh, she is not sold
+and purchased in the public market. But come, sir, with me, and let us
+take the privilege of spirits out of the body to glide into that gilded
+saloon, or into that richly comfortable family room, of cabinets, and
+pictures, and statuary: see the parties, there, to sell and buy that human
+body and soul, and make her a chattel! See how they sit, and bend towards
+each other, in earnest colloquy, on sofa of rosewood and satin,--_Turkey_
+carpet (how befitting!) under feet, sunlight over head, softened through
+stained windows: or it is night, and the gas is turned nearly off, and the
+burners gleam like stars through the shadow from which the whisper is
+heard, in which that old ugly brute, with gray goatee--how fragrant!--bids
+one, two, five, ten hundred thousand dollars, and _she_ is knocked off to
+him,--that beautiful young girl asleep up there, amid flowers, and
+innocent that she is sold and bought. Sir, that young girl would as soon
+permit a baboon to embrace her, as that old, ignorant, gross, disgusting
+wretch to approach her. Ah, has she not been sold and bought for money?
+But--But what? But, you say, she freely, and without parental authority,
+accepted him. Then she sold herself for money, and was guilty of _that_
+which is nothing better than legal prostitution. I know what I say; you
+know what I say. Up there in the gallery you know: you nod to one another.
+Ah! you know the parties. Yes, you say: All true, true, true. (Laughter.)
+
+Now, Mr. Moderator, I will clinch all I have said by nails sure, and
+fastened from the word of God.
+
+There is King James's English Bible, with its magnificent dedication. I
+bring the English acknowledged translation. And just one word more to
+push gently aside--for I am a kind man to those poor, deluded anti-slavery
+people--their last argument. It is _that_ this English Bible, in those
+parts which treat of slavery, don't give the ideas which are found in the
+original Hebrew and Greek. Alas for the common people!--alas for this good
+old translation! Are its days numbered? No, sir; no, sir. The Unitarian,
+the Universalist, the Arminian, the Baptist, when pressed by this
+translation, have tried to find shelter for their false isms by making or
+asking for a new rendering. And now the anti-slavery men are driving hard
+at the same thing. (Laughter.) Sir, shall we permit our people everywhere
+to have their confidence in this noble translation undermined and
+destroyed by the isms and whims of every or any man in our pulpits? I
+affirm, whatever be our perfect liberty of examination into God's meaning
+in all the light of the original languages, that there is a respect due to
+this received version, and that great caution should be used, lest we
+teach the people to doubt its true rendering from the original word of
+God. I protest, sir, against having a Doctor-of-Divinity _priest_, Hebrew
+or Greek, to tell the people what God has spoken on the subject of
+slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin
+priest,--I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,--I would as soon go to
+Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,--I would as soon have the Pope at once in
+his fallible infallibility,--as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery
+Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible
+rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet
+produced this Bible, in its plain unanswerable authority, for the relation
+of master and slave, but the anti-slavery man ran away into the fog of
+_his_ Hebrew or Greek, (laughter,) or he jabbered the nonsense that God
+permitted the _sin_ of slaveholding among the Jews, but that he don't do
+it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it
+right, they know, then and now. Having thus taken the last puff of wind
+out of the sails of the anti-slavery phantom ship, turn to the
+twenty-first chapter of Exodus, vs. 2-5. God, in these verses, gave the
+Israelites his command how they should buy and hold the Hebrew
+servant,--how, under certain conditions, he went free,--how, under other
+circumstances, he might be held to service forever, with his wife and her
+children. There it is. Don't run into the Hebrew. (Laughter.)
+
+But what have we here?--vs. 7-11:--"And if a man sell his daughter to be a
+maid-servant, she shall not go out as the men-servants do. If she please
+not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her
+be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power,
+seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he hath betrothed her
+unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he
+take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage
+shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall
+she go out free without money." Now, sir, the wit of man can't dodge that
+passage, unless he runs away into the Hebrew. (Great laughter.) For what
+does God say? Why, this:--that an Israelite might sell his own daughter,
+not only into servitude, but into polygamy,--that the buyer might, if he
+pleased, give her to his son for a wife, or take her to himself. If he
+took her to himself, and she did not please him, he should not sell her
+unto a strange nation, but should allow her to be redeemed by her family.
+But, if he took him another wife before he allowed the first one to be
+redeemed, he should continue to give the first one _food_, her _raiment_,
+and her _duty of marriage_; that is to say, _her right to his bed_. If he
+did not do _these three things_, she should go out free; _i.e._ cease to
+be his slave, without his receiving any money for her. There, sir, God
+sanctioned the Israelite father in selling his daughter, and the Israelite
+man to buy her, into slavery and into polygamy. And it was then right,
+because God made it right. In verses 20 and 21, you have these
+words:--"And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die
+under his hand, he shall be surely punished; notwithstanding, if he
+continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."
+What does this passage mean? Surely this:--if the master gave his slave a
+hasty blow with a rod, and he died under his hand, he should be punished.
+But, if the slave lived a day or two, it would so extenuate the act of the
+master he should not be punished, inasmuch as he would be in that case
+sufficiently punished in losing his money in his slave. Now, sir, I affirm
+that God was more lenient to the degraded Hebrew master than Southern laws
+are to the higher Southern master in like cases. But there you have what
+was the divine will. Find fault with God, ye anti-slavery men, if you
+dare. In Leviticus, xxv. 44-46, "Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which
+thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them
+shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the
+strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their
+families that are with you, which they beget in your land: and they shall
+be your 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."
+
+Sir, I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command
+his people to buy slaves from the heathen round about them, and from the
+stranger, and of their families sojourning among them. The passage has no
+other meaning. Did God merely permit sin?--did he merely tolerate a
+dreadful evil? God does not say so anywhere. He gives his people law to
+buy and hold slaves of the heathen forever, on certain conditions, and to
+buy and hold Hebrew slaves in variously-modified particulars. Well, how
+did the heathen, then, get slaves to sell? Did they capture them in
+war?--did they sell their own children? Wherever they got them, they sold
+them; and God's law gave his people the right to buy them.
+
+God in the New Testament made no law prohibiting the relation of master
+and slave. But he made law regulating the relation under Greek and Roman
+slavery, which was the most oppressive in the world.
+
+God saw that these regulations would ultimately remove the evils in the
+Greek and Roman systems, and do it away entirely from the fitness of
+things, as there existing; for Greek and Roman slaves, for the most part,
+were the equals in all respects of their masters. AEsop was a slave;
+Terence was a slave. The precepts in Colossians iv. 18, 23, 1 Tim. vi.
+1-6, and other places, show, unanswerably, that God as really sanctioned
+the relation of master and slave as those of husband and wife, and parent
+and child; and that all the obligations of the moral law, and Christ's law
+of love, might and must be as truly fulfilled in the one relation as in
+the other. The fact that he has made the one set of relations permanent,
+and the other more or less dependent on conditions of mankind, or to pass
+away in the advancement of human progress, does not touch the question. He
+sanctioned it under the Old Testament and the New, and ordains it now
+while he sees it best to continue it, and he now, as heretofore, proclaims
+the duty of the master and the slave. Dr. Parker's admirable explanation
+of Colossians, and other New Testament passages, saves me the necessity of
+saying any thing more on the Scripture argument.
+
+One word on the Detroit resolutions, and I conclude. Those resolutions of
+the Assembly of 1850 decide that slavery is sin, unless the master holds
+his slave as a guardian, or under the claims of humanity.
+
+Mr. Moderator, I think we had on this floor, yesterday, proof conclusive
+that those resolutions mean any thing or nothing; that they are a fine
+specimen of Northern skill in platform-making; that it put in a plank
+here, to please this man,--a plank there, to please that man,--a plank for
+the North, a broad board for the South. It is Jackson's judicious tariff.
+It is a gum-elastic conscience, stretched now to a charity covering all
+the multitude of our Southern sins, contracted now, giving us hardly a
+fig-leaf of righteousness. It is a bowl of punch,--
+
+  A little sugar to make it sweet,
+    A little lemon to make it sour,
+  A little water to make it weak,
+    A little brandy to give it power. (Laughter.)
+
+As a Northern argument against us, it is a mass of lead so heavy that it
+weighed down even the strong shoulders of Judge Jessup. For, sir, when he
+closed his speech, I asked him a single question I had made ready for him.
+It was this:--"Do you allow that Mr. Aiken, of South Carolina, may, under
+the claims of humanity, hold three thousand slaves, or must he emancipate
+them?" The Judge staggered, and stammered, and said, "No man could rightly
+hold so many." I then asked, "How many may he hold, in humanity?" The
+Judge saw his fatal dilemma. He recovered himself handsomely, and fairly
+said, "Mr. Aiken might hold three thousand slaves, in harmony with the
+Detroit action." I replied, "Then, sir, you have surrendered the whole
+question of Southern slavery." And, sir, the Judge looked as if he felt he
+had surrendered it. And every man in this house, capable of understanding
+the force of that question, felt it had shivered the whole anti-slavery
+argument, on those resolutions, to atoms. Why, sir, if a man can hold
+three slaves, with a right heart and the approbation of God, he may hold
+thirty, three hundred, three thousand, or thirty thousand. It is a mere
+question of heart, and capacity to govern. The Emperor of Russia holds
+sixty millions of slaves: and is there a man in this house so much of a
+fool as to say that God regards the Emperor of Russia a sinner because he
+is the master of sixty millions of slaves? Sir, that Emperor has certainly
+a high and awful responsibility upon him. But, if he is good as he is
+great, he is a god of benevolence on earth. And so is every Southern
+master. His obligation is high, and great, and glorious. It is the same
+obligation, in kind, he is under to his wife and children, and in some
+respects immensely higher, by reason of the number and the tremendous
+interests involved for time and eternity in connection with this great
+country, Africa, and the world. Yes, sir, _I know_, whether Southern
+masters fully know it or not, that _they hold from God_, individually and
+collectively, _the highest and the noblest responsibility ever given by
+Him to individual private men on all the face of the earth._ For God has
+intrusted to them to train millions of the most degraded in form and
+intellect, but, at the same time, the most gentle, the most amiable, the
+most affectionate, the most imitative, the most susceptible of social and
+religious love, of all the races of mankind,--to train them, and to give
+them civilization, and the light and the life of the gospel of Jesus
+Christ. And I thank God he has given this great work to that type of the
+noble family of Japheth best qualified to do it,--to the Cavalier
+stock,--the gentleman and the lady of England and France, born to command,
+and softened and refined under our Southern sky. May they know and feel
+and fulfil their destiny! Oh, may they "know that they also have a Master
+in heaven."
+
+
+
+
+Letter from Dr. Ross.
+
+
+
+I need only say, in reference to this letter, that my friends
+having questioned my position as to the good of the agitation, I
+wrote the following letter to vindicate that point, as given, in
+the New York speech:--
+
+HUNTSVILLE, ALA., July 14, 1856.
+
+_Brother Blackburn_:--I affirmed, in my New York speech, that the Slavery
+agitation has done, and will accomplish, good.
+
+Your very kind and courteous disagreement on that point I will make the
+occasion to say something more thereon, without wishing you, my dear
+friend, to regard what I write as inviting any discussion.
+
+I said _that_ agitation has brought out, and would reveal still more
+fully, the Bible, in its relation to slavery and liberty,--also the
+infidelity which long has been, and is now, leavening with death the whole
+Northern mind. And that it would result in the triumph of the _true_
+Southern interpretation of the Bible; to the honor of God, and to the
+good of the master, the slave, the stability of the Union, and be a
+blessing to the world. To accomplish this, the sin _per se_ doctrine will
+be utterly demolished. That doctrine is the difficulty in every _Northern
+mind,_ (where there is any difficulty about slavery,) whether they confess
+it or not. Yes, the difficulty with every Northern man is, that _the
+relation of_ master and slave is felt _to be_ sin. I know that to be the
+fact. I have talked with all grades of Northern men, and come in contact
+with all varieties of Northern mind on this subject. And I know that the
+man who says and tries to believe, and does, partially in sober judgment,
+believe, that slavery is not sin, yet, _in his feelings, in his educated
+prejudices_, he feels that slavery is sin.
+
+Yes, _that_ is the difficulty, and _that_ is the whole of the difficulty,
+_between the North and the South_, so far as the question is one of the
+Bible and morals. Now, I again say, that that _sin per se_ doctrine will,
+in this agitation, be utterly demolished. And when that is done,--when the
+North will know and feel fully, perfectly, that the relation of master and
+slave is not sin, but sanctioned of God,--then, and not till then, the
+North and South can and will, without anger, consider the following
+questions:--Whether slavery, as it exists in the United States, all
+things considered, be or be not a great good, and the greatest good for a
+time, notwithstanding its admitted evils? Again, whether these evils can
+or cannot be modified and removed? Lastly, whether slavery itself can or
+cannot pass away from this land and the world? Now, sir, the moment the
+sin question is settled, then all is peace. For these other questions
+belong entirely to another category of morals. They belong entirely to the
+category of _what is_ wise _to realize_ good. This agitation will bring
+this great result. And therefore I affirm the agitation to be good.
+
+There is another fact also, the result, in great measure, of this
+agitation, which in my view proves it to have been and to be of great
+good. I mean the astonishing rise and present stability of the slave-power
+of the United States. This fact, when examined, is undeniable. And it is
+equally undeniable that it has been caused, in great part, by the slavery
+question in all its bearings. It is a wonderful development made by God.
+And I must believe he intends thereby either to destroy or bless this
+great Union. But, as I believe he intends to bless, therefore I am
+fortified in affirming the good there has been and is in this agitation.
+Let me bring out to view this astonishing fact.
+
+1. Twenty-five years ago, and previously, the whole slave-holding South
+and West had a strong tendency to emancipation, in some form. But the
+abolition movement then began, and arrested that Southern and Western
+leaning to emancipation. Many people have said, and do say, that that
+_arrest_ was and is a great evil. I say it was and is a great good. Why?
+Answer: It was and would now be premature. Had it been carried out, it
+would have been and would now be evil, immense, inconceivable,--to master,
+slave, America, Africa, and the world; because neither master, slave,
+America, Africa, the world, were, or are, ready for emancipation. God has
+a great deal to do before he is ready for emancipation. He tells us so by
+this _arrest_ put upon that tendency to emancipation years ago. For He put
+it into the hearts of abolitionists _to make the arrest_. And He stopped
+the Southern movement all the more perfectly by permitting Great Britain
+to emancipate Jamaica, and letting that experiment prove, as it has, a
+perfect failure and a terrible warning. JAMAICA IS DESTROYED. And now,
+whatever be done for its negroes must be done with the full admission that
+what has been attempted was in violation of the duty Britain owed to
+those negroes. But her failure in seeing and doing her duty, God has given
+to us to teach us knowledge; and, through us, to instruct the world in the
+demonstration of the problem of slavery.
+
+2. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to give Texas to the South. Texas, a territory so vast that
+a bird, as Webster said, can't fly over it in a week. Many in the South
+did not want Texas. But many longer-headed ones did want it. And Northern
+men voted and gave to the South exactly what these longer-headed Southern
+statesmen wanted. This, I grant, was Northern anti-slavery fatuity,
+utterly unaccountable but that God made them do it.
+
+3. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to vote for Polk, Dallas, and Texas. This gave us the
+Mexican War; and that immense territory, its spoil,--a territory which,
+although it may not be favorable for slave-labor, has increased, and will,
+in many ways, extend the slave-power.
+
+4. This leads me to say that God put it into the hearts of many Northern
+men--especially abolitionists--to believe what Great Britain
+said,--namely, that _free trade_ would result in slave-emancipation. _But
+lo! the slave-holder wanted free trade_. So Northern abolitionists helped
+to destroy the _tariff policy_, and thus to expand the demand for, and the
+culture of, cotton. Now, see, the gold of California has _perpetuated free
+trade_ by enabling our merchants to meet the enormous demand for specie
+created by free trade. So California helps the slave-power. But the
+abolitionists gave us Polk, the Mexican War, and California.
+
+5. God put it into the hearts of the North, and especially abolitionists,
+to stimulate the settlement of new free States, and to be the ardent
+friends of an immense foreign emigration. The result has been to send down
+to the South, with railroad speed and certainty, corn, wheat, flour, meal,
+bacon, pork, beef, and every other imaginable form of food, in quantity
+amazing, and so cheap that the planter can spread wider and wider the
+culture of cotton.
+
+6. God has, by this growth of the Northwest, made the demand for cotton
+enormous in the North and Northwest. Again, he has made English and French
+experiments to procure cotton somewhere else than from the United States
+_dead failures_,--in the East Indies, Egypt, Algeria, Brazil. God has
+thus given to the Southern planter an absolute monopoly. A monopoly so
+great that he, the Southern planter, sits now upon his throne of cotton
+and wields the commercial sceptre of the world. Yes, it is the Southern
+planter who says to-day to haughty England, Go to war, if you dare;
+dismiss Dallas, if you dare. Yes, he who sits on the throne of the
+cotton-bag has triumphed at last over him who sits on the throne of the
+wool-sack. England is prostrate at his feet, as well as the abolitionists.
+
+7. God has put it into the hearts of abolitionists to prevent half a
+million of free negroes from going to Liberia; and thereby the
+abolitionists have made them consumers of slave-products to the extension
+of the slave-power. And, by thus keeping them in America, the
+abolitionists have so increased their degradation as to prove all the more
+the utter folly of emancipation in the United States.
+
+8. God has permitted the anti-slavery men in the North, in England, in
+France, and everywhere, so to blind themselves in hypocrisy as to give the
+Southern slave-holder his last perfect triumph over them; for God tells
+the planter to say to the North, to England, to France, to all who buy
+cotton, "Ye men of Boston, New York, London, Paris,--ye hypocrites,--ye
+brand me as a pirate, a kidnapper, a murderer, a demon, fit only for hell,
+and yet ye buy my blood-stained cotton. O ye hypocrites!--ye Boston
+hypocrites! why don't ye throw the cotton in the sea, as your fathers did
+the tea? Ye Boston hypocrites! ye say, _if we had been in the days of our
+fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the
+slave-trade!_ Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the
+children of them who, in fact, kidnapped and bought in blood, and sold the
+slave in America! for now, ye hypocrites, ye buy the blood-stained cotton
+in quantity so immense, that _ye_ have run up the price of slaves to
+be more than a thousand dollars,--the average of old and young! O ye
+hypocrites! ye denounce slavery; then ye bid it live, and not die,--in
+that ye buy sugar, rice, tobacco, and, above all, cotton! Ye hypocrites!
+ye abuse the devil, and then fall down and worship him!--ye
+hypocrites,--ye New England hypocrites,--ye Old England hypocrites,--ye
+French hypocrites,--ye Uncle Tom's Cabin hypocrites,--ye Beecher
+hypocrites,--ye Rhode Island Consociation hypocrites! Oh, your holy
+twaddle stinks in the nostrils of God, and he commands me to lash you
+with my scorn, and his scorn, so long as ye gabble about the sin of
+slavery, and then bow down to me, and buy and spin cotton, and thus work
+for me as truly as my slaves! O ye fools and blind, fill ye up the measure
+of your folly, and blindness, and shame! And this ye are doing. Ye have,
+like the French infidels, made _reason_ your goddess, and are exalting her
+above the Bible; and, in your unitarianism and neology and all modes of
+infidelity, ye are rejecting and crucifying the Son of God."
+
+Now, my brother, this controlling slave-power is a world-wide fact. Its
+statistics of bales count by millions; its tonnage counts by hundreds of
+thousands; its manufacture is reckoned by the workshops of America and
+Europe; its supporters are numbered by all who must thus be clothed in the
+world. This tremendous power has been developed in great measure by the
+abolition agitation, controlled by God. I believe, then, as I have already
+said, that God intends one of two things. He either intends to destroy the
+United States by this slave-power, or he intends to bless my country and
+the world by the unfoldings of his wisdom in this matter. I believe he
+will bless the world in the working out of this slavery. I rejoice, then,
+in the agitation which has so resulted, and will so terminate, to reveal
+the Bible, and bless mankind.
+
+Your affectionate friend,
+
+F.A. Ross.
+
+REV. A. BLACKBURN.
+
+
+
+
+What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?
+
+
+
+My position as to this all-important question, in my New York speech, was
+made subject of remark in the "Presbyterian Herald," Louisville, Kentucky,
+to which I replied at length in the "Presbyterian Witness," Knoxville,
+Tennessee. No rejoinder was ever made to that reply. But, recently, an
+extract from the younger Edwards was submitted to me. To that I gave the
+following letter. The subject is of the first and the last importance, and
+bears directly, as set forth in my New York speech, on infidelity, and, of
+course, the slavery question:--
+
+Mr. Editor:--In your paper of Tuesday, 24th ult., there is an article,
+under this head, giving the argument of Edwards (the son) against my views
+as to _the foundation of moral obligation_.
+
+I thank the writer for his argument, and his courteous manner of
+presenting it. In my third letter to Mr. Barnes, I express my preparation
+to meet "_all comers_" on this question; and I am pleased to see this
+"_comer_". If my views cannot be refuted by Edwards, I may wait long
+for an "_uglier customer_."
+
+A word, introductory, to your correspondent. He says, "His [Dr. Ross's]
+theory was advanced and argued against in a former age." By this, I
+understand him to express his belief that my theory has been rejected
+heretofore. Well. It may, nevertheless, be the true theory. The Copernican
+astronomy was argued against in a former age and rejected; yet it has
+prevailed. Newton's law of gravitation was argued against and rejected by
+a whole generation of philosophers on the continent of Europe; yet it has
+prevailed. And now all school-boys and girls would call anybody a fool who
+should deny it. Steam, in all its applications, was argued against and
+rejected; yet it has prevailed. So the electric telegraph; and, to go back
+a little, the theory of vaccination,--the circulation of the blood,--a
+thousand things; yea, Edwards's (the father) theory of virtue, although
+received by many, has been argued against, and by many rejected; yet it
+will prevail. Yea, his idea of the unity of the race in Adam was and is
+argued against and rejected; yet it will prevail. I feel, therefore, no
+fear that my theory of moral obligation will not be acknowledged because
+it was argued against and rejected by many in a former age, and may be
+now. Nay; facts to prove it are accumulating,--facts which were not
+developed in Edwards's day,--facts showing, irresistibly, that Edwards's
+theory, which is _that_ most usually now held, is what I say it is,--_the
+rejection of revelation, infidelity, and atheism_. The evidence amounts to
+demonstration.
+
+The question is in a nutshell; it is this:--_Shall man submit to the
+revealed will of God_, or _to his own will?_ That is the naked question
+when the fog of confused ideas and unmeaning words is lifted and
+dispersed.
+
+My position, expressed in the speech delivered in the General Assembly,
+New York, May, 1856, is this:--"God, in making all things, saw that, in
+the relations he would constitute between himself and intelligent
+creatures, and among themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass.
+In his benevolent wisdom, he then _willed_ LAW to control this _good_ and
+_evil_; and he thereby made _conformity_ to that law to be _right_, and
+_non-conformity_ to be _wrong_. Why? Simply because he saw it to be
+_good_, and _made it to be_ RIGHT; not because _he saw it to be right_,
+but because _he made it to be right_."
+
+Your correspondent replies to this theory in the following words of
+Edwards:--"Some hold that the foundation of moral obligation is
+primarily in the will of God. But the will of God is either benevolent
+or not. If it be benevolent, and on that account the foundation of moral
+obligation, it is not the source of obligation merely because it is the
+will of God, but because it is benevolent, and is of a tendency to
+promote happiness; and this places the foundation of obligation in a
+tendency to happiness, and not primarily in the will of God. But if the
+will of God, and that which is the expression of it, the divine law, be
+allowed to be not benevolent, and are foundation of obligation, we are
+obliged to conform to them, whatever they be, however malevolent and
+opposite to holiness and goodness the requirements be. But this, I
+presume, none will pretend." Very fairly and strongly put; that's to say,
+if I understand Edwards, he supposes, if God was the devil and man what
+he is, then man would not be under obligation to obey the devil's will!
+That's it! Well, I suppose so too; and I reckon most _Christians_ would
+agree to that statement, Nay, more: I presume nobody ever taught that the
+mere naked _will_, abstractly considered, if it could be, from the
+_character_ of God, was the ground of moral obligation? Nay, I think
+nobody ever imagined that the notion of an infinite Creator presupposes
+or includes the idea that he is a malevolent Being! I agree, then, with
+Edwards, that the ultimate ground of obligation _is_ in the _fact_ that
+God is benevolent, or is a good God. I said _that_ in my speech quoted
+above. I formally stated that "_God, in his benevolent wisdom, willed law
+to control the natural good and evil_," &c. What, then, is the point of
+disagreement between my view and Edwards's? It is in _the different ways
+by which we_ GET AT _the_ FACT _of divine benevolence_. I hold that the
+REVEALED WORD _tells us who God is and what he does_, and is, therefore,
+the ULTIMATE GROUND OF OBLIGATION. But Edwards holds that HUMAN REASON
+_must tell us who God is and what he does_, and IS, therefore, the
+PRIMARY GROUND OF OBEDIENCE. _That_ is my issue with Edwards and others;
+and it is as broad an issue as _faith in revelation_, or the REJECTION OF
+IT. I do not charge that Edwards did, or that all who hold with him do,
+deny the word of God; but I do affirm that their argument does. The
+matter is plain. For what is revelation? It is that God has appeared in
+person, and _told_ man in WORD that he is GOD; and _told_ him first in
+WORD (to be expanded in studying _creation_ and _providence_) that God is
+a Spirit, eternal, infinite in power, wisdom, goodness, holiness,--the
+Creator, Preserver, Benefactor. That WORD, moreover, he proved by
+highest evidence--namely, supernatural evidence--to be _absolute,
+perfect_ TRUTH as to all FACT affirmed _of him_ and _what_ he _does_.
+REVELATION, as claimed in the Bible, was and is THAT THING.
+
+Man, then, having this revelation; is under obligation ever to believe
+every jot and tittle of that WORD. He at first, no doubt, knew little of
+the meaning of some _facts_ declared; nay, he may have comprehended
+nothing of the sense or scope of many _facts_ affirmed. Nay, he may now,
+after thousands of years, know most imperfectly the meaning of that WORD.
+But he was and he is, notwithstanding, to believe with absolute faith the
+WORD,--that God _is_ all he says he is, and _does_ all he says he
+does,--however that WORD may _go beyond_ his reason, or _surprise_ his
+feelings, or _alarm_ his conscience, or _command_ his will.
+
+This statement of what revelation is, settles the whole question as
+presented by Edwards. For REVELATION, as explained, does FIX _forever the
+foundation of man's moral obligation in the benevolence of God_,
+PRIMARILY, as it is _expressed_ in the word of God. REVELATION does then,
+in that sense, FIX _obligation in the_ MERE WILL OF GOD; for, the moment
+you attempt to establish the foundation _somewhere else_, you have
+abandoned the ground of revelation. You have left the WILL OF GOD _in his
+word_, and you have made your rule of right to be the WILL OF MAN _in the_
+SELF _of the_ HEART. The proof of what I here say is so plain, even as the
+writing on the tables of Habakkuk's vision, that he may run that readeth
+it. Read, then, even as on the _tables_.
+
+God _says_ in his WORD, "I am all-powerful, all-wise, the Creator." "You
+may be," says Edwards, "but I want _primary foundation_ for my faith; and
+I can't take your _word_ for it. I must look first into _nature_ to see if
+evidence of infinite power and wisdom is there,--to see if evidence of a
+Creator is there,--and if thou art he!"
+
+Again, God _says_ in his word, "I am benevolent, and _my will_ in my law
+is expression of that benevolence." "You may tell the truth," Edwards
+replies, "but I want _primary ground_ for my belief, and I must hold your
+word suspended until I examine into my reason, my feelings, my conscience,
+my will,--to see if your WORD _harmonizes_ with my HEART,--to see if what
+you reveal tends to _happiness_ IN MY NOTION OF HAPPINESS; _or tends to
+right_ IN MY NOTION OF RIGHT!" That's it. That's the theory of Edwards,
+Barnes, and others.
+
+And what is this but the attempt to know the divine attributes and
+character in _some other way_ than through the divine WORD? And what is
+this but the denial of the divine WORD, except so far as it agrees with
+the knowledge of the attributes and character of God, obtained in THAT
+_some other way?_ And what is this but to make the word of God
+_subordinate_ to the teaching of the HUMAN HEART? And what is this but to
+make the WILL _of God_ give place to the WILL _of man?_ And what is this
+but the REJECTION OF REVELATION? Yet this is the result (though not
+intended by him) of the whole scheme of obligation, maintained by Edwards
+and by all who agree with him.
+
+Carry it out, and what is the progress and the end of it? This. Human
+reason--the human heart--will be supreme. Some, I grant, will hold to a
+revelation of some sort. A thing more and more transcendental,--a thing
+more and more of fog and moonshine,--fog floating in German cellars from
+fumes of lager-beer, and moonshine gleaming from the imaginations of the
+drinkers. Some, like Socrates and Plato, will have a God supreme,
+personal, glorious, somewhat like the true; and with him many inferior
+deities,--animating the stars, the earth, mountains, valleys, plains, the
+sea, rivers, fountains, the air, trees, flowers, and all living things.
+Some will deny a personal God, and conceive, instead, the intelligent mind
+of the universe, without love. Some will contend for mere law,--of
+gravitation and attraction; and some will suggest that all is the result
+of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Here, having passed through the
+shadows and the darkness, we have reached the blackness of
+infidelity,--blank atheism. No God--yea, all the way the "_fools_" were
+saying in their hearts, no God. What now is man? Alas! some, the Notts and
+Gliddons, tell us, man was indeed _created_ millions of ages ago, the Lord
+only knows when, in swarms like bees to suit the zones of the
+earth,--while other some, the believers in the _vestiges of creation_, say
+man is the result of development,--from fire, dust, granite, grass, the
+creeping thing, bird, fish, four-footed beast, monkey. Yea, and some of
+these last philosophers are even now going to Africa to try to find men
+they have heard tell of, who still have tails and are jumping and climbing
+somewhere in the regions around the undiscovered sources of the Nile.
+
+This is the progress and the result of the Edwards theory; because, deny
+or hesitate about revelation, and man cannot prove, _absolutely_, any of
+the things we are considering. Let us see if he can. Edwards writes, "On
+the supposition that the will or law of God is the primary foundation,
+reason, and standard of right and virtue, every attempt _to prove the
+moral perfection or attributes of God is absurd_." Here, then, Edwards
+believes, that, to reach the primary foundation of right and virtue, he
+must not take God's word as to his perfection or attributes, no matter how
+fully _God_ may have _proved_ his word: no; but he, Edwards, he, man, must
+first _prove_ them in _some other way_. And, of course, he believes he can
+reach such primary foundation by such other proof. Well, let us see how he
+goes about it. I give him, to try his hand, the easiest
+attribute,--"POWER." I give him, then, all creation, and providence
+besides, as his _black-board_, on which to work his demonstration. I give
+him, then, the lifetime of Methuselah, in which to reach his conclusion of
+proof.--Well, I will now suppose we have all lived and waited that long
+time: what is his _proof_ OF INFINITE POWER? Has he found the EXHIBITION
+of _infinite power?_ No. He has found _proof_ of GREAT POWER; but he has
+not reached the DISPLAY of _infinite power_. What then is his _faith_ in
+infinite power after such _proof?_ Why, just this: he INFERS _only_, that
+THE POWER, _which did the things he sees, can go on, and on, and on, to
+give greater, and greater, and greater manifestations of itself!_ VERY
+GOOD: _if so be, we can have no better proof_. But _that_ PROOF is
+infinitely below ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. And all
+manifestations of power to a _finite creature_, even to the archangel
+Michael, during countless millions of ages, never gives, because it never
+can give to him, ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. But the word of GOD
+gives the PROOF ABSOLUTE, _and in a moment of time!_ "I AM THE ALMIGHTY!"
+The _perfect proof_ is in THAT WORD OF GOD.
+
+I might set Edwards to work to prove the _infinite wisdom_, the _infinite
+benevolence_, the _infinite holiness_--yea, the EXISTENCE--of God. And he,
+finite man, in any examination of creation or providence, must fall
+infinitely below the PERFECT PROOF.
+
+So then I tell Edwards, and all agreeing with him, that _it is absurd_ to
+attempt to _prove_ the moral perfection and attributes of God, if he
+thereby seeks to reach the HIGHEST EVIDENCE, _or if he thereby means to
+find the_ PRIMARY GROUND _of moral obligation_.
+
+Do I then teach that man should not seek the _proof_ there is, of the
+perfection and attributes of God, in _nature and providence_? No. I hold
+that such proof unfolds the _meaning_ of the FACTS declared in the WORD of
+God, and is all-important, as such expansion of meaning. But I say, by
+authority of the Master, that _the highest proof, the absolute proof, the
+perfect proof_, of the FACTS as to _who God is, and what he does_, and the
+PRIMARY OBLIGATION _thereupon, is in the_ REVEALED WORD.
+
+FRED. A. ROSS.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., April 3, 1857.
+
+N.B.--In notice of last Witness's extract from Erskine, I remark that
+Thomas Erskine was, and may yet be, a lawyer of Edinburgh. He wrote
+_three works_:--_one_ on the _Internal Evidences_, the _next_ on
+_Faith_, the _last_ on the _Freeness of the Gospel_. They are all
+written with great ability, and contain much truth. But all have in them
+fundamental _untruths_. There is least in the Evidences; more in the
+essay on Faith; most in the tract on the Freeness of the Gospel,--which
+last has been utterly refuted, and has passed away. His _Faith_ is,
+also, not republished. The Evidences is good, like good men,
+notwithstanding the evil.
+
+
+
+
+Letters to Rev. A. Barnes.
+
+
+
+
+Introduction.
+
+
+
+As part of the great slavery discussion, Rev. A. Barnes, of Philadelphia,
+published, in October, 1856, a pamphlet, entitled, "The CHURCH and
+SLAVERY." In this tract he invites every man to utter his views on the
+subject. And, setting the example, he speaks his own with the greatest
+freedom and honesty.
+
+In the same freedom of speech, I have considered his views unscriptural,
+false, fanatical, and infidel. Therefore, while I hold him in the highest
+respect, esteem, and affection, as a divine and Christian gentleman, and
+cherish his past relations to me, yet I have in these letters written to
+him, and of him, just as I would have done had he lived in France or
+Germany, a stranger to me, and given to the world the refined scoff of the
+one, or the muddy transcendentalism of the other.
+
+My first letter is merely a glance at some things in his pamphlet, in
+which I show wherein I agree and disagree with him,--_i.e._ in our
+estimate of the results of the agitation; in our views of the Declaration
+of Independence; in our belief of the way men are made infidels; and in
+our appreciation of the testimonies of past General Assemblies.
+
+The other letters I will notice in similar introductions.
+
+These letters first appeared as original contributions to the Christian
+Observer, published and edited by Dr. A. Converse, Philadelphia.
+
+I take this occasion to express my regard for him, and my sense of the
+ability with which he has long maintained the rights and interests of the
+Presbyterian body, to which we both belong; and the wise and masterly way
+in which he has vindicated, from the Bible, the truth on the slavery
+question. To him, too, the public is indebted for the first exhibition of
+Mr. Barnes's errors in his recent tract which has called forth my reply.
+
+
+
+
+No. I.
+
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+_Dear Sir_:--You have recently published a tract:--"The Church and
+Slavery."
+
+"The opinion of each individual," you remark, "contributes to form public
+sentiment, as the labor of the animalcule in the ocean contributes to the
+coral reefs that rise above the waves."
+
+True, sir, and beautifully expressed. But while, in harmony with your
+intimation, I must regard you one of the animalcules, rearing the coral
+reef of public opinion, I cannot admit your disclaimer of "special
+influence" among them in their work. Doubtless, sir, you have "special
+influence,"--and deserve to have. I make no apology for addressing you. I
+am one of the animalcules.
+
+I agree, and I disagree, with you. I harmonize in your words,--"The
+present is eminently a time when the views of every man on the subject of
+slavery should be uttered in unambiguous tones." I agree with you in this
+affirmation; because the subject has yet to be fully understood; because,
+when understood, if THE BIBLE does _not_ sanction the system, the MASTER
+must cease to be the master. The SLAVE must cease to be the slave. He must
+be _free_, AND EQUAL IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE. _That_ is your
+"_unambiguous tone_". Let it be heard, if _that_ is the word of God.
+
+But if THE BIBLE _does_ sanction the system, then _that_ "unambiguous
+tone" will silence abolitionists who admit the Scriptures; it will satisfy
+all good men, and give peace to the country. That is the "_tone_" I want
+men to hear. Listen to it in the past and present speech of providence.
+The time was when _you_ had the very _public sentiment_ you are now trying
+to form. From Maine to Louisiana, the American mind was softly yielding to
+the impress of emancipation, in some hope, however vague and imaginary.
+Southern as well as Northern men, in the church and out of it, not having
+sufficiently studied the word of God, and, under our own and French
+revolutionary excitement, looking only at the evils of slavery, wished it
+away from the land. It was a _mistaken_ public sentiment. Yet, such as it
+was, you had it, and it was doing your work. It was Quaker-like, mild and
+affectionate. It did not, however, work fast enough for you. You thought
+that the negro, with his superior attributes of body and mind and higher
+advantages of the nineteenth century, might reach, in a day, the liberty
+and equality which the Anglo-American had attained after the struggle of
+his ancestors during a thousand years! You got up the agitation. You got
+it up in the Church and State. You got it up over the length and breadth
+of this whole land. Let me show you some things you have secured, as the
+results of your work.
+
+
+
+_First Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+1. The most consistent abolitionists, affirming the sin of slavery, on the
+maxim of created equality and unalienable right, after torturing the Bible
+for a while, to make it give the same testimony, felt they could get
+nothing from the book. They felt that the God of the Bible disregarded the
+thumb-screw, the boot, and the wheel; that he would not speak for them,
+but against them. These consistent men have now turned away from the
+word, in despondency; and are seeking, somewhere, an abolition Bible, an
+abolition Constitution for the United States, and an abolition God.
+
+This, sir, is the _first result_ of your agitation:--the very van of your
+attack repulsed, and driven into infidelity.
+
+
+
+_A Second Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+2. Many others, and you among them, are trying in exactly the same way
+just mentioned to make the Bible speak against slave-holding. You get
+nothing by torturing the English version. People understand English. Nay,
+you get little by applying the rack to the Hebrew and Greek; even before a
+tribunal of men like you, who proclaim beforehand that Moses, in Hebrew,
+and Paul, in Greek, _must_ condemn slavery because "_it is a violation of
+the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence_." You find it
+difficult to persuade men that Moses and Paul were moved by the Holy Ghost
+to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson! You find it hard to make
+men believe that Moses saw in the mount, and Paul had vision in heaven,
+that this future _apostle of Liberty_ was inspired by Jesus Christ.
+
+You torture very severely. But the muscles and bones of those old men are
+tough and strong. They won't yield under your terrible wrenchings. You get
+only groans and mutterings. You claim these voices, I know, as testimony
+against slavery. But you cannot torture in secret as in olden times. When
+putting the question, you have to let men be present,--who tell us that
+Moses and Paul won't speak for you,--that they are silent, like Christ
+before Pilate's scourging-men; or, in groans and mutterings,--the voices
+of their sorrow and the tones of their indignation,--they rebuke your
+pre-judgment of the Almighty when you say if the Bible sanctions slavery,
+"it neither ought to be nor could be received by mankind as a divine
+revelation."
+
+This, sir, is the _second result_ you have gained by your agitation. You
+have brought a thousand Northern ministers of the gospel, with yourself,
+to the verge of the same denial of the word of God which they have made,
+who are only a little ahead of you in the road you are travelling.
+
+
+
+_A Third Result of Agitation._
+
+
+3. Meanwhile, many of your most pious men, soundest scholars, and
+sagacious observers of providence, have been led to study the Bible more
+faithfully in the light of the times. And they are reading it more and
+more in harmony with the views which have been reached by the highest
+Southern minds, to wit:--That the relation of master and slave is
+sanctioned by the Bible;--that it is a relation belonging to the same
+category as those of husband and wife, parent and child, master and
+apprentice, master and hireling;--that the relations of husband and wife,
+parent and child, _were ordained in Eden for man, as man_, and _modified
+after the fall_, while the relation of slavery, as a system of labor, is
+_only one form of the government ordained of God over fallen and degraded
+man_;--that the _evils_ in the system are _the same evils_ of OPPRESSION
+we see in the relation of husband and wife, and all other forms of
+government;--that slavery, as a relation, suited to the more degraded or
+the more ignorant and helpless types of a sunken humanity, is, like all
+government, intended _as the proof of the curse of such degradation, and
+at the same time to elevate and bless_;--that the relation of husband and
+wife, being for man, as man, _will ever be over him_, while slavery will
+remain so long as God sees it best, as a controlling power over the
+ignorant, the more degraded and helpless;--and that, when he sees it for
+the good of the country, he will cause it to pass away, if the slave can
+be elevated to liberty and equality, political and social, with his
+master, _in_ that country; or _out of_ that country, if such elevation
+cannot be given therein, but may be realized in some other land: all which
+result must be left to the unfoldings of the divine will, _in harmony with
+the Bible_, and not to a newly-discovered dispensation. These facts are
+vindicated in the Bible and Providence. In the Old Testament, they stare
+you in the face:--in the family of Abraham,--in his slaves, bought with
+his money and born in his house,--in Hagar, running away under her
+mistress's hard dealing with her, and yet sent back, as a fugitive slave,
+by the angel,--in the law which authorized the Hebrews to hold their
+brethren as slaves for a time,--in which parents might sell their children
+into bondage,--in which the heathen were given to the Hebrews as their
+slaves forever,--in which slaves were considered so much the money of
+their master, that the master who killed one by an unguarded blow was,
+under certain circumstances, sufficiently punished in his slave's death,
+because he thereby lost his money,--in which the difference between
+_man-stealing_ and _slave-holding_ is, by law, set forth,--in which the
+runaway from heathen masters may not be restored, because God gave him
+the benefits of an adopted Hebrew. In the New Testament:--wherein the
+slavery of Greece and Rome was recognised,--in the obligations laid on
+master and slave,--in the close connection of this obligation with the
+duties of husband and wife, parent and child,--in the obligation to return
+the fugitive slave to his master,--and _in the condemnation of every
+abolition principle_, "AS DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH." (1 Tim. vi. 1-5.)
+
+This view of slavery is becoming more and more, not only the settled
+decision of the Southern but of the best Northern mind, with a movement so
+strong that you have been startled by it to write the pamphlet now lying
+before me.
+
+This is the _third result_ you have secured:--to make many of the best men
+in the North see the infidelity of your philosophy, falsely so called, on
+the subject of slavery, in the clearer and clearer light of the
+Scriptures.
+
+
+
+_Another Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+4. The Southern slave-holder is now satisfied, as never before, that the
+relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible; and he feels, as
+never before, the obligations of the word of God. He no longer, in his
+ignorance of the Scriptures, and afraid of its teachings, will seek to
+defend his common-sense opinions of slavery by arguments drawn from "Types
+of Mankind," and other infidel theories; but he will look, in the light of
+the Bible, on all the good and evil in the system. And when the North, as
+it will, shall regard him holding from God this high power for great
+good,--when the North shall no more curse, but bid him God-speed,--then he
+will bless himself and his slave, in nobler benevolence. With no false
+ideas of created equality and unalienable right, but with the Bible in his
+heart and hand, he will do justice and love mercy in higher and higher
+rule. Every evil will be removed, and the negro will be elevated to the
+highest attainments he can make, and be prepared for whatever destiny God
+intends. This, sir, is the _fourth result_ of your agitation:--to make the
+Southern master _know_, from the Bible, his right to be a master, and his
+duty to his slave.
+
+These _four results_ are so fully before you, that I think you must see
+and feel them. You have brought out, besides, tremendous political
+consequences, giving astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on
+these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of
+the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep
+of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I
+rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly
+purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long
+latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and
+South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of
+God and to speak it to the land. I rejoice that all the South now know
+that God gives the right to hold slaves, and, with that right,
+obligations they must fulfil. I rejoice that the day has dawned in which
+the North and South will think and feel and act together on the subject
+of slavery. I thank God for the agitation. May he forgive the folly and
+wickedness of many who have gotten it up! May he reveal more and more,
+that surely the wrath of man shall praise him, while the remainder of
+wrath he will restrain!
+
+
+
+_Declaration of Independence_.
+
+
+I agree with you, sir, that _the second paragraph_ of the Declaration of
+Independence contains _five affirmations_, declared to be self-evident
+truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every
+thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to
+liberty,--to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to
+their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident
+truth, or a truth at all. On the contrary, that each one is contrary to
+the Bible; that each one, separately, is denied; and that all five,
+collectively, are denied and upset by the Bible, by the natural history of
+man, and by providence, in every age of the world. I say this now. In a
+subsequent communication, I will prove what I affirm. For the present I
+merely add, that the Declaration of Independence stands in no need of
+these false affirmations. It was, and is, a beautiful whole without them.
+It was, and is, without these imaginary maxims, the simple statement of
+the grievances the colonies had borne from the mother-country, and their
+right _as colonies_, when thus oppressed, to declare themselves
+independent. That is to say, the right given of God to oppressed children
+to seek protection in another family, or to set up for themselves somewhat
+before _twenty-one_ or natural maturity; right belonging to them _in the
+British family;_ right sanctioned of God; right blessed of God, in the
+resistance of the colonies _as colonies_--not as individual men--to the
+attempt of the mother-country to consummate her tyranny. But God gives no
+sanction to the affirmation that he has _created all men equal_; that this
+is _self-evident,_ and that he has given them _unalienable rights;_ that
+he has made government to _derive its power solely from their consent_,
+and that he has given them _the right to change that government in their
+mere pleasure_. All this--every word of it, every jot and tittle--is the
+liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times
+in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if
+Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed
+it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as
+time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru
+Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, Garrison, or Barnes.
+
+Sir, that paragraph is an _excrescence_ on the tree of our liberty. I pray
+you take it away. Worship it if you will, and in a manner imitate the
+Druid. He gave reverence to the _mistletoe_, but first he removed the
+_parasite_ from the noble tree. Do you the same. Cut away _this mistletoe_
+with golden knife, as did the Druid; enshrine its imaginary divinity in a
+grove or cave; then retire there, and leave our oak to stand in its glory
+in the light of heaven. Men have been afraid to say all this for years,
+just as they have been timid to assert that God has placed master and
+slave in the same relation as husband and wife. Public sentiment, which
+you once had and have lost, suppressed this utterance as the other. But
+now, men speak out; and I, for one, will tell you what the Bible reveals
+as to that part of the Declaration of Independence, as fearlessly as I
+tell you what it says of the system of slavery.
+
+
+
+_How Men are made Infidels_.
+
+
+I agree with you that some men have been, are, and will be, made infidels
+by hearing that God has ordained slavery as one form of his government
+over depraved mankind. But how does this fact prove that the Bible does
+not sanction slavery? Why, sir, you have been all your life teaching that
+some men are made infidels by hearing any truth of the Bible;--that some
+men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement,
+Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. True: and these men
+find "_great laws of their nature,--instinctive feelings_"--just such as
+you find against slavery, and not more perverted in them than in you,
+condemning all this Bible. And they hold now, with your sanction, that a
+book affirming such facts "_cannot be from God_."
+
+Sir, some men are made infidels by hearing the Ten Commandments, and they
+find "_great laws of their nature_," as strong in them as yours in you
+against slavery, warring against every one of these commandments. And
+they declare now, with your authority, that a book imposing such
+restraints upon human nature, "_cannot be from God_" Sir, what is it
+makes infidels? You have been wont to answer, "They _will not_ have God
+_to rule over them_. They _will not_ have the BIBLE _to control the great
+laws of their nature."_ Sir, that is the true answer. And you know that
+_the great instinct of liberty_ is only one of _three great laws_,
+needing special teaching and government:--that is to say, _the instinct
+to rule; the instinct to submit to be ruled; and the instinct for
+liberty._ You know, too, that the instinct _to submit_ is the strongest,
+the instinct _to rule_ is next, and that the _aspiration for liberty_ is
+the weakest. Hence you know the overwhelming majority of men have ever
+been willing to be slaves; masters have been next in number; while the
+few have struggled for freedom.
+
+The Bible, then, in proclaiming God's will _as to these three great
+impulses_, will be rejected by men, exactly as they have yielded forbidden
+control to the one or the other of them. The Bible will make infidels of
+_masters_, when God calls to them to rule right, or to give up rule, if
+they have allowed _the instinct of power_ to make them hate God's
+authority. Pharaoh spoke for all infidel rulers when he said, "_Who is the
+Lord that I should obey his voice?_"
+
+The Bible will make infidels of _slaves_, when God calls to them to aspire
+to be free, if they have permitted _the instinct of submission to_ make
+them hate his commands. The Israelites in the wilderness revealed ten
+times, in their murmuring, _the slave-instinct_ in all ages:--"_Would to
+God we had died in the wilderness!_"
+
+You know all this, and you condemn these infidels. Good.
+
+But, sir, you know equally well that the Bible will make infidels of men
+_affirming the instinct of liberty,_ when God calls them to learn of him
+how _much liberty_ he gives, and _how_ he gives it, and _when_ he gives
+it, if they have so yielded to this law of their nature as to make them
+despise the word of the Lord. Sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram spoke out
+just what the liberty-and-equality men have said in all time:--"_Ye, Moses
+and Aaron, take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy,
+every one of them: wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the
+congregation?"_ Verily, sir, these men were intensely excited by "_the
+great law of our nature,--the great instinct of freedom."_ Yea, they told
+God to his face they had looked within, and found the _higher law of
+liberty and equality--the eternal right--in their intuitional
+consciousness_; and that they would not submit to his will in the
+elevation of Moses and Aaron _above them_.
+
+Verily, sir, you, in the spirit of Korah, now proclaim and say, "Ye
+masters, and ye white men who are not masters, North and South, ye take
+too much upon you, seeing the negro is created your equal, and, by
+unalienable right, is as free as you, and entitled to all your political
+and social life. Ye take, then, too much upon you in excluding him from
+your positions of wealth and honor, from your halls of legislation, and
+from your palace of the nation, and from your splendid couch, and from
+your fair women with long hair on that couch and in that gilded chariot:
+wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the negro?"
+
+Verily, sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram said all we have ever heard from
+abolition-platforms or now listen to from you. But the Lord made the
+earth swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram!
+
+I agree with you then, sir, fully, that some men have been, are, and will
+be, made infidels by hearing that God, in the Bible, has ordained slavery.
+But I hold this to be no argument against the fact that the Bible does so
+teach, because men are made infidels by any other doctrine or precept they
+hate to believe.
+
+Sir, no man has said all this better than you. And I cannot express my
+grief that you--in the principle now avowed, _that every man must
+interpret the Bible as he chooses to reason and feel_--sanction all the
+infidelity in the world, obliterate your "_Notes_" on the Bible, and deny
+the preaching of your whole life, so far as God may, in his wrath, permit
+you to expunge or recall the words of the wisdom of your better day.
+
+
+
+_Testimonies of General Assemblies_.
+
+
+I agree with you that the Presbyterian Church, both before and since its
+division, has testified, after a fashion, against slavery. But some of its
+action has been very curious testimony. I know not how the anti-slavery
+resolutions of 1818 were gotten up; nor how in some Assemblies since. I
+can guess, however, from what I do know, as to how such resolutions passed
+in Buffalo in 1853, and in New York in 1856. I know that in Buffalo they
+were at first voted down by a large majority. Then they were reconsidered
+in mere courtesy to men who said they wanted to speak. So the resolutions
+were passed after some days, in which the _screws_ were applied and
+turned, in part, _by female hands_, to save the chairman of the committee
+from _the effects_ of the resolutions being finally voted down!
+
+I know that, in New York, the decision of the Assembly to spread the
+minority report on the minutes was considered, in the body and out of it,
+as a Southern victory; for it revealed, however glossed over, that many in
+the house, who could not vote directly for the minority report, did in
+fact prefer it to the other.
+
+I was not in Detroit in 1850; but I think it was established in New York
+last May that that Detroit testimony was so admirably worded that both
+Southern and Northern men might vote for it with clear consciences!
+
+I need not pursue the investigation. I admit that, after this sort, you
+have the stultified abstractions of the New School Presbyterian
+Church,--while I have its common sense; you have its Delphic words,--I
+have its actions; you have the traditions of the elders making void the
+word of God,--I have the providence of God restraining the church from
+destroying itself and our social organization under folly, fanaticism, and
+infidelity.
+
+You, sir, seem to acknowledge this; for, while you appear pleased with the
+testimony of the New School Presbyterian Church, such as it is, you lament
+that the Old School have not been true to the resolutions of 1818,--that,
+in that branch of the church, it is questionable whether those resolutions
+could now be adopted. You lament the silence of the Episcopal, the
+Southern Methodist, and the Baptist denominations; you might add the
+Cumberland Presbyterian Church. And you know that in New England, in New
+York, and in the Northwest, many testify against _us_ as a pro-slavery
+body. You lament that so many members of the church, ministers of the
+gospel, and editors of religious papers, defend the system; you lament
+that so large a part of the religious literature of the land, though
+having its seat North and sustained chiefly by Northern funds, shows a
+perpetual deference to the slave-holder; you lament that, after fifty
+years, nothing has been done to arrest slavery; you lament and ask, "Why
+should this be so?" In saying this, you acknowledge that, while you have
+been laboring to get and have reached the abstract testimony of the
+church, all diluted as it is, the common-sense fact has been and is more
+and more brought out, in the providence of God, that _the slave-power has
+been and is gaining ground in the United States_. In one word, you have
+contrived to get, in confused utterance, the voice of the Sanhedrim; while
+Christ himself has been preaching in the streets of our Jerusalem the true
+meaning of slavery as one form of his government over fallen men.
+
+These, then, are some of the things I promised to show as the results of
+your agitation. This is the "_tone_" of the past and present speech of
+Providence on the subject of slavery. You seem disturbed. I feel sure
+things are going on well as to that subject. Speak on, then, "in
+unambiguous tones." But, sir, when you desire to go from words to
+actions,--when you intimate that the constitution of the Presbyterian
+Church may be altered to permit such action, or that, without its
+alteration, the church can detach itself from slavery by its existing laws
+or the modification of them,--then I understand you to mean that you
+desire to deal, in fact, with slave-holders as _offenders_. Then, sir,
+_you mean to exscind the South_; for it is absurd to imagine that you
+suppose the South will submit to such action. You mean, then, to _exscind
+the South, or to exscind yourself and others_, or to _compel the South to
+withdraw_. Your tract, just published, is, I suppose, intended by you to
+prepare the next General Assembly for such movement? What then? Will you
+make your "American Presbyterian," and your Presbyterian House, effect
+that great change in the religious literature of the land whereby the
+subject of slave-holding shall be approached _precisely_ as you deal with
+"theft, highway-robbery, or piracy?" Will you, then, by act of Assembly,
+Synod, Presbytery, Session, deny your pulpits, and communion-bread and
+wine, to slave-holding ministers, elders, and members? Will you, then,
+tell New England, and especially little Rhoda, We have purified our skirts
+from the blood: forgive us, and take us again to your love? What then?
+Will you then ostracize the South and compel the abolition of slavery?
+Sir, do you bid us fear these coming events, thus casting their shadow
+before from the leaves of your book?
+
+Sir, you may destroy the integrity of the New School Presbyterian Church.
+So much evil you may do; but you will hereby only add immensely to the
+great power and good of the Old School; and you will make disclosures of
+Providence, unfolding a consummation of things very different from the end
+you wish to accomplish for your country and the world.
+
+I write as one of the animalcules contributing to the coral reef of
+public opinion.
+
+F. A. Ross.
+
+
+
+
+No. II.
+
+Government Over Man a Divine Institute.
+
+
+
+This letter is the examination and refutation of the infidel theory of
+human government foisted into the Declaration of Independence.
+
+I had written this criticism in different form for publication, before Mr.
+Barnes's had appeared. I wrote it to vindicate my affirmation in the
+General Assembly which met in New York, May last, on this part of the
+Declaration. My views were maturely formed, after years of reflection, and
+weeks--nay months--of carefully-penned writing.
+
+And thus these truths, from the Bible, Providence, and common sense, were
+like rich freight, in goodly ship, waiting for the wind to sail; when lo,
+Mr. Barnes's abolition-breath filled the canvas, and carried it out of
+port into the wide, the free, the open sea of American public thought.
+There it sails. If pirate or other hostile craft comes alongside, the good
+ship has guns.
+
+I ask that this paper be carefully read more than once, twice, or three
+times. Mr. Barnes, I presume, will not so read it. He is committed.
+Greeley may notice it with his sparkling wit, albeit he has too much sense
+to grapple with its argument. The Evangelist-man will say of it, what he
+would say if Christ were casting out devils in New York,--"He casteth
+out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils." Yea, this
+Evangelist-man says that my version of the golden rule is "diabolical;"
+when truly that version is the _word_ of the Spirit, as Christ's casting
+out devils was the _work_ of the Holy Ghost.
+
+Gerrett Smith, Garrison, Giddings, do already agree with me, that they are
+right if Jefferson spoke the truth. Yea, whether the Bible be true, is no
+question with them no more than with him. Yea, they hold, as he did, that
+whether there be one God or twenty, it matters not: the fact either way,
+in men's minds, neither breaks the leg nor picks the pocket. (See
+Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.) Messrs. Beecher and Cheever will find
+nothing in me to aid them in speaking to the mobs of Ephesus and Antioch.
+They are making shrines, and crying, Great is Diana. Mrs. Stowe is on the
+Dismal Swamp, with Dred for her Charon, to paddle her light canoe, by the
+fire-fly lamps, to the Limbo of Vanity, of which she is the queen. None of
+these will read with attention or honesty, if at all, this examination of
+what Randolph long ago said was a _fanfaronade of nonsense_. These are all
+wiser "than seven men that can render a reason."
+
+But there are thousands, North and South, who will read this refutation,
+and will feel and acknowledge that in the light of God's truth the notion
+of created equality and unalienable right is falsehood and infidelity.
+
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--In my first letter I promised to prove that the paragraph in
+the Declaration of Independence, which contains the affirmation of
+created equality and unalienable rights, has no sanction from the word of
+God. I now meet my obligation.
+
+The time has come when civil liberty, as revealed in the Bible and in
+Providence, must be re-examined, understood, and defended against infidel
+theories of human rights. The slavery question has brought on this
+conflict; and, strange as it may seem, the South, the land of the slave,
+is summoned by God to defend the liberty he gives; while the North, the
+clime of the free, misunderstands and changes the truth of God into a
+lie,--claiming a liberty he does not give. Wherefore is this? I reply:---
+
+God, when he ordained government over men, gave to the individual man
+RIGHTS, _only_ as he is under government. He first established the family;
+hence all other rule is merely the family expanded. The _good_ of the
+family limited the _rights_ of every member. God required the family, and
+then the state, so to rule as to give to every member the _good_ which is
+his, in harmony with the welfare of the whole; and he commanded the
+individual to seek _that good_, and NO MORE.
+
+Now, mankind being depraved, government has ever violated its obligation
+to rule for the benefit of the entire community, and has wielded its
+power in oppression. Consequently, the governed have ever struggled to
+secure the good which was their right. But, in this struggle, they have
+ever been tempted to go beyond the limitation God had made, and to seek
+supposed good, not given, in rights, prompted by _self-will_, destructive
+of the state.
+
+Government thus ever existing in oppression, and people thus ever rising
+up against despotism, have been the history of mankind.
+
+The Reformation was one of the many convulsions in this long-continued
+conflict. In its first movements, men claimed the liberty the Bible
+grants. Soon they ran into licentiousness. God then stayed the further
+progress of emancipation in Europe, because the spread of the asserted
+liberty would have made infidelity prevail over that part of the
+continent where the Reformation was arrested. God preferred Romanism,
+and other despotisms, modified as they were by the struggle, to rule for
+a time, than have those countries destroyed under the sway of a
+licentious freedom.
+
+In this contest the North American colonies had their rise, and they
+continued the strife with England until they declared themselves
+independent.
+
+That "Declaration" affirmed not only the liberty sanctioned of the Bible,
+but also the liberty constituting infidelity. Its first paragraph, to the
+word "_separation_," is a noble introduction. Omit, then, what follows,
+to the sentence beginning "_Prudence will dictate_," and the paper, thus
+expurgated, is complete, and is then simply the complaint of the colonies
+against the government of England, which had oppressed them beyond
+further submission, and the assertion of their right to be free and
+independent States.
+
+This declaration was, in that form, nothing more than the affirmation of
+the right God gives to children, in a family, applied to the colonies, in
+regard to their mother-country. That is to say, children have, from God,
+RIGHT, AS CHILDREN, when cruelly treated, to secure the good to which they
+are entitled, as children, IN THE FAMILY. They may secure _this_ good by
+becoming part of another family, or by setting up for themselves, if old
+enough. So the colonies had, from God, _right_ as colonies, when oppressed
+beyond endurance, to exchange the British family for another, or, if of
+sufficient age, to establish their own household. The Declaration, then,
+in that complaint of oppression and affirmation of right, in the colonies,
+to be independent, asserts liberty sanctioned by the word of God. And
+therefore the pledge to _that_ Declaration, of "lives, fortune, and sacred
+honor," was blessed of Heaven, in the triumph of their cause.
+
+But the Declaration, in the part I have omitted, affirms other things, and
+very different. It asserts facts and rights as appertaining to man, not in
+the Scriptures, but contrary thereto. Here is the passage:--
+
+  "We hold these truths to be self-evident,--that all men are created
+  equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
+  unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
+  pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are
+  instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
+  the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
+  destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
+  abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation
+  on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to
+  them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
+
+_This is the affirmation of the liberty claimed by infidelity._ It teaches
+as a fact _that_ which is not true; and it claims as right _that_ which
+God has not given. It asserts nothing new, however. It lays claim to that
+individual right beyond the limitation God has put, which man has ever
+asserted when in his struggle for liberty he has refused to be guided and
+controlled by the word and providence of his Creator.
+
+The paragraph is a chain of four links, each of which is claimed to be a
+self-evident truth.
+
+The _first_ and controlling assertion is, "that ALL MEN ARE CREATED
+EQUAL;" which proposition, as I understand it, is, that _every man and
+woman on earth is created with equal attributes of body and mind_.
+
+_Secondly_, and consequently, that every individual has, by virtue of his
+or her being created the equal of each and every other individual, the
+right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, _so in his or her
+own keeping that that right is unalienable without his or her consent_.
+
+_Thirdly_, it follows, that government among men must derive its just
+powers only from the _consent_ of the governed; and, as the governed are
+the aggregate of individuals, _then each person must consent to be thus
+controlled before he or she can be rightfully under such authority_.
+
+_Fourthly_, and finally, that whenever any form of government becomes
+destructive of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+_as each such individual man or woman may think_, then each such person
+may rightly set to work to alter or abolish such form, and institute a new
+government, on such principles and in such form as to them shall seem most
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.
+
+This is the celebrated averment of created equality, and unalienable right
+to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, with the necessary
+consequences. I have fairly expanded its meaning. It is the old infidel
+averment. It is not true in any one of its assertions.
+
+
+
+_All Men not created equal_.
+
+
+It is not a truth, _self-evident,_ that all men are created equal.
+Webster, in his dictionary, defines "Self-evident--Evident without proof
+or reason: clear conviction upon a bare presentation to the mind, as that
+two and three make five."
+
+Now, I affirm, and you, I think, will not contradict me, that the
+position, "_all men are created equal"_ is _not_ self-evident; that the
+nature of the case makes it impossible for it to be self-evident. For the
+created nature of man is not in the class of things of which such
+self-evident propositions can by possibility be predicated. It is equally
+clear and beyond debate, that it is not _self-evident_ that all men have
+_unalienable rights_, that governments derive their just powers from the
+_consent_ of the governed, and may be altered or abolished whenever _to
+them_ such rights may be better secured. All these assertions can be known
+to be true or false only from revelation of the Creator, or from
+examination and induction of reasoning, covering the nature and the
+obligations of the race on the whole face of the earth. What revelation
+and examination of facts do teach, I will now show. The whole
+battle-ground, as to the truth of this series of averments, is on the
+first affirmation, "_that all men are created equal_." Or, to keep up my
+first figure, the strength of the chain of asserted truths depend on
+_that_ first link. It must then stand the following perfect trial.
+
+God reveals to us that he created man in his image, _i.e._ a spirit
+endowed with attributes resembling his own,--to reason, to form rule of
+right, to manifest various emotions, to will, to act,--and that he gave
+him a body suited to such a spirit, (Gen. i. 26, 27, 28;) that he created
+MAN "_male and female_," (Gen. i. 27;) that he made the woman "_out of the
+man_," (Gen. ii. 23;) that he made "_the man the image and glory of God_,
+but the woman _the glory of the man_. For the man is not of the woman, but
+the woman of the man. Neither was the man _created for the woman_, but the
+woman _for the man_," (1 Cor. xi.;) that he made the woman to be the
+weaker vessel, (1 Pet. iii. 7.) Here, then, God created _the race_ to be
+in the beginning TWO,--a male and a female MAN; one of them _not equal_ to
+the other _in attributes of body and mind_, and, as we shall see
+presently, not equal in rights as to government. Observe, this inequality
+was fact as to the TWO, in the perfect state wherein they were _created_.
+
+But these two fell from that perfect state, became depraved, and began to
+be degraded in body and mind. This statement of the original inequality in
+which man was created controls all that comes after, in God's providence
+and in the natural history of the race.
+
+_Providence_, in its comprehensive teaching, "says that God, soon after
+the flood, subjected the races to all the influences of the different
+zones of the earth;"--"That he hath made of one blood all nations of men
+for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times
+before appointed and the bounds of their habitation; that they should
+seek the Lord if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he
+be not far from every one of us." (Acts xvii. 26, 27.)
+
+These "bounds of their habitation" have had much to do in the natural
+history of man; for "_all men_" have been "_created_," or, more
+correctly, _born_, (since the race was "created" once only at the first,)
+with attributes of body and mind derived from the TWO unequal parents,
+and these attributes, in every individual, the combined result of the
+parental natures. "_All men_," then, come into the world under influences
+upon the amalgamated and transmitted body and mind, from depravity and
+degradation, sent down during all the generations past; and, therefore,
+under causes of inequality, acting on each individual from climate, from
+scenery, from food, from health, from sickness, from love, from hatred,
+from government, inconceivable in variety and power. Under such causes,
+to produce infinite shades of inequality, physical and mental, in
+birth--if "all men" were created equal (_i.e._ born equal) in attributes
+of body and mind--such "creation" would be a violation of all the known
+analogies in the world of life.
+
+Do, then, the facts in man's natural history exhibit this departure from
+the laws of life and spirit? Do they prove that "all men are created
+equal"? Do they show that every man and every woman of Africa, Asia,
+Europe, America, and the islands of the seas, is created each one equal in
+body and mind to each other man or woman on the face of the earth, and
+that this has always been?
+
+Need I extend these questions? Methinks, sir, I hear you say, what others
+have told me, that the "Declaration" is not to be understood as affirming
+what is so clearly false, but merely asserts that all men are "created
+equal" in _natural rights._
+
+I reply that _that_ is _not_ the meaning of the clause before us; for
+_that_ is the meaning of the next sentence,--the _second_ in the series we
+are considering.
+
+There are, as I have said, four links to the chain of thought in this
+passage:--1. That all men are created equal. 2. That they are endowed by
+the Creator with certain unalienable rights. 3. That government derives
+its just powers from the consent of the governed. 4. That the people may
+alter and abolish it, &c.
+
+These links are logical sequences. All men--man and woman--are created
+equal,--equal in _attributes of body and mind_; (for _that_ is the only
+sense in which they could be _created_ equal;) _therefore_ they are
+endowed with right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,
+unalienable, except in their consent; _consequently_ such consent is
+essential to all rightful government; and, _finally_ and _irresistibly_,
+the people have supreme right to alter or abolish it, &c.
+
+The meaning, then, I give to that first link, and to the chain following,
+_is_ the sense, because, if you deny that meaning to the _first link_,
+then the others have no logical truth whatever. Thus:--
+
+If all men are _not_ created equal in attributes of body and mind, then
+the _inequality_ may be _so great_ that such men cannot be endowed with
+right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, unalienable save in
+their _consent_; then government over such men cannot rightfully rest upon
+their _consent_; nor can they have right to alter or abolish government in
+their mere determination.
+
+Yea, sir, you concede every thing if you admit that the "Declaration"
+does _not_ mean to affirm that all men are "_created_" _equal in body
+and mind_.
+
+I will suppose in the Alps a community of Cretins,--_i.e._ deformed and
+helpless idiots,--but among them many from the same parents, who, in body
+and mind, by birth are comparatively _Napoleons_. Now, this _inequality_,
+physical and mental, by birth, makes it impossible that the government
+over these Cretins can be in their "_consent_." _The Napoleons must rule_.
+The Napoleons must absolutely control their "life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness," for the good of the community. Do you reply that I have taken
+an extreme case? that everybody admits sensible people must govern natural
+fools? Ay, sir, there is the rub. _Natural fools_! Are some men, then,
+"_created_" natural fools? Very well. Then you also admit that some men
+are _created_ just a degree above natural fools!--and, consequently, that
+men are "_created_" in all degrees, gradually rising in the scale of
+intelligence. Are they not "_created_" just above the brute, with savage
+natures along with mental imbecility and physical degradation? Must the
+Napoleons govern the Cretins without their "consent"? Must they not also
+govern without their "consent" these types of mankind, whether one, two,
+three, thirty, or three hundred degrees above the Cretins, if they are
+still greatly inferior by nature? Suppose the Cretins removed from the
+imagined community, and a colony of Australian ant-catchers or California
+lizard-eaters be in their stead: must not the Napoleons govern these? And,
+if you admit inequality to be in birth, then that inequality is the very
+ground of the reason why the Napoleons must govern the ant-catchers and
+lizard-eaters. Remove these, and put in their place an importation of
+African negroes. Do you admit _their inferiority by_ "CREATION?" Then the
+same control over them must be the irresistible fact in common sense and
+Scripture of God. _The Napoleons must govern_. They must govern without
+asking "consent,"--if the inequality be such that "_consent_" would be
+evil, and not good, in the family--the state.
+
+Yea, sir, if you deny that the "Declaration" asserts "all men are created
+equal" in body and mind, then you admit the inequality may be such as to
+make it impossible that in such cases men have rights unalienable save in
+their "consent;" and you admit it to be impossible that government in such
+circumstances can exist in such "_consent_" But, if you affirm the
+"Declaration" _does_ mean that men are "_created_ equal" in attributes of
+body and mind, then you hold to an equality which God, in his word, and
+providence, and the natural history of man, denies to be truth.
+
+I think I have fairly shown, from Scripture and facts, that the first
+averment is not the truth; and have reduced it to an absurdity. I will now
+regard the second, third, and fourth links of the chain.
+
+I know they are already broken; for, the whole chain being but an electric
+current from a vicious imagination, I have destroyed the whole by breaking
+the first link. Or was it but a cluster from a poisonous vine, then I have
+killed the branches by cutting the vine. I will, however, expose the other
+three sequences by a distinct argument covering them all.
+
+
+
+_Authority Delegated to Adam_.
+
+
+God gave to Adam sovereignty over the human race, in his first
+decree:--"_He shall rule over thee_." _That_ was THE INSTITUTION OF
+GOVERNMENT. It was not based on the "_consent_" of Eve, the governed. It
+was from God. He gave to Adam like authority to rule his children. It was
+not derived from their "_consent_". It was from God. He gave Noah the same
+sovereignty, with express power over life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness. It was not founded in "_consent_" of Shem, Ham, and Japheth,
+and their wives. It was from God. He then determined the habitations of
+men on all the face of the earth, and _indicated_ to them, in every clime,
+the _form_ and _power_ of their governments. He gave, directly, government
+to Israel. He just as truly gave it to Idumea, to Egypt, and to Babylon,
+to the Arab, to the Esquimaux, the Caffre, the Hottentot, and the negro.
+
+God, in the Bible, decides the matter. He says, "Let every soul be subject
+unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that
+be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
+the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
+damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.
+Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou
+shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for
+good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid, for he beareth not the
+sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath
+upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for
+wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also:
+for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
+Render, therefore, to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due;
+custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor." (Rom.
+xiii. 1-7.)
+
+Here God reveals to us that he has _delegated to government his own_ RIGHT
+_over life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness_; and that that RIGHT is
+not, in any sense, from the "_consent_" of the governed, but is directly
+from him. Government over men, whether in the family or in the state, is,
+then, as directly from God as it would be if he, in visible person, ruled
+in the family or in the state. I speak not only of the RIGHT simply to
+govern, but the _mode_ of the government, and the _extent_ of the power.
+Government _can do_ ALL which God _would do,--just_ THAT,--_no more, no
+less_. And it is _bound to do just_ THAT,--_no more, no less_. Government
+is responsible to God, if it fails to do _just_ THAT which He himself
+would do. It is under responsibility, then, to rule in righteousness. It
+must not oppress. It must _give_ to every individual "_life, liberty, and
+pursuit of happiness_," in harmony with the _good_ of the family,--the
+state,--_as God himself would give it_,--_just_ THAT, _no more, no less_.
+
+This passage of Scripture settles the question, From whence has
+government RIGHT to rule, and what is the _extent_ of its power? The
+RIGHT is from God, and the EXTENT of the power is _just_ THAT to which
+God would exercise it if he were personally on the earth. God, in this
+passage, and others, settles, with equal clearness, from whence is the
+OBLIGATION to _submit_ to government, and what is the _extent_ of the
+duty of obedience? The OBLIGATION to submit is not from individual RIGHT
+to consent or not to consent to government,--but the OBLIGATION _to
+submit_ is directly from God.
+
+The EXTENT of the duty of obedience is equally revealed--in this wise: so
+long as the government rules in righteousness, the duty is perfect
+obedience. So soon, however, as government requires _that_ which God, in
+his word, _forbids the subject to do_, he must obey God, and not man. He
+must refuse to obey man. But, inasmuch as the obligation to submit to
+authority of government is so great, the subject must _know_ it is the
+will of God, that he shall refuse to obey, before he assumes the
+responsibility of resistance to the powers that be. His _conscience_ will
+not justify him before God, if he mistakes his duty. _He may be all the
+more to blame for having_ SUCH A CONSCIENCE. Let him, then, be CERTAIN he
+can say, like Peter and John, "Whether it be right, in the sight of God,
+to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
+
+But, when government requires _that_ which God _does not forbid_ the
+subject to do, although _in that_ the government may have transcended the
+line of its righteous rule, the subject must, nevertheless,
+submit,--_until_ oppression has gone to _the point_ at which _God makes_
+RESISTANCE _to be duty._ And _that point_ is when RESISTANCE will clearly
+be _less of evil, and more of good_, TO THE COMMUNITY, than further
+submission.
+
+_That_ is the rule of _duty_ God gives to the _whole_ people, or to the
+_minority_, or to the _individual_, to guide them in resistance to the
+powers that be.
+
+It is irresistibly _certain_ that _He who ordains_ government _has, alone,
+the right to alter or abolish it_,--that He who institutes the powers that
+be has, alone, the right to say when and how the people, in whole or in
+part, may resist. So, then, the people, in whole, or in part, have no
+right to resist, to alter, or abolish government, simply because _they_
+may deem it destructive of the end for which it was instituted; but they
+may resist, alter, or abolish, _when it shall be seen that God so regards
+it_. This places the great fact where it must be placed,--_under the_
+CONTROL _of the_ BIBLE _and_ PROVIDENCE.
+
+
+
+_Illustrations_.
+
+
+I will conclude with one or two illustrations. God, in his providence,
+ordains the Russian form of government,--_i.e._ He places the sovereignty
+in one man, because He sees that such government can secure, for a time,
+more good to that degraded people than any other form. Now, I ask, Has the
+emperor _right_, from God, to change at once, in his mere "_consent_," the
+_form_ of his government to _that_ of the United States? No. God forbids
+him. Why? Because he would thereby destroy the good, and bring immense
+evil in his empire. I ask again, Have the Russian serfs and nobles,--yea,
+all,--"consenting," the right, from God, to make that change? No. For the
+government of the United States is not suited to them. And, in such an
+attempt, they would deprive themselves of the blessings they now have, and
+bring all the horrors of anarchy.
+
+Do you ask if I then hold, that God ordains the Russian type of rule to be
+perpetual over that people? No. The emperor is bound to secure all of
+"_life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness_," to each individual,
+consistent with the good of the nation. And he is to learn his obligation
+from the Bible, and faithfully apply it to the condition of his subjects.
+_He will thus gradually elevate them_; while they, on their part, are
+bound to strive for this elevation, in all the ways in which God may show
+them the good, and the right, which, more and more, will belong to them in
+their upward progress. The result of such government and such obedience
+would be that of a father's faithful training, and children's
+corresponding obedience. The Russian people would thus have, gradually,
+that measure of liberty they could bear, under the one-man power,--and
+then, in other forms, as they might be qualified to realize them. This
+development would be without convulsion,--as the parent gives place, while
+the children are passing from the lower to their higher life. It would be
+the exemplification of Carlyle's illustration of the snake. He says, A
+people should change their government only as a snake sheds his skin: the
+new skin is gradually formed under the old one,--and then the snake
+wriggles out, with just a drop of blood here and there, where the old
+jacket held on rather tightly.
+
+God ordains the government of the United States. And _He places_ the
+_sovereignty_ in the _will_ of the majority, because He has trained the
+people, through many generations in modes of government, to such an
+elevation in moral and religious intelligence, that such sovereignty is
+best suited to confer on them the highest right, as yet, to "life,
+liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But God requires that _that will
+of the majority_ be in perfect submission to Him. Once more then I
+inquire,--Whether the people of this country, yea all of them consenting,
+have right from God, to abolish now, at this time, our free institutions,
+and set up the sway of Russia? No. But why? There is one answer only. He
+tells us that our happiness is in this form of government, and in it, its
+developed results.
+
+
+
+_The "Social Compact" not recognised in the Divine Institute_.
+
+
+Here I pause. So, then, God gives no sanction to the notion of a SOCIAL
+COMPACT. He never gave to man individual, isolated, natural rights,
+unalienably in his keeping. He never made him a Caspar Hauser, in the
+forest, without name or home,--a Melchisedek, in the wilderness, without
+father, without mother, without descent,--a Robinson Crusoe, on his
+island, in skins and barefooted, waiting, among goats and parrots, the
+coming of the canoes and the savages, to enable him to "_consent_" if he
+would, to the relations of social life.
+
+And, therefore, those five sentences in that second paragraph of the
+Declaration of Independence are not the truth; so, then, it is not
+_self-evident_ truth that all men are created equal. So, then, it is not
+the truth, in fact, that they are created equal. So, then, it is not the
+truth that God has endowed all men with unalienable right to life,
+liberty, and pursuit of happiness. So, then, it is not the truth that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So,
+then, it is not the truth that the people have right to alter or abolish
+their government, and institute a new form, whenever to them it shall seem
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.
+
+The manner in which these unscriptural dogmas have been modified or
+developed in the United States, I will examine in another paper.
+
+I merely add, that the opinions of revered ancestors, on these questions
+of right and their application to American slavery, must now, as never
+before, be brought to the test of the light of the Bible. F.A. Ross.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 1857.
+
+
+
+
+Man-Stealing.
+
+
+
+This argument on the abolition charge, against the slave-holder,--that he
+is a man-stealer,--covers the whole question of slavery, especially as it
+is seen in the Old Testament. The headings in the letter make the subject
+sufficiently clear.
+
+
+
+No. III.
+
+
+
+Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--In my first letter, I merely touched some points in your tract,
+intending to notice them more fully in subsequent communications. I have,
+in my second paper, sufficiently examined the imaginary maxims of created
+equality and unalienable rights.
+
+In this, I will test your views by Scripture more directly. "To the law
+and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is
+because there is no light in them." (Isaiah viii. 20).
+
+The abolitionist charges the slave-holder with being a _man-stealer_. He
+makes this allegation in two affirmations. First, that the slave-holder
+is thus guilty, because, the negro having been kidnapped in Africa,
+therefore those who now hold him, or his children, in bondage, lie under
+the guilt of that first act. Secondly, that the slave-holder, by the very
+fact that he is such, is guilty of stealing from the negro his unalienable
+right to freedom.
+
+This is the charge. It covers the whole subject. I will meet it in all
+its parts.
+
+
+
+_The Difference between Man-Stealing and Slave-Holding, as set forth in
+the Bible_.
+
+
+The Bible reads thus: (Exodus xxi. 16:)--"He that stealeth a man
+and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be
+put to death."
+
+What, then, is it to kidnap or steal a man? Webster informs us--To kidnap
+is "to steal a human being, a man, woman, or child; or to seize and
+forcibly carry away any person whatever, from his own country or state
+into another." The idea of "_seizing and forcibly carrying away"_ enters
+into the meaning of the word in all the definitions of law.
+
+The crime, then, set forth in the Bible was not _selling_ a man: but
+selling a _stolen_ man. The crime was not having a man _in his hand as a
+slave_; but......in _his_ hand, as a slave, a _stolen_ man. And hence, the
+penalty of _death_ was affixed, not to selling, buying, or holding man, as
+a slave, but to the specific offence of _stealing and selling, or holding_
+a man _thus stolen, contrary to this law_. Yea, it was _this law_, and
+this law _only_, which made it _wrong_. For, under some circumstances, God
+sanctioned the seizing and forcibly carrying away a man, woman, or child
+from country or state, into slavery or other condition. He sanctioned the
+utter destruction of every male and every married woman, and child, of
+Jabez-Gilead, and the seizure, and forcibly carrying away, four hundred
+virgins, unto the camp to Shiloh, and there, being given as wives to the
+remnant of the slaughtered tribe of Benjamin, in the rock Rimmon. Sir,
+how did that destruction of Jabez-Gilead, and the kidnapping of those
+young women, differ from the razing of an African village, and forcibly
+seizing, and carrying away, those not put to the sword? The difference is
+in this:--God commanded the Israelites to seize and bear off those young
+women. But he forbids the slaver to kidnap the African. Therefore, the
+Israelites did right; therefore, the trader does wrong. The Israelites,
+it seems, gave wives, in that way, to the spared Benjamites, because they
+had sworn not to give their daughters. But there were six hundred of these
+Benjamites. Two hundred were therefore still without wives. What was done
+for them? Why, God authorized the elders of the congregation to tell the
+two hundred Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of
+Shiloh, when they came out to dance, in the feast of the Lord, on the
+north side of Bethel. And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them
+wives, "whom they caught:" (Judges xxi.) God made it right for those
+Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of Shiloh. But he
+makes it wrong for the trader to catch his slaves of the sons or daughters
+of Africa. Lest you should try to deny that God authorized this act of the
+children of Israel, although I believe he did order it, let me remind you
+of another such case, the authority for which you will not question.
+
+Moses, by direct command from God, destroyed the Midianites. He slew all
+the males, and carried away all the women and children. He then had all
+the married women and male children killed; but all the virgins,
+thirty-two thousand, were divided as spoil among the people. And
+_thirty-two_ of these virgins, _the Lord's tribute_, were given unto
+Eleazar, the priest, "as the Lord commanded Moses." (Numbers xxxi.)
+
+Sir, Thomas Paine rejected the Bible on this fact among his other
+objections. Yea, _his_ reason, _his_ sensibilities, _his_ great law of
+humanity, _his_ intuitional and eternal sense of right, made it impossible
+for him to honor such a God. And, sir, on your now avowed principles of
+interpretation, which are those of Paine, you sustain him in his rejection
+of the books of Moses and all the word of God.
+
+God's command _made it right_ for Moses to destroy the Midianites and make
+slaves of their daughters; and I have dwelt upon these facts, to reiterate
+what I hold to be THE FIRST TRUTH IN MORALS:--that a thing is right, not
+because it is ever so _per se_, but because God _makes it right_; and, of
+course, a thing is wrong, not because it is so in the nature of things,
+but because God makes it wrong. I distinctly have taken, and do take, that
+ground in its widest sense, and am prepared to maintain it against all
+comers. He made it right for the sons of Adam to marry their sisters. He
+made it right for Abraham to marry his half-sister. He made it right for
+the patriarchs, and David and Solomon, to have more wives than one. He
+made it right when he gave command to kill whole nations, sparing none. He
+made it right when he ordered that nations, or such part as he pleased,
+should be spared and enslaved. He made it right that the patriarchs and
+the Israelites should hold slaves in harmony with the system of servile
+labor which had long been in the world. He merely modified that system to
+suit his views of good among his people. So, then, when he saw fit, they
+might capture men. So, then, when he forbade the individual Israelite to
+steal a man, he made it crime, and the penalty death. So, then, that crime
+was not the mere _stealing_ a man, nor the _selling_ a man, nor the
+_holding_ a man,--but the _stealing and selling_, or _holding_, a man
+_under circumstances thus forbidden of God_.
+
+
+
+_Was the Israelite Master a Man-Stealer?_
+
+
+I now ask, Did God intend to make man-stealing and slave-holding the same
+thing? Let us see. In that very chapter of Exodus (xxi.) which contains
+the law against man-stealing, and only four verses further on, God says,
+"If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his
+hand, he shall be surely punished: notwithstanding, if he continue a day
+or two he shall not be punished; for he is his money." (Verses 20, 21.)
+
+Sir, that man was not a hired servant. He was bought with money. He was
+regarded by God _as the money_ of his master. He was his slave, in the
+full meaning of a slave, then, and now, bought with money. God, then, did
+not intend the Israelites to understand, and not one of them ever
+understood, from that day to this, that Jehovah in his law to Moses
+regarded the slave-holder as a man-stealer. Man-stealing was a specific
+offence, with its specific penalty. Slave-holding was one form of God's
+righteous government over men,--a government he ordained, with various
+modifications, among the Hebrews themselves, and with sterner features in
+its relation to heathen slaves.
+
+In Exodus xxi. and Leviticus xxv., various gradations of servitude were
+enacted, with a careful particularity which need not be misunderstood.
+Among these, a Hebrew man might be a slave for six years, and then go free
+with his wife, if he were married when he came into the relation; but if
+his master had given him a wife, and she had borne him sons or daughters,
+the wife and her children should be her master's, and he should go out by
+himself. That is, the man by the law became free, while his wife and
+children remained slaves. If the servant, however, plainly said, "I love
+my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his
+master brought him unto the judges, also unto the doorpost, and his master
+bored his ear through with an awl, and he served him forever." (Ex. xxi.
+1-6.) Sir, you have urged discussion:--give us then your views of that
+passage. Tell us how that man was separated from his wife and children
+according to _the eternal right_. Tell us what was the condition of the
+woman in case the man chose to "go out" without her? Tell us if the Hebrew
+who thus had his ear bored by his master with an awl was not a slave for
+life? Tell us, lastly, whether those children were not slaves? And, while
+on that chapter, tell us whether in the next verses, 7-11, God did not
+allow the Israelite father to sell his own daughter into bondage and into
+polygamy by the same act of sale?
+
+I will not dwell longer on these milder forms of slavery, but read to you
+the clear and unmistakable command of the Lord in Leviticus xxv. 44,
+46:--"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be
+of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and
+bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn
+among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you,
+which they beget in your land: and they shall be your possession: and ye
+shall take them for an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit
+them for a possession; and they shall be your bondmen forever."
+
+Sir, the sun will grow dim with age before that Scripture can be tortured
+to mean any thing else than just what it says; that God commanded the
+Israelites to be slave-holders in the strict and true sense over the
+heathen, in manner and form therein set forth. Do you tell the world that
+this cannot be the sense of the Bible, because it is "a violation of the
+first principles of the American Declaration of Independence;" because it
+grates upon your "instinct of liberty;" because it reveals God in
+opposition to the "spirit of the age;" because, if it be the sense of the
+passage, then "the Bible neither ought to be, nor can be, received by
+mankind as a divine revelation"? _That_ is what you say: _that_ is what
+Albert Barnes affirms in his philosophy. But what if God in his word says,
+"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have shall be of the
+heathen that are round about you"? What if we may then choose between
+Albert Barnes's philosophy and God's truth?
+
+Or will you say, God, under the circumstances, _permitted_ the Israelites
+_to sin_ in the matter of slave-holding, just as he permitted them _to
+sin_ by living in polygamy. _Permitted_ them _to sin!_ No, sir; God
+_commanded_ them to be slave-holders. He _made it_ the law of their social
+state. He _made it_ one form of his ordained government among them.
+Moreover, you take it for granted all too soon, that the Israelites
+committed sin in their polygamy. God sanctioned their polygamy. It was
+therefore not sin in them. It was right. But God now forbids polygamy,
+under the gospel; and now it is sin.
+
+Or will you tell us the iniquity of the Canaanites was then full, and
+God's time to punish them had come? True; but the same question comes
+up:--Did God punish the Canaanites by placing them in the relation of
+slaves to his people, by express command, which compelled them to sin?
+That's the point. I will not permit you to evade it. In plainer
+words:--Did God command the Hebrews to make slaves of their fellow-men, to
+buy them and sell them, to regard them as their money? He did. Then, did
+the Hebrews sin when they obeyed God's command? No. Then they did what was
+right, and it was right because God made it so. Then _the Hebrew
+slave-holder was not a man-stealer_. But, you say, the Southern
+slave-holder is. Well, we shall see presently.
+
+Just here, the abolitionist who professes to respect the Scriptures is
+wont to tell us that the whole subject of bondage among the Israelites was
+so peculiar to God's ancient dispensation, that no analogy between that
+bondage and Southern slavery can be brought up. Thus he attempts to raise
+a dust out of the Jewish institutions, to prevent people from seeing that
+slaveholding then was the same thing that it is now. But, to sustain my
+interpretation of the plain Scriptures given, I will go back five hundred
+years before the existence of the Hebrew nation.
+
+I read at that time, (Gen. xiv. 14:)--"And when Abraham heard that his
+brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own
+house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them even unto Damascus,"
+&c. (Gen. xvii. 27:)--"And all the men of his house, born, in the house,
+and bought with the money of the stranger, were circumcised." (Gen. xx.
+14:)--"And Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and men-servants and
+women-servants, and gave them unto Abraham." (Gen. xxiv. 34, 35:)--"And he
+said, I am Abraham's servant; and the Lord hath blessed my master greatly,
+and he is become great; and he hath given him flocks and herds, and silver
+and gold, and men-servants and maid-servants, and camels and asses."
+
+
+
+_Was Abraham a Man-Stealer?_
+
+
+Sir, what is the common sense of these Scriptures? Why, that the
+slave-trade existed in Abraham's day, as it had long before, and has ever
+since, in all the regions of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, in which
+criminals and prisoners of war were sold,--in which parents sold their
+children. Abraham, then, it is plain, bought, of the sellers in this
+traffic, men-servants and maid-servants; he had them born in his house; he
+received them as presents.
+
+Do you tell me that Abraham, by divine authority, made these servants part
+of his family, social and religious? Very good. But still he regarded them
+as his slaves. He took Hagar as a wife, but he treated her as his
+slave,--yea, as Sarah's slave; and as such he gave her to be chastised,
+for misconduct, by her mistress. Yea, he never placed Ishmael, the son of
+the bondwoman, on a level with Isaac, the son of the freewoman. If, then,
+he so regarded Hagar and Ishmael, of course he never considered his other
+slaves on an equality with himself. True, had he been childless, he would
+have given his estate to Eliezer: but he would have given it to his slave.
+True, had Isaac not been born, he would have given his wealth to Ishmael;
+but he would nave given it to the son of his bondwoman. Sir, every
+Southern planter is not more truly a slave-holder than Abraham. And the
+Southern master, by divine authority, may, to-day, consider his slaves
+part of his social and religious family, just as Abraham did. His relation
+is just that of Abraham. He has slaves of an inferior type of mankind from
+Abraham's bondmen; and he therefore, for that reason, as well as from the
+fact that they are his slaves, holds them lower than himself. But,
+nevertheless, he is a slave-holder in no other sense than was Abraham. Did
+Abraham have his slave-household circumcised? Every Southern planter may
+have his slave-household baptized. I baptized, not long since, a
+slave-child,--the master and mistress offering it to God. What was done
+in the parlor might be done with divine approbation on every plantation.
+
+So, then, Abraham lived in the midst of a system of slave-holding exactly
+the same in nature with that in the South,--a system ordained of God as
+really as the other forms of government round about him. He, then, with
+the divine blessing, made himself the master of slaves, men, women, and
+children, by buying them,--by receiving them in gifts,--by having them
+born in his house; and he controlled them as property, just as really as
+the Southern master in the present day. I ask now, _was Abraham a
+man-stealer?_ Oh, no, you reiterate: but the Southern master is. Why?
+
+
+
+_Is the Southern Master a Man-Stealer_?
+
+
+Do you, sir, or anybody, contend that the Southern master seized his slave
+in Africa, and forcibly brought him away to America, contrary to law?
+That, and that alone, was and is kidnapping in divine and human statute.
+No. What then? Why, the abolitionist responds, The African man-stealer
+sold his victim to the slave-holder; he, to the planter; and the negro has
+been ever since in bondage: therefore _the guilt_ of the man-stealer has
+cleaved to sellers, buyers, and inheritors, to this time, and will
+through all generations to come. That is the charge.
+
+And it brings up the question so often and triumphantly asked by the
+abolitionist; _i.e._ "You," he says to the slave-holder,--"you admit it
+was wrong to steal the negro in Africa. Can the slave-holder, then, throw
+off wrong so long as he holds the slave at any time or anywhere
+thereafter?" I answer, yes; and my reply shall be short, yet conclusive. It
+is this:--_Guilt_, or criminality, is that state of a moral agent which
+results from _his_ actual commission of a crime or offence knowing it to
+be crime or violation of law. _That_ is the received definition of
+_guilt_, and _you_, I know, do accept it. The _guilt_, then, of kidnapping
+_terminated_ with the man-stealer, the seller, the buyer, and holders,
+who, knowingly and intentionally, carried on the traffic contrary to the
+divine law. THAT GUILT attaches in no sense whatever, as a personal, moral
+responsibility, to the present slave-holder. Observe, I am here
+discussing, _not the question of mere slave-holding,_ but whether the
+master, who has had nothing to do with the slave-trade, can _now_ hold the
+slave without the moral guilt of the man-stealer? I have said that _that_
+guilt, in no sense whatever, rests upon him; for he neither stole the
+man, nor bought him from the kidnapper, nor had any _complicity_ in the
+traffic. Here, I know, the abolitionist insists that the master _is_
+guilty of this _complicity_, unless he will at once emancipate the slave;
+because, so long as he holds him, he thereby, personally and _voluntarily,
+assumes the same relation which the original kidnapper or buyer held to
+the African_.
+
+This is Dr. Cheever's argument in a recent popular sermon. He thinks it
+unanswerable; but it has no weight whatever. It is met perfectly by adding
+_one_ word to his proposition. Thus:--_The master does_ NOT _assume the
+same relation which the original man-stealer or buyer held to the
+African_. The master's _relation_ to God and to his slave is now _wholly
+changed_ from that of the man-stealer, and those engaged in the trade; and
+his obligation is wholly different. What is his relation? and what is his
+obligation? They are as follows:----
+
+The master finds himself, with no taint of personal concern in the African
+trade, in a Christian community of white Anglo-Americans, holding control
+over his black fellow-man, who is so unlike himself in complexion, in
+form, in other peculiarities, and so unequal to himself in attributes of
+body and mind, that it is _impossible, in every sense_, to place him on a
+level with himself in the community. _This is his relation to the negro_.
+What, then, does God command him to do? Does God require him to send the
+negro back to his heathen home from whence he was stolen? That home no
+longer exists. But, if it did remain, does God command the master to send
+his Christianized slave into the horrors of his former African heathenism?
+No. God has placed the master under law entirely different from his
+command to the slave-trader. God said to the trader, _Let the negro
+alone_. But he says to the present master, _Do unto the negro all the good
+you can; make him a civilized man; make him a Christian man; lift him up
+and give him all he has a right to claim in the good of the whole
+community_. This the master can do; this he must do, and then leave the
+result with the Almighty.
+
+We reach the same conclusion by asking, What does God say to the
+negro-slave?
+
+Does he tell him to ask to be sent back to heathen Africa? No. Does he
+give him authority to claim a created equality and unalienable right to
+be on a level with the white man in civil and social relations? No. To
+ask the first would be to ask a great evil; to claim the second is to
+demand a natural and moral impossibility. No. God tells him to seek none
+of these things. But he commands him to know the facts in his case as
+they are in the Bible, and have ever been, and ever will be in
+Providence:--that he is not the white man's equal,--that he can never
+have his level--that he must not claim it; but that he can have, and
+ought to have, and must have, all of good, in his condition as a slave,
+until God may reveal a higher happiness for him in some other relation
+than that _he must ever_ have to the Anglo-American. The present
+slave-holder, then, by declining to emancipate his bondman, does not
+place himself in _the guilt_ of the man-stealer or of those who had
+complicity with him; but he stands _exactly_ in that NICK _of time and
+place_, in the course of Providence, where _wrong_, in the transmission
+of African slavery, _ends_, and _right begins_.
+
+I have, sir, fairly stated this, your strongest argument, and fully met
+it. _The Southern master is not a man-stealer._ The abolitionist--repulsed
+in his charge that the slave-owner is a kidnapper, either in fact or by
+voluntarily assuming any of the relations of the traffic--then makes his
+impeachment on his second affirmation, mentioned at the opening of this
+letter. That the slave-holder is, nevertheless, thus _guilty_, because,
+in the simple fact of being a master, he _steals_ from the negro his
+unalienable right to freedom.
+
+This, sir, looks like a new view of the subject. The crime forbidden in
+the Bible was stealing and selling a man; _i.e._ seizing and forcibly
+carrying away, from country or State, a human being--man, woman, or
+child--contrary to law, and selling or holding the same. But the
+abolitionist gives us to understand this crime rests on the slave-holder
+in another sense:--namely, that he steals from the negro a metaphysical
+attribute,--his unalienable right to liberty!
+
+This is a new sort of kidnapping. This is, I suppose, _stealing the man
+from himself_, as it is sometimes elegantly expressed,--_robbing him of
+his body and his soul_. Sir, I admit this is a strong figure of speech, a
+beautiful personification, a sonorous rhetorical flourish, which must make
+a deep impression on Dr. Cheever's people, Broadway, New York, and on your
+congregation, Washington Square, Philadelphia; but it is certainly not the
+Bible crime of man-stealing. And whether the Southern master is _guilty_
+of this sublimated thing will be understood by us when you prove that the
+negro, or anybody else, has such metaphysical right to be stolen,--such
+transcendental liberty not in subordination to the good of the whole
+people. In a word, sir, this refined expression is, after all, just the
+old averment that the slave-holder is guilty of _sin per se!_ That's it.
+
+I have given you, in reply, the Old Testament. In my next, I propose to
+inquire what the New Testament says in the light of the _Golden Rule_.
+
+F.A. Ross.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 31, 1857.
+
+
+
+
+The Golden Rule.
+
+
+
+This view of the Golden Rule is the only exposition of that great text
+which has ever been given in words sufficiently clear, and, with practical
+illustrations, to make the subject intelligible to every capacity. The
+explanation is the truth of God, and it settles forever the slavery
+question, so far as it rests on this precept of Jesus Christ.
+
+
+
+
+No. IV.
+
+
+
+Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--The argument against slave-holding, founded on the Golden Rule,
+is the strongest which can be presented, and I admit that, if it cannot be
+perfectly met, the master must give the slave liberty and equality. But if
+it can be absolutely refuted, then the slave-holder in this regard may
+have a good conscience; and the abolitionist has nothing more to say. Here
+is the rule.
+
+"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to
+you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets."
+(Matt. vii. 12.)
+
+In your "_Notes_," on this passage you thus write:--"This command has been
+usually called the Savior's _Golden Rule_; a name given to it on account
+of its great value.--_All that you_ EXPECT or DESIRE _of others, in
+similar circumstances_, DO TO THEM."
+
+This, sir, is your exposition of the Savior's rule of right. With all due
+respect, I decline your interpretation. You have missed the meaning by
+leaving out ONE word. Observe,--you do not say, All that you OUGHT to
+_expect_ or _desire_, &c., THAT _do to them_. No. But you make the
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE, _which every man_ ACTUALLY HAS _in similar
+circumstances_, THE MEASURE _of his_ DUTY _to every other man_. Or, in
+different words, you make, without qualification or explanation, the MERE
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE which every man,--with no instruction, or any sort
+of training,--wise or simple, good or bad, heathen, Mohammedan, nominal
+Christian,--WOULD HAVE _in similar circumstances_, THE LAW OF OBLIGATION,
+_always binding_ upon him TO DO THAT SAME THING _unto his neighbor!_
+
+Sir, you have left out _the very idea_ which contains the sense of that
+Scripture. It is this: Christ, in his rule, _presupposes_ that the man to
+whom he gives it _knows_, and from the Bible, (or providence, or natural
+conscience, _so far as in harmony_ with the Bible,) the _various
+relations_ in which God has placed him; and the _respective duties_ in
+those relations; _i.e._ The rule _assumes_ that he KNOWS what he OUGHT to
+_expect_ or _desire_ in similar circumstances.
+
+I will test this affirmation by several and varied illustrations. I will
+show how Christ, according to your exposition of his rule, speaks on the
+subject,--of _revenge, marriage, emancipation_,--_the fugitive from
+bondage_. And how he truly speaks on these subjects.
+
+
+
+_Revenge--Right according to your view of the Golden Rule_.
+
+
+Indian and Missionary--Prisoner tied to a tree, stuck over with burning
+splinters.
+
+Here is an Indian torturing his prisoner. The missionary approaches and
+beseeches him to regard _the Golden Rule_. "Humph!" utters the savage:
+"Golden Rule! what's that?" "Why" says the good man, "all that you
+_expect_ or _desired_ other Indians, in similar circumstances, do you
+even so to them." "Humph!" growls the warrior, with a fierce
+smile,--"Missionary--good: that's what I do now. If I was tied to that
+tree, I would _expect_ and _desire him_ to have _his_ revenge,--to do to
+me as I do to him; and I would sing my death-song, as he sings his.
+Missionary, your rule is Indian rule,--good rule, missionary. Humph!"
+And he sticks more splinters into his victim, brandishes his tomahawk,
+and yells.
+
+Sir, what has the missionary to say, after this perfect proof that you
+have mistaken the great law of right? Verily, he finds that the rule,
+with your explanation, tells the Indian to torture his prisoner. Verily,
+he finds that the wild man has the best of the argument. He finds he had
+left out the word OUGHT; and that he can't put it in, until he teaches
+the Indian things which as yet he don't know. Yea, he finds he gave the
+commandment too soon; for that he must begin back of that commandment,
+and teach the savage God's ordination of the relations in which he is to
+his fellow-men, before he can make him comprehend or apply the rule as
+Christ gives it.
+
+
+
+_Marriage--Void under your Interpretation of the Golden Rule_.
+
+
+Lucy Stone, and Moses--Lady on sofa, having just divorced herself--Moses,
+with the Tables of the Law, appears: she falls at his feet, and covers her
+face with her hands.
+
+This woman, everybody knows, was married some time since, after a fashion;
+that is to say, protesting publicly against all laws of wedlock, and
+entering into the relation so long only as she, or her husband, might
+continue pleased therewith.
+
+Very well. Then I, without insult to her or offense to my readers, suppose
+that about this time she has shown her unalienable right to liberty and
+equality by giving her husband a bill of divorcement. Free again, she
+reclines on her couch, and is reading the Tribune. It is mid-day. But
+there is a light, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about
+her. And _he_, who saw God on Sinai, stands before her, the glory on his
+face, and the tables of stone in his hands. The woman falls before him,
+veils her eyes with her trembling fingers, and cries out, "Moses, oh, I
+believed till now that thou practised deception, in claiming to be sent of
+God to Israel. But now, I know thou didst see God in the burning bush,
+and heard him speak that law from the holy mountain. Moses, I know ... I
+confess.".... And Moses answers, and says unto her, "Woman, thou art one
+of a great class in this land, who claim to be more just than God, more
+pure than their Maker, who have made their inward light their God. Woman,
+thou in '_convention_' hast uttered _Declaration of Independence_ from
+man. And, verily, thou hast asserted this claim to equality and
+unalienable right, even now, by giving thy husband his bill of
+divorcement, in thy sense of the Golden Rule. Yea, verily, thou hast done
+unto him all that thou _expectedst_ or _desiredst_ of him, in similar
+circumstances. And now thou thinkest thyself free again. Woman, thou art a
+sinner. Verily, thine inward light, and declaration of independence, and
+Golden Rule, do well agree the one with the other. Verily, thou hast
+learned of Jefferson, and Channing, and Barnes. But, woman,
+notwithstanding thou hast sat at the feet of these wise men, I, Moses, say
+thou art a sinner before the law, and the prophets, and the gospel. Woman,
+thy light is darkness; thy declaration of equality and right is vanity and
+folly; and thy Golden Rule is license to wickedness.
+
+"Woman, hast thou ears? Hear: I, by authority of God, ordained that the
+man should rule over thee. I placed thee, and children, and men-servants,
+and maid-servants, under the same law of subjection to the government
+ordained of God in the family,--the state. I for a time sanctioned
+polygamy, and made it right. I, for the hardness of men's hearts, allowed
+them, and made it right, to give their wives a bill of divorcement.
+Woman, hear. Paul, having the same Spirit of God, confirms my word. He
+commands _wives_, and children, and servants, after this manner:--'Wives,
+submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord;
+children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto
+the Lord; servants, obey in all things your masters according to the
+flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but in singleness of heart,
+fearing God.' Woman, Paul makes _that rule_ the same, and _that
+submission_, the same. The _manner_ of the rule he varies with the
+relations. He requires it to be, in the _love_ of the husband, even as
+Christ loved the church,--in the _mildness_ of the father, not provoking
+the children to anger, lest they be discouraged,--in _the justice and
+equity_ of the master, knowing that he also has a master in heaven:
+(Colossians.) Woman, hear. Paul says to thee, the man _now_ shall have
+one wife, and he _now_ shall not give her a bill of divorcement, save for
+crime. Woman, thou art not free from thy husband. Christ's Golden Rule
+must not be interpreted by thee as A. Barnes has rendered it; Christ
+_assumes_ that thou _believest_ God's truth,--that thou _knowest_ the
+relation of husband and wife, and the _obligations and rights_ of the
+same, _as in the Bible; then_, in the light of this _knowledge_, verily,
+thou art required to do what God says thou _oughtest_ to do. Woman, thou
+art a sinner. Go, sin no more. Go, find thy husband; see to it that he
+takes thee back. Go, submit to him, and honor him, and obey him."
+
+
+
+_Emancipation--Ruin--Golden Rule, in your meaning, carried out_.
+
+
+Island in the Tropics--Elegant houses falling to decay--Broad fields
+abandoned to the forest--Wharves grass-grown--Negroes relapsing into the
+savage state--A dark cloud over the island, through which the lightning
+glares, revealing, in red writing, these words:--"_Redeemed, regenerated,
+and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal
+emancipation"_.--[Gospel--according to Curran--and the British
+Parliament.]
+
+Jamaica, sir, to say nothing of St. Domingo, is illustration of your
+theory of the Golden Rule, in negro emancipation. You tell the Southern
+master that all he would _expect_ or _desire_, if he were a slave, he must
+do unto his bondman; that he must not pause to ask whether the relation of
+master and slave be ordained of God or not. No. You tell him, _if_ he
+would _expect_ or _desire_ liberty were he a slave, _that_ settles the
+question as to what he is to do! He must let his bondman go free. Yea,
+_that_ is what you teach: because the moment you put in the word OUGHT,
+and say, all that you OUGHT to _expect_ or _desire_,--_i.e._ all that you
+_know_ God commands you to _expect _ or _desire_ in your relations to men,
+_as established by him,_--THAT _do to them_. Sir, when you thus explain
+the Golden Rule, then your argument against slave-holding, so far as
+founded on this rule, is at once arrested; it is stopped short, in full
+career; it has to wait for reinforcement of FACT, which may never come up.
+For, suppose the FACT to be, that the relation of master and slave is one
+mode of the government ordained of God. Then, sir, the master, _knowing
+that_ FACT, and _knowing_ what the slave, _as a slave_, OUGHT to _expect_
+or _desire_, he, the master, then FULFILS THE GOLDEN RULE when he does
+that unto his slave which, in similar circumstances, he OUGHT to expect
+_to be done unto himself_. Now comes the question, OUGHT he then to
+_expect_ or _desire_ liberty and equality? THAT is the question of
+questions on this subject. And without hesitation I reply, The Golden Rule
+DECIDES _that question_ YEA or NAY, _absolutely_ and _perfectly_, as God's
+word or providence shows that the GOOD _of the family, the community, the
+state_, REQUIRES that the slave IS or IS NOT _to be set free and made
+equal_. THAT GOOD, _as God reveals it_, SETTLES THE QUESTION.
+
+Let the master then see to it, how he hears God's word as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, how he understands God's providence as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, that he makes no mistake as to THAT GOOD. For God will
+not hold him guiltless, if he will not hear what he tells him as to THAT
+GOOD. God will not justify him, if he has a bad conscience or blunders in
+his philosophy. God will punish him, if he fails to bless his land by
+letting the bond go free when, he OUGHT to emancipate. And God will punish
+him, if he brings a curse upon his country by freeing his slave when he
+OUGHT NOT to give him liberty.
+
+So, then, _the Golden Rule does not_, OF ITSELF, _reveal to man at all
+what are his_ RELATIONS _to his fellow-men; but it tells him what he is
+to_ DO, _when he_ ALREADY KNOWS THEM.
+
+So, then, you, sir, cannot be permitted to tell the world that this rule
+must emancipate all the negro slaves in the United States,--no matter how
+unprepared they may be,--no matter how degraded,--no matter how unlike and
+unequal to the white man by creation,--no matter if it be a natural and
+moral impossibility,--no matter: the Golden Rule must emancipate by
+authority of the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, and
+by obligation of the great law of liberty,--the intuitional consciousness
+of the eternal right!
+
+No. The Rule, as said, _presupposes_ that he who is required to obey it
+does already _know_ the relations in which God has placed him, and the
+respective duties in those conditions. Has God, then, established the
+relations of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave? Yes.
+Then the command comes. It says to the husband, To aid you in your known
+obligations to your wife,--to give you a lively sense of it,--suppose
+yourself to be the wife: whatsoever, therefore, you OUGHT, in that
+condition, to _expect_ or _desire_, that, as husband, do unto your wife.
+It says to the parent, Imagine yourself the child; and whatsoever, as
+such, you OUGHT to _expect_ or _desire, that_, as parent, do unto your
+child. It says to the master, Put yourself in the place of your slave;
+and whatsoever you OUGHT, in that condition, to _expect_ or _desire,
+that_, as master, do unto your slave. Let husband, parent, master, _know_
+his obligations from God, and obey the Rule.
+
+
+
+_Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule under your version_.
+
+
+Honorable Joshua R. Giddings and the Angel of the Lord--Hon. Gentleman at
+table--Nine runaway negroes dining with him--The Angel, uninvited, comes
+in and disturbs the feast.
+
+Giddings has boasted in Congress of having had nine fugitive slaves to
+break bread with him at one time. I choose, then, to imagine that, during
+the dinner, the angel who found Hagar by the fountain stands suddenly in
+the midst, and says to the negroes, "Ye slaves, whence came ye, and
+whither will ye go?" And they answer and say, "We flee from the face of
+our masters. This abolitionist told us to kill, and steal, and run away
+from bondage; and we have murdered and stolen and escaped. He, thou seest,
+welcomes us to liberty and equality. We _expect_ and _desire_ to be
+members of Congress, Governors of States, to marry among the great, and
+one of us to be President. Giddings, and all abolitionists, tell us that
+these honors belong to us equally as to white people, and will be given
+under the Golden Rule." And the angel of the Lord says to them, "Ye
+slaves, return unto your masters, and submit yourselves under their hands.
+I sent your fathers, and I send you, into bondage. I mean it unto good,
+and I will bring it to pass to save much people alive." Then, turning to
+the tempter, he says, "Thou, a statesman! thou, a reader of my word and
+providence! why hast thou not understood my speech to Hagar? I gave her, a
+slave, to Sarah. She fled from her mistress. I sent her back. Why hast
+thou not understood my word four thousand years ago,--that _the slave
+shall not flee from his master?_ Why hast thou also perverted my law in
+Deuteronomy, (xxiii. 15, 16?) I say therein, 'Thou shalt not deliver unto
+his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he
+shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall
+choose, in one of thy gates where it liketh him best: thou shalt not
+oppress him.' Why hast thou not known that I meant the _heathen slave_ who
+escaped from his _heathen master?_ I commanded, Israel, in such case, not
+to hold _him_ in bondage. I made this specific law for this specific fact.
+Why hast thou taught that, in this commandment, I gave license to all
+men-servants and maid-servants in the whole land of Israel to run away
+from their masters? Why hast thou thus made me, in one saying, contradict
+and make void all my laws wherein I ordained that the Hebrews should be
+slave-owners over their brethren during years, and over the heathen
+forever? Why hast thou in all this changed my Golden Rule? I, in that
+rule, _assume_ that men _know_ from revelation and providence the
+relations in which I have placed them, and their duties therein. I then
+command them to do unto others what they thus _know_ they _ought_ to do
+unto them in these relations; and I make the obligation quick and
+powerful, by telling every man to imagine himself in such conditions, and
+then he will _the better_ KNOW '_whatsoever_' he should do unto his
+neighbor. Why hast thou made void my law, by making me say, 'All that thou
+_expectest_ or _desirest_ of others, in similar circumstances, do to
+them'? I never imagined to give such license to folly and sin. Why hast
+thou imagined such license to iniquity? Verily, thou tempter, thou hast in
+thy Golden Rule made these slaves thieves and murderers, and art now
+eating with them the bread of sin and death.
+
+"Why hast thou tortured my speech wherein I say that I have made of _one
+blood_ all nations of men, to mean that I have created all men equal and
+endowed them with rights unalienable save in their consent? I never said
+that thing! I said that I made all men to descend from _one parentage!_
+That is what I say in that place! Why hast thou tortured that plain truth?
+Thou mightest as well teach that all 'the moving creatures that have life,
+and fowl that fly above the earth, in the open firmament of heaven,' are
+_created equal_, because I said I brought them forth _of the water_. Thou
+mightest as well say that 'all cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the
+earth, _are created equal_, because I said I brought them forth _of the
+earth_, as to affirm the _equality of men_ because I say they are _of one
+blood_. Nay, I have made men unequal as the leaves of the trees, the sands
+of the sea, the stars of heaven. I have made them so, in harmony with the
+infinite variety and inequality in every thing in my creation. And I have
+made them unequal in my _mercy_. Had I made all men equal in attributes of
+body and mind, then _unfallen man_ would never have realized the varied
+glories of his destiny. And had I given _fallen man_ equality of nature
+and unalienable rights, then I had made the earth an Aceldama and Valley
+of Gehenna. For what would be the _strife_ in all the earth among men
+equal in body and mind, equal in power, equal in depravity, equal in will,
+each one maintaining rights unalienable? When would the war end? Who would
+be the victors where all are giants? Who would sue for peace where none
+will submit? What would be _human social life?_ Who would be the weak, the
+loving? Who would seek or need forbearance, compassion, self-denying
+benevolence? Who would be the grateful? Who would be the humble, the meek?
+What would be _human_ virtue, what _human_ vice, what _human_ joy or
+sorrow? Nay, I have made men _unequal_ and given them _alienable rights_,
+that I might INSTITUTE HUMAN GOVERNMENT and reveal HUMAN CHARACTER.
+
+"Why hast thou been willingly ignorant of these first principles of the
+oracles of God, which would have made thee truly a Christian philosopher
+and statesman?"
+
+
+
+_Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule as Christ gave it_
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes and the Apostle Paul--Minister of the gospel in his
+study--Fugitive slave, converted under his preaching, inquiring whether it
+is not his duty to return to his master--Paul appears and rebukes the
+minister for wresting his Gospel.
+
+With all respect and affection for you, sir, I imagine a slave, having run
+away from his master and become a Christian under your preaching, might,
+with the Bible in his hands and the Holy Spirit in his heart, have,
+despite your training, question of conscience, whether he did right to
+leave his master, and ought not to go back. And I think how Paul would
+listen, and what he would say, to your interpretation of his Epistle to
+Philemon. I think he would say,--
+
+"I withstand thee to thy face, because thou art to be blamed. Why hast
+thou written, in thy '_Notes_,' that the word I apply to Onesimus may
+mean, not _slave_, but _hired servant?_ Why hast thou said this in
+unsupported assertion? Why hast thou given no respect to Robinson, and all
+thy wise men, who agree that the word wherein I express Onesimus's
+relation to Philemon never means a hired servant, but a _slave_,--the
+property of his master,--a living possession?
+
+"Why hast thou called in question the fact that Philemon was a
+slave-holder? Why hast thou taught that, if he was a slave-holder when he
+became a Christian, he could not _continue, consistently_, to be a
+slave-owner and a Christian,--that if he did so _continue_, he would not
+be in _good standing_, but an _offender_ in the church? (See Notes.)
+
+"I say Philemon was the master of Onesimus, in the real sense of a
+slave-owner, under Roman law, in which he had the right of life and death
+over him,--being thereby a master in possession of power unknown in the
+United States. And yet I call Philemon 'our dearly beloved and
+fellow-laborer,' I tell him that I send to him again Onesimus, who had
+been unprofitable to him in time past; but now, being a Christian, he
+would be profitable. I tell him, I send him again, not a slave, (only,)
+but above a slave, a Christian brother, beloved, specially to me, but how
+much more unto him, both _in the flesh_ and in the Lord. Dost thou know,
+Albert Barnes, what I mean by that word, _in the flesh?_ Verily, I knew
+the things wherein the master and the slave are beloved, the one of the
+other, in the best affections of human nature, and in the Lord! therefore
+I say to Philemon that he, _as master_, could receive Onesimus _as his
+slave_, and yet as a _brother_, MORE _beloved, by reason of his relation
+to him as master_, than I could regard him! Yea, verily,--and I say to
+thee, Albert Barnes, thou hast never been in the South, and thou dost not
+understand, and canst not understand, the force, or even the meaning, of
+my words _in the flesh_; i.e. _in the love of the master and the slave to
+one another_. But Philemon I knew would feel its power, and so I made that
+appeal to him.
+
+"Why hast thou said, that I did not send Onesimus back _by authority?_ I
+did send him back by authority,--yea, by authority of the Lord Jesus
+Christ? For it was my duty to send him again to Philemon, whether he had
+been willing to go or not; and it was his duty to go. But he was willing.
+So we both felt our obligations; and, when I commanded, he cheerfully
+obeyed. What else was my duty and his? Had I not said, in line upon line
+and in precept upon precept, 'Servants, obey in all things your masters
+according to the flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in
+singleness of heart, pleasing God'? (Coloss. iii. 22.) Had not Peter
+written, 'Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to
+the good and gentle, but also to the froward'? (1 Pet. ii. 18.) Onesimus
+had broken these commandments when he fled from his master. Was it not
+then of my responsibility to send him again to Philemon? And was it not
+Christ's law to him to return and submit himself under his master's hand?
+
+"Why, then, hast thou not understood my speech? Has it been even because
+thou couldst not _hear_ my word? What else has hindered? What more could I
+have said, than (in 1 Tim. vi. 1-5) I do say, to rebuke all abolitionists?
+Yea, I describe them--I show their principles--as fully as if I had called
+them by name in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, and said they would
+live in 1857.
+
+"And yet thou hast, in thy commentary on my letter to Timothy, utterly
+distorted, maimed, and falsified my meaning. Thou hast mingled truth and
+untruth so together as to make me say what was not and is not in my mind.
+For thou teachest the slave, while professing not so to teach him, that I
+tell him that he is _not_ to count his master worthy of all honor; that he
+_is_ to _despise_ him; that he is _not_ to do him service as to a
+Christian faithful and beloved. _No_. But thou teachest the slave, in my
+name, to regard his Christian master an _offender_ in the sight of
+Christ, if he _continues_ a slave-owner.
+
+"Thou tellest him to obey _only_ in the sense in which he is to submit to
+injustice, oppression, and cruelty; and that he is ever to seek to throw
+off the yoke in his created equality and unalienable right to liberty.
+(See Notes.)
+
+"This is what thou hast taught as my gospel. But I commanded thee to
+teach and exhort _just the contrary_. I commanded thee to say after this
+way:--'Let as many servants as are under the yoke, count their own
+masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not
+blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise
+them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they
+are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach
+and exhort.'
+
+"Thou, in thy 'Notes,' art compelled, though most unwillingly, to confess
+that I do mean _slaves_ in this place, in the full and proper sense; yea,
+slaves under the Roman law. Good. Then do I here tell slaves to count
+their masters, even when not Christians, worthy of all honor; and, when
+Christians, to regard them as faithful and beloved, and not to despise
+them, and to do them service? Yet, after all this, do I say to these same
+slaves that they have a created equality and unalienable right to liberty,
+under which, whenever they think fit, I command them to dishonor their
+masters, despise them, and run away! Sir, I did never so instruct slaves;
+nay, I did never command thee so to teach them. But I did and do exhort
+thee not so to train them; for I said then and say now to thee, 'If any
+man teach [slaves] otherwise, [than to honor their masters as faithful and
+beloved, and to do them service,] and consent not to wholesome words, even
+the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according
+to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and
+strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
+perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH,
+supposing that gain is godliness; from such withdraw thyself,'
+
+"What more could I have said to the abolitionists of my day? What more can
+I say to them in this day? _That_ which was true of them two thousand
+years ago, is true now. I rebuked abolitionists then, and I rebuke them
+now. I tell them the things in their hearts,--the things on their
+tongues,--the things in their hands,--are contrary to wholesome words,
+even the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. Canst thou _hear_ my words in
+this place without feeling how faithfully I have given the head, and the
+heart, and the words, and the doings of the men, from whom thou hast not
+withdrawn thyself?
+
+"Verily, thou canst not _hear_ my speech, and therefore thou canst not
+interpret my gospel. Thou believest it is impossible that I sanction
+slavery! Hence it is impossible for thee to understand my words: for I do
+sanction slavery. How? Thus:--
+
+"I found slavery in Asia, in Greece, in Rome. I saw it to be one mode of
+the government ordained of God. I regarded it, in most conditions of
+fallen mankind, necessarily and irresistibly part of such government, and
+therefore as natural, as wise, as good, in such conditions, as the other
+ways men are ruled in the state or the family.
+
+"I took up slavery, then, as such ordained government,--wise, good, yea
+best, in certain circumstances, until, in the elevating spirit and power
+of my gospel, the slave is made fit for the liberty and equality of his
+master, if he can be so lifted up. Hence I make the RULE of magistrate,
+subject, master and servant, parent and child, husband and wife, THE SAME
+RULE; _i.e._ I make it THE SAME RIGHT in the _superior_ to control the
+_obedience_ and the _service_ of the _inferior_, bound to obey, whatever
+the difference in the relations and service to be rendered. Yea, I give
+_exactly the same command_ to all in these relations; and thus, in all my
+words, I make it plainly to be understood that I regard slavery to be as
+righteous a mode of government as that of magistrate and subject, parent
+and child, husband and wife, during the circumstances and times in which
+God is pleased to have it continue. I saw all the injustice, the
+oppression, the cruelty, masters might be guilty of, and were and are now
+guilty of; but I saw no more injustice, oppression, and cruelty, in the
+relation of master and slave, than I saw in all other forms of rule,--even
+in that of husband and wife, parent and child. In my gospel I condemn
+wrong in all these states of life, while I fully sanction and sustain the
+relations themselves. I tell the magistrate, husband, father, master, how
+to rule; I tell the subject, wife, child, servant, how to submit. Hence, I
+command the slave not to flee from bondage, just as I require the subject,
+the wife, the child, not to resist or flee from obedience. I warn the
+slave, if he leaves his master he has sinned, and must return; and I make
+it the duty of all men to see to it, that _he shall go back_. Hence, I
+myself did what I command others to do: I sent Onesimus back to his
+master.
+
+"Thus I sanction slavery everywhere in the New Testament. But it is
+impossible for thee, with thy principles,--thy law of reason,--thy law of
+created equality and unalienable right,--thy elevation of the Declaration
+of Independence above the ordinance of God,--to sustain slavery. Nay, it
+is impossible for thee, with thy interpretation of Christ's Golden Rule,
+to recognise the system of servile labor; nay, it is impossible for thee
+to tell _this_ slave to return to his master as I sent Onesimus back;
+nay, thou art guarded by thy Golden Rule. Thou tellest him that, if thou
+hadst been in his place, thou wouldst have _expected, desired_ freedom,
+that thou wouldst have run away, and that thou wouldst not now return;
+that thou wouldst have regarded thy created equality and unalienable
+right as thy supreme law, and have disregarded and scorned all other
+obligations as _pretended revelation from God_. Therefore thou now doest
+unto him '_whatsoever_' thou wouldst _expect_ or _desire_ him to do unto
+thee in similar circumstances; _i.e._ thou tellest him he did right to
+run away, and will do right not to return! This is thy Golden Rule. But
+I did not instruct thee so to learn Christ. Nay, this slave knows thou
+hast not not given him the mind of Christ; nay, he knows that Christ
+commands thee to send him to his master again. And thus do what thou
+OUGHTEST to _expect_ or _desire_ in similar circumstances; yea, _do_ now
+_thy duty_, and this slave, like Onesimus, will bless thee for giving him
+a good conscience whenever he will return to his obedience. Thus Paul,
+the aged, speaks to thee."
+
+So, then, the Golden Rule is the whole Bible; yea, Christ says it is-"the
+law and the prophets;" yea, it is the Old Testament and the New condensed;
+and with ever-increasing glory of Providence in one sublime aphorism,
+which can be understood and obeyed only by those who _know_ what the
+Bible, or Providence, reveals as to man's varied conditions and his
+obligations therein.
+
+I think, sir, I have refuted your interpretation of the Golden Rule, and
+have given its true meaning.
+
+The slave-holder, then, may have a good conscience under this commandment.
+Let him so exercise himself as to have a conscience void of offence
+towards God and towards men.
+
+Yours, &c. F.A. Ross.
+
+
+
+
+Conclusion.
+
+
+
+I intended to, and may yet, in a subsequent edition, write two more
+letters to A. Barnes. The _one_, to show how infidelity has been passing
+off from the South to the North,--especially since the _Christian death_
+of Jackson; the other, to meet Mr. Barnes's argument founded on the spirit
+of the age.
+
+
+The End.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Slavery Ordained of God
+by Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD ***
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+Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
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+Title: Slavery Ordained of God
+
+Author: Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9171]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 10, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD
+
+By
+
+Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+
+"The powers that be are ordained of God." Romans xiii. 1.
+
+
+TO
+The Men
+NORTH AND SOUTH,
+WHO HONOR THE WORD OF GOD
+AND
+LOVE THEIR COUNTRY.
+
+
+
+
+Preface.
+
+
+
+The book I give to the public, is not made up of isolated articles. It is
+one harmonious demonstration--that slavery is part of the government
+ordained in certain conditions of fallen mankind. I present the subject in
+the form of speeches, actually delivered, and letters written just as
+published. I adopt this method to make a readable book.
+
+I give it to the North and South--to maintain harmony among Christians,
+and to secure the integrity of the union of this great people.
+
+This harmony and union can be preserved only by the view presented in this
+volume,--_i.e._ that _slavery is of God_, and to continue for the good of
+the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family,
+until another and better destiny may be unfolded.
+
+The _one great idea_, which I submit to North and South, is expressed in
+the speech, first in order, delivered in the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, May 27, 1853. I therein say:--
+
+"Let us then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend _two
+ideas_, and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern
+philanthropist learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave
+is not sin _per se_. Let him learn that God says nowhere it is sin. Let
+him learn that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no
+law there is no sin, and that _the Golden Rule_ may exist in the
+relations of slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil _in
+certain circumstances_. Let him learn that _equality_ is only the highest
+form of social life; that _subjection_ to authority, even _slavery_, may,
+in _given conditions_, be _for a time_ better than freedom to the slave
+of any complexion. Let him learn that _slavery_, like _all evils_, has
+its _corresponding_ and _greater good_; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded _compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa_. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself: And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+_God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual_.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny."
+
+All which comes after, in the speech delivered in New York, 1856, and in
+the letters, is just the expansion of this one controlling thought, which
+must be understood, believed, and acted out North and South.
+
+The Author.
+
+Written in Cleveland, Ohio, May 28, 1857.
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+Speech Before the General Assembly at Buffalo
+Speech Before the General Assembly at New York
+Letter to Rev. A. Blackburn
+What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?
+
+Letters to Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+  I.--Results of the slavery agitation--Declaration of Independence--
+      The way men are made infidels--Testimonies of General Assemblies
+ II.--Government over man a divine institute
+III.--Man-stealing
+ IV.--The Golden Rule
+
+
+
+
+Speech Delivered at Buffalo, Before the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church.
+
+
+
+To understand the following speech, the reader will be pleased to
+learn--if he don't know already--that the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, before its division in 1838, and since,--both Old
+School and New School,--has been, for forty years and more, bearing
+testimony, after a fashion, against the system of slavery; that is to say,
+affirming, in one breath, that slave-holding is a "blot on our holy
+religion," &c. &c.; and then, in the next utterance, making all sorts of
+apologies and justifications for the slave-holder. Thus: this august body
+has been in the habit of telling the Southern master (especially in the
+Detroit resolutions of 1850) that he is a _sinner_, hardly meet to be
+called a _Christian_; but, nevertheless, if he will only sin "from
+unavoidable necessity, imposed by the laws of the States,"--if he will
+only sin under the "obligations of guardianship,"--if he will only sin
+"from the demands of humanity,"--why, then, forsooth, he may be a
+slave-holder as long as _he has a mind to_. Yea, he may hold one slave,
+one hundred or one thousand slaves, and till the day of judgment.
+
+Happening to be in attendance, as a member of the body, in Buffalo, May,
+1853, when, as usual, the system of slavery was touched, in a series of
+questions sent down to the church courts below, I made the following
+remarks, in good-natured ridicule of such preposterous and stultifying
+testimony; and, as an argument, opening the views I have since reproduced
+in the second speech of this volume, delivered in the General Assembly
+which convened in New York, May, 1856, and also in the letters
+following:--
+
+BUFFALO, FRIDAY, May 27, 1853.
+
+The order of the day was reached at a quarter before eleven, and the
+report read again,--viz.:
+
+"1. That this body shall reaffirm the doctrine of the second resolution
+adopted by the General Assembly, convened in Detroit, in 1850, and,
+
+"2. That with an express disavowal of any intention to be impertinently
+inquisitorial, and for the sole purpose of arriving at the truth, so as to
+correct misapprehensions and allay all causeless irritation, a committee
+be appointed of one from each of the synods of Kentucky, Tennessee,
+Missouri, and Virginia, who shall be requested to report to the next
+General Assembly on the following points:--1. The number of slave-holders
+in connection with the churches, and the number of slaves held by them. 2.
+The extent to which slaves are held from an unavoidable necessity imposed
+by the laws of the States, the obligations of guardianship, and the
+demands of humanity. 3. Whether the Southern churches regard the
+sacredness of the marriage relation as it exists among the slaves; whether
+baptism is duly administered to the children of the slaves professing
+Christianity, and in general, to what extent and in what manner provision
+is made for the religious well-being of the slave," &c. &c.
+
+Dr. Ross moved to amend the report by substituting the following,--with
+an express disavowal of being impertinently inquisitorial:--that a
+committee of _one_ from each of the Northern synods of ---- be appointed,
+who shall be requested to report to the next General Assembly,--
+
+1. The number of Northern church-members concerned, directly or
+indirectly, in building and fitting out ships for the African slave-trade,
+and the slave-trade between the States.
+
+2. The number of Northern church-members who traffic with slave-holders,
+and are seeking to make money by selling them negro-clothing, handcuffs,
+and cowhides.
+
+3. The number of Northern church-members who have sent orders to New
+Orleans, and other Southern cities, to have slaves sold, to pay debts
+owing them from the South. [See Uncle Tom's Cabin.]
+
+4. The number of Northern church-members who buy the cotton, sugar, rice,
+tobacco, oranges, pine-apples, figs, ginger, cocoa, melons, and a thousand
+other things, raised by slave-labor.
+
+5. The number of Northern church-members who have intermarried with
+slave-holders, and have thus become slave-owners themselves, or enjoy the
+wealth made by the blood of the slave,--especially if there be any
+Northern ministers of the gospel in such a predicament.
+
+6. The number of Northern church-members who are the descendants of the
+men who kidnapped negroes in Africa and brought them to Virginia and New
+England in former years.
+
+7. The aggregate and individual wealth of members thus descended, and what
+action is best to compel them to disgorge this blood-stained gold, or to
+compel them to give dollar for dollar in equalizing the loss of the South
+by emancipation.
+
+8. The number of Northern church-members, ministers especially, who have
+advocated _murder_ in resistance to the laws of the land.
+
+9. The number of Northern church-members who own stock in under-ground
+railroads, running off fugitive slaves, and in Sabbath-breaking railroads
+and canals.
+
+10. That a special commission be sent up Red River, to ascertain whether
+Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to death, (and who was a Northern
+_gentleman_,) be not still in connection with some Northern church in good
+and regular standing.
+
+11. The number of Northern church-members who attend meetings of
+Spiritual Rappers,--or Bloomers,--or Women's-Rights Conventions.
+
+12. The number of Northern church-members who are cruel husbands.
+
+13. The number of Northern church-members who are hen-pecked husbands.
+
+[As it is always difficult to know the temper of speaker and audience from
+a printed report, it is due alike to Dr. R., to the whole Assembly, and
+the galleries, to say, that he, in reading these resolutions, and
+throughout his speech, evinced great good-humour and kindness of feeling,
+which was equally manifested by the Assembly and spectators, repeatedly,
+while he was on the floor.]
+
+Dr. Ross then proceeded:--Mr. Moderator, I move this amendment in the best
+spirit. I desire to imitate the committee in their refinement and delicacy
+of distinction. I disavow all intention to be _impertinently_
+inquisitorial. I intend to be inquisitorial, as the committee say they
+are,--but not _impertinently_ so. No, sir; not at all; not at all.
+(Laughter.) Well, sir, we of the South, who desire the removal of the evil
+of slavery, and believe it will pass away in the developments of
+Providence, are grieved when we read your graphic, shuddering pictures of
+the "middle passage,"--the slave-ship, piling up her canvas, as the shot
+pours after her from English or American guns,--see her again and again
+hurrying hogshead after hogshead, filled with living slaves, into the
+deep, and, thus lightened, escape. Sir, what horror to believe that
+clipper-ship was built by the hands of Northern, noisy Abolition
+church-members! ["Yes, I know some in New York and Boston," said one in
+the crowd.] Again, sir, when we walk along your _Broadways_, and see, as
+we do, the soft hands of your church-members sending off to the South, not
+only clothing for the slave, but manacles and whips, manufactured
+expressly for him,--what must we think of your consistency of character?
+[True, true.] And what must we think of your self-righteousness, when we
+know your church-members order the sale of slaves,--yes, slaves such as
+St. Clair's,--and under circumstances involving all the separations and
+all the loathsome things you so mournfully deplore? Your Mrs. Stowe says
+so, and it is so, without her testimony. I have read that splendid, bad
+book. Splendid in its genius, over which I have wept, and laughed, and got
+mad, (here some one said, "All at the same time?") yes--all at the same
+time. Bad in its theology, bad in its morality, bad in its temporary evil
+influence here in the North, in England, and on the continent of Europe;
+bad, because her isolated cruelties will be taken (whether so meant by her
+or not) as the general condition of Southern life,--while her Shelbys, and
+St. Clairs, and Evas, will be looked upon as angel-visitors, lingering for
+a moment in that earthly hell. The _impression made by the book is a
+falsehood_.
+
+Sir, why do your Northern church-members and philanthropists buy Southern
+products at all? You know you are purchasing cotton, rice, sugar,
+sprinkled with blood, literally, you say, from the lash of the driver! Why
+do you buy? What's the difference between my filching this blood-stained
+cotton from the outraged negro, and your standing by, taking it from me?
+What's the difference? You, yourselves, say, in your abstractions, there
+is no difference; and yet you daily stain your hands in this horrid
+traffic. You hate the traitor, but you love the treason. Your ladies,
+too,--oh, how they shun the slave-owner _at a distance_, in _the
+abstract_! But alas, when they see him in the _concrete_,--when they see
+the slave-owner _himself_, standing before them,--not the brutal driver,
+but the splendid gentleman, with his unmistakable grace of carriage and
+ease of manners,--why, lo, behold the lady says, "Oh, fie on your
+slavery!--what a _wretch_ you are! But, indeed, sir, I love your
+sugar,--and truly, truly, sir, _wretch_ as you are, I love you too." Your
+gentlemen talk just the same way when they behold our matchless women. And
+well for us all it is, that your good taste, and hearts, can thus
+appreciate our genius, and accomplishments, and fascinations, and
+loveliness, and sugar, and cotton. Why, sir, I heard this morning, from
+one pastor only, of two or three of his members thus intermarried in the
+South. May I thus give the mildest rebuke to your inconsistency of
+conduct? (Much good-natured excitement.)
+
+Sir, may we know who are the descendants of the New England kidnappers?
+What is their wealth? Why, here you are, all around me. You, gentlemen,
+made the best of that bargain. And you have kept every dollar of your
+money from the charity of emancipating the slave. You have left us,
+unaided, to give millions. Will you now come to our help? Will you give
+dollar for dollar to equalize our loss? [Here many voices cried out, "Yes,
+yes, we will."]
+
+Yes, yes? Then pour out your millions. Good. I may thank you personally.
+My own emancipated slaves would to-day be worth greatly more than
+$20,000. Will you give me back $10,000? Good. I need it now.
+
+I recommend to you, sirs, to find out your advocates of _murder_,--your
+owners of stock in under-ground railroads,--your Sabbath-breakers for
+money. I particularly urge you to find Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to
+death. He is a Northern _gentleman_, although having a somewhat Southern
+name. Now, sir, you know the Assembly was embarrassed all yesterday by
+the inquiry how the Northern churches may find their absent members, and
+what to do with them. Here then, sir, is a chance for you. Send a
+committee up Red River. You may find Legree to be a Garrison, Phillips,
+Smith, or runaway husband from some Abby Kelly. [Here Rev. Mr. Smith
+protested against Legree being proved to be a Smith. Great laughter.
+[Footnote: This gentleman was soon after made a D.D., and I think in part
+for that witticism.]] I move that you bring him back to lecture on the
+_cuteness_ there is in leaving a Northern church, going South, changing
+his name, buying slaves, and calculating, without _guessing_, what the
+profit is of killing a negro with inhuman labor above the gain of
+treating him with kindness.
+
+I have little to say of spirit-rappers, women's-rights conventionists,
+Bloomers, cruel husbands, or hen-pecked. But, if we may believe your own
+serious as well as caricature writers, you have things up here of which we
+down South know very little indeed. Sir, we have no young Bloomers, with
+hat to one side, cigar in mouth, and cane tapping the boot, striding up to
+a mincing young gentleman with long curls, attenuated waist, and soft
+velvet face,--the boy-lady to say, "May I see you home, sir?" and the
+lady-boy to reply, "I thank ye--no; pa will send the carriage." Sir, we of
+the South don't understand your women's-rights conventions. Women have
+their wrongs. "The Song of the Shirt,"--Charlotte Elizabeth,--many, many
+laws,--tell her wrongs. But your convention ladies despise the Bible. Yes,
+sir; and we of the South are afraid _of them_, and _for you_. When women
+despise the Bible, what next? _Paris,--then the City of the Great Salt
+Lake,--then Sodom, before_ and _after the Dead Sea_. Oh, sir, if slavery
+tends in any way to give the _honour of chivalry_ to Southern young
+gentlemen towards ladies, and the exquisite delicacy and heavenly
+integrity and love to Southern maid and matron, it has then a glorious
+blessing with its curse.
+
+Sir, your inquisitorial committee, and the North so far as represented by
+them, (a small fraction, I know,) have, I take it, caught a Tartar this
+time. Boys say with us, and everywhere, I _reckon_, "You worry my dog, and
+I'll worry your cat." Sir, it is just simply a _fixed fact: the South will
+not submit to these questions_. No, not for an instant. We will not permit
+you to approach us at all. If we are morbidly sensitive, you have made us
+so. But you are directly and grossly violating the Constitution of the
+Presbyterian Church. The book forbids you to put such questions; the book
+forbids _you to begin discipline_; the book forbids your sending this
+committee to help common fame bear testimony against us; the book guards
+the honour of our humblest member, minister, church, presbytery, against
+all this impertinently-inquisitorial action. Have you a _prosecutor_, with
+his definite charge and witnesses? Have you _Common Fame_, with her
+specified charges and witnesses? Have you a request from the South that
+you send a committee to inquire into slanders? No. Then hands off. As
+gentlemen you may ask us these questions,--we will answer you. But,
+ecclesiastically, you cannot speak in this matter. You have no power to
+move as you propose.
+
+I beg leave to say, just here, that Tennessee [Footnote: At that time I
+resided in Tennessee.] will be more calm under this movement than any
+other slave-region. Tennessee has been ever high above the storm, North
+and South,--especially we of the mountains. Tennessee!--"there she
+is,--look at her,"--binding this Union together like a great, long,
+broad, deep stone,--more splendid than all in the temple of Baalbec or
+Solomon. Tennessee!--there she is, in her calm valour. I will not lower
+her by calling her unconquerable, for she has never been assailed; but I
+call her ever-victorious. King's Mountain,--her pioneer
+battles:--Talladega, Emucfau, Horse-shoe, New Orleans, San Jacinto,
+Monterey, the Valley of Mexico. Jackson represented her well in his
+chivalry from South Carolina,--his fiery courage from Virginia and
+Kentucky,--all tempered by Scotch-Irish Presbyterian prudence from
+Tennessee. We, in his spirit, have looked on this storm for years
+untroubled. Yes, Jackson's old bones rattled in their grave when that
+infamous disunion convention met in Nashville, and its members turned
+pale and fled aghast. Yes, Tennessee, in her mighty million, feels
+secure; and, in her perfect preparation to discuss this question,
+politically, ecclesiastically, morally, metaphysically, or physically,
+with the extreme North or South, she is willing and able _to persuade
+others to be calm_. In this connection, I wish to say, for the South to
+the North, and to the world, that we have no fears from our
+slave-population. There might be a momentary insurrection and bloodshed;
+but destruction to the black man would be inevitable. The Greeks and
+Romans controlled immense masses of white slaves,--many of them as
+intelligent as their lords. Schoolmasters, fabulists, and poets were
+slaves. Athens, with her thirty thousand freemen, governed half a
+million of bondmen. Single Roman patricians owned thirty thousand. If,
+then, the phalanx and the legion mastered such slaves for ages, when
+battle was physical force of man to man, how certain it is that
+infantry, cavalry, and artillery could hold in bondage millions of
+Africans for a thousand years!
+
+But, dear brethren, our Southern philanthropists do not seek to have this
+unending bondage; Oh, no, no. And I earnestly entreat you to "stand still
+and see the salvation of the Lord." Assume a masterly inactivity, and you
+will behold all you desire and pray for,--you will see _America liberated
+from the curse of slavery_.
+
+The great question of the world is, WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE
+AMERICAN SLAVE?--WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MASTER? The
+following _extract from the "Charleston Mercury"_ gives my view of the
+subject with great and condensed particularity:--
+
+"Married, Thursday, 26th inst., the Hon. Cushing Kewang, Secretary of
+State of the United States, to Laura, daughter of Paul Coligny,
+Vice-President of the United States, and one of our noblest Huguenot
+families. We learn that this distinguished gentleman, with his bride, will
+visit his father, the Emperor of China, at his summer palace, in Tartary,
+north of Pekin, and return to the Vice-President's Tea Pavilion, on Cooper
+River, ere the meeting of Congress." The editor of the "Mercury" goes on
+to say: "This marriage in high life is only one of many which have
+signalized that immense emigration from Christianized China during the
+last seventy-five years, whereby Charleston has a population of 1,250,000,
+and the State of South Carolina over 5,000,000,--an emigration which has
+wonderfully harmonized with the great exodus of the negro race to
+Africa." [Some gentleman here requested to know of Dr. Ross the date of
+the "Charleston Mercury" recording this marriage. The doctor replied, "The
+date is 27th May, 1953, exactly one hundred years from this day." Great
+laughter.]
+
+Sir, this is a dream; but it is not all a dream. No, I verily believe you
+have there the Gordian knot of slavery untied; you have there the solution
+of the problem; you have there the curtain up, and the last scene in the
+last act of the great drama of Ham.
+
+I am satisfied with the tendencies of things. I stand on the mountain-peak
+above the clouds. I see, far beyond the storm, the calm sea and blue sky;
+I see the Canaan of the African. I like to stand there on the Nebo of his
+exodus, and look across, not the Jordan, but the Atlantic. I see the
+African crossing as certainly as if I gazed upon the ocean divided by a
+great wind, and piled up in walls of green glittering glass on either
+hand, the dry ground, the marching host, and the pillar of cloud and of
+fire. I look over upon the Niger, black with death to the white man,
+instinct with life to the children of Ham. _There_ is the black man's
+home. Oh, how strange that you of the North see not how you degrade him
+when you keep him here! You will not let him vote; you will not let him
+rise to honors or social equality; you will not let him hold a pew in your
+churches. Send him away, then; tell him, begone. Be urgent, like the
+Egyptians: send him out of this land. _There_, in his fatherland, he will
+exhibit his own type of Christianity. He is, of all races, the most gentle
+and kind. The _man_, the most submissive; the _woman_, the most
+affectionate. What other slaves would love their masters better than
+themselves?--rock them and fan them in their cradles? caress them--how
+tenderly!--boys and girls? honor them, grown up, as superior beings? and,
+in thousands of illustrious instances, be willing to give life, and, in
+fact, die, to serve or save them? Verily, verily, this emancipated race
+may reveal the most amiable form of spiritual life, and the _jewel_ may
+glitter on the Ethiop's brow in meaning more sublime than all in the
+poet's imagery. Brethren, let them go; and, when they are gone,--ay,
+before they go away,--rear a monument; let it grow in greatness, if not on
+your highest mountain, in your hearts,--in lasting memory of the
+South,--in memory of your wrong to the South,--in memory of the
+self-denial of the South, and her philanthropy in training the slave to
+be free, enlightened, and Christian.
+
+Can all this be? Can this double emigration civilize Africa and more than
+re-people the South? Yes; and I regard the difficulties presented here, in
+Congress, or the country, as little worth. God intends both emigrations.
+And, without miracle, he will accomplish both. Difficulties! There are no
+difficulties. Half a million emigrate to our shores, from Ireland, and all
+Europe, every year. And you gravely talk of difficulties in the negro's
+way to Africa! Verily, God will unfold their destiny as fast, and as
+fully, as he sees best for the highest good of the slave, the highest good
+of the master, and the glory of Christ in Africa.
+
+And, sir, there are forty thousand Chinese in California. And in Cuba,
+this day, American gentlemen are cultivating sugar, with Chinese hired
+labor, more profitably than the Spaniards and their slaves. Oh! there is
+China--half the population of the globe--just fronting us across that
+peaceful sea,--her poor, living on rats and a pittance of red rice,--her
+rich, hoarding millions in senseless idolatry, or indulging in the
+luxuries of birds'-nests and roasted ice. Massed together, they must
+migrate. Where can they go? They must come to our shores. They must come,
+even did God forbid them. But he will hasten their coming. They can live
+in the extremest South. It is their latitude,--their side of the ocean.
+They can cultivate cotton, rice, sugar, tea, and the silkworm. Their
+skill, their manipulation, is unrivalled. Their commonest gong you can
+neither make nor explain. They are a law-abiding people, without castes,
+accustomed to rise by merit to highest distinctions, and capable of the
+noblest training, when their idolatry, which is waxing old as a garment,
+shall be folded up as a vesture and changed for _that_ whose years shall
+not fail. The English ambassador assures us that the Chinese negotiator of
+the late treaty was a splendid gentleman, and a diplomatist to move in any
+court of Europe. Shem, then, can mingle with Japheth in America.
+
+The Chinese must come. God will bring them. He will fulfil Benton's noble
+thought. The railroad must complete the voyage of Columbus. The statue of
+the Genoese, on some peak of the Rocky Mountains, high above the flying
+cars, must point to the West, saying, "There is the East! There is India
+and Cathay."
+
+Let us, then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend _two ideas_,
+and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern philanthropist
+learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave is not sin
+_per se_. Let him learn that God nowhere says it is sin. Let him learn
+that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no law,
+there is no sin; and that _the golden rule_ may exist in the relations of
+slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil _in certain
+circumstances_. Let him learn that _equality_ is only the highest form of
+social life; that _subjection_ to authority, even _slavery_, may, in
+_given conditions_, be _for a time_ better than freedom to the slave, of
+any complexion. Let him learn that _slavery_, like _all evils_, has its
+_corresponding_ and _greater good_; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded _compared with his master_, is _elevated_ and _ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa_. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself. And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+_God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual_.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away, in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny.
+
+Ham will be ever lower than Shem; Shem will be ever lower than Japheth.
+All will rise in the Christian grandeur to be revealed. Ham will be lower
+than Shem, because he was sent to Central Africa. Man south of the
+Equator--in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa--is
+inferior to his Northern brother. The _blessing_ was upon Shem in his
+magnificent Asia. The _greater blessing_ was upon Japheth in his
+man-developing Europe. _Both blessings_ will be combined, in America,
+_north of the Zone_, in commingled light and life. I see it all in the
+first symbolical altar of Noah on that mound at the base of Ararat. The
+father of all living men bows before the incense of sacrifice, streaming
+up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all
+flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of
+the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness,
+near the long-necked giraffe, type of his _Africa_,--his magnificent wife,
+seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her
+long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered with gems from
+mines before the flood. Higher up is Shem, leaning his arm over that
+mouse-colored horse,--his _Arab_ steed. His wife, in pure white linen,
+feeds the elephant, and plays with his lithe proboscis,--the mother of
+Terah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, and Christ. And yet she looks
+up, and bows in mild humility, to _her_ of Japheth, seated amid plumed
+birds, in robes like the sky. Her noble lord, meanwhile, high above all,
+stands, with folded arms, following that eagle which wheels up towards
+Ararat, displaying his breast glittering with stars and stripes of scarlet
+and silver,--radiant heraldry, traced by the hand of God. Now he purifies
+his eye in the sun, and now he spreads his broad wings in symbolic flight
+to the _West_, until lost to the prophetic eye of Japheth, under the bow
+of splendors set that day in the cloud. God's covenant with man,--oh, may
+the bow of covenant between us be here to-day, that the waters of _this
+flood_ shall never again threaten our beloved land!
+
+
+
+
+Speech Delivered in the General Assembly
+New York, 1856.
+
+
+
+The circumstances, under which this speech was delivered, are sufficiently
+shown in the statement below.
+
+It was not a hasty production. After being spoken, it was prepared for the
+"Journal of Commerce," with the greatest care I could give to it: most of
+it was written again and again. Unlike Pascal, who said, as to his longest
+and inferior sixteenth letter, that he had not had time to make it
+shorter, I had time; and I did condense in that one speech the matured
+reflections of my whole life. I am calmly satisfied I am right. I am sure
+God has said, and does say, "Well done."
+
+The speech brings to view a wide range of thought, all belonging to the
+subject of slavery, of immense importance. As introductory,--there is the
+question of the abolition agitation the last thirty years; then, what is
+right and wrong, and the foundation of moral obligation; then, the
+definition of sin; next, the origin of human government, and the
+relations, in which God has placed men under his rule of subjection;
+finally, the word of God is brought to sustain all the positions taken.
+
+The challenge to argue the question of slavery from the Bible was thrown
+down on the floor of the Assembly, as stated. Presently I took up the
+gauntlet, and made this argument. The challenger never claimed his glove,
+then nor since; nor has anybody, so far as I know, attempted to refute
+this speech. Nothing has come to my ears (save as to two points, to be
+noticed hereafter) but reckless, bold denial of God's truth, infidel
+affirmation without attempt at proof, and denunciations of myself.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_ having said that he would argue the question on the Bible at
+a following time, Dr. Ross rose, when he took his seat, and, taking his
+position on the platform near the Moderator's chair, said,--
+
+"I accept the challenge given by Dr. Wisner, to argue the question of
+slavery from the Scriptures."
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--Does the brother propose to go into it here?
+
+_Dr. Ross_.--Yes, sir.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--Well, I did not propose to go into it here.
+
+_Dr. Ross_.--You gave the challenge, and I accept it.
+
+_Dr. Wisner_.--I said I would argue it at a proper time; but it is no
+matter. Go ahead.
+
+_Dr. Beman_ hoped the discussion would be ruled out. He did not think it a
+legitimate subject to go into,--Moses and the prophets, Christ and his
+apostles, and all intermediate authorities, on the subject of what the
+General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America had done.
+
+_Judge Jessup_ considered the question had been opened by this report of
+the majority: after which _Dr. Beman_ withdrew his objection, and _Dr.
+Ross_ proceeded.
+
+I am not a slave-holder. Nay, I have shown some self-denial in that
+matter. I emancipated slaves whose money-value would now be $40,000. In
+the providence of God, my riches have entirely passed from me. I do not
+mean that, like the widow, I gave all the living I had. My estate was then
+greater than that slave-property. I merely wish to show I have no selfish
+motive in giving, as I shall, the true Southern defence of slavery.
+(Applause.) I speak from Huntsville, Alabama, my present home. That gem of
+the South, that beautiful city where the mountain softens into the
+vale,--where the water gushes, a great fountain, from the rock,--where
+around that living stream there are streets of roses, and houses of
+intelligence and gracefulness and gentlest hospitality,--and, withal,
+where so high honor is ever given to the ministers of God.
+
+Speaking then from that region where "_Cotton is king_," I affirm,
+contrary as my opinion is to that most common in the South, that the
+slavery agitation has accomplished and will do great good. I said so, to
+ministerial and political friends, twenty-five years ago. I have always
+favored the agitation,--just as I have always countenanced discussion
+upon all subjects. I felt that the slavery question needed examination.
+I believed it was not understood in its relations to the Bible and human
+liberty. Sir, the light is spreading North and South. 'Tis said, I know,
+this agitation has increased the severity of slavery. True, but for a
+moment only, in the days of the years of the life of this noble problem.
+Farmers tell us that deep ploughing in poor ground will, for a year or
+two, give you a worse crop than before you went so deep; but that that
+deep ploughing will turn up the under-soil, and sun and air and rain will
+give you harvests increasingly rich. So, this moral soil, North and
+South, was unproductive. It needed deep ploughing. For a time the harvest
+was worse. Now it is becoming more and more abundant. The political
+controversy, however fierce and threatening, is only for power. But the
+moral agitation is for the harmony of the Northern and Southern mind, in
+the right interpretations of Scripture on this great subject, and, of
+course, for the ultimate union of the hearts of all sensible people, to
+fulfil God's intention,--to bless the white man and the black man in
+America. I am sure of this. I take a wide view of the progress of the
+destiny of this vast empire. I see God in America. I see him in the North
+and in the South. I see him more honored in the South to-day than he was
+twenty-five years ago; and that that higher regard is due, mainly, to the
+agitation of the slavery question. Do you ask how? Why, sir, this is the
+how. Twenty-five years ago the religious mind of the South was leavened
+by wrong Northern training, on the great point of the right and wrong of
+slavery. Meanwhile, powerful intellects in the South, following the mere
+light of a healthy good sense, guided by the common grace of God, reached
+the very truth of this great matter,--namely, that the relation of the
+master and slave is not sin; and that, notwithstanding its admitted
+evils, it is a connection between the highest and the lowest races of
+man, revealing influences which may be, and will be, most benevolent for
+the ultimate good of the master and the slave,--conservative on the
+Union, by preserving the South from all forms of Northern fanaticism, and
+thereby being a great balance-wheel in the working of the tremendous
+machinery of our experiment of self-government. This seen result of
+slavery was found to be in absolute harmony with the word of God. These
+men, then, of highest grade of thought, who had turned in scorn from
+Northern notions, now see, in the Bible, that these notions are false
+and silly. They now read the Bible, never examined before, with growing
+respect. God is honored, and his glory will be more and more in their
+salvation. These are some of the moral consummations of this agitation in
+the South. The development has been twofold in the North. On the one
+hand, some anti-slavery men have left the light of the Bible, and
+wandered into the darkness until they have reached the blackness of the
+darkness of infidelity. Other some are following hard after, and are
+throwing the Bible into the furnace,--are melting it into iron, and
+forging it, and welding it, and twisting it, and grooving it into the
+shape and significance and goodness and gospel of Sharpe's rifles. Sir,
+are you not afraid that some of your once best men will soon have no
+better Bible than that?
+
+But, on the other hand, many of your brightest minds are looking intensely
+at the subject, in the same light in which it is studied by the highest
+Southern reason. Ay, sir, mother-England, old fogy as she is, begins to
+open her eyes. What, then, is our gain? Sir, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in many of
+its conceptions, could not have been written twenty-five years ago. That
+book of genius,--over which I and hundreds in the world have freely
+wept,--true in all its facts, false in all its impressions,--yea, as false
+in the prejudice it creates to Southern social life as if Webster, the
+murderer of Parkman, may be believed to be a personification of the
+_elite_ of honor in Cambridge, Boston, and New England. Nevertheless,
+Uncle Tom's Cabin could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Dr.
+Nehemiah Adams's "_South-Side View_" could not have been written
+twenty-five years ago. Nor Dr. Nathan Lord's "_Letter of Inquiry_." Nor
+Miss Murray's book. Nor "_Cotton is King_". Nor Bledsoe's "_Liberty and
+Slavery"_. These books, written in the midst of this agitation, are all of
+high, some the highest, reach of talent and noblest piety; all give, with
+increasing confidence, the present Southern Bible reading on Slavery. May
+the agitation, then, go on! I know the New School Presbyterian church has
+sustained some temporary injury. But God is honored in his word. The
+reaction, when the first abolition-movement commenced, has been succeeded
+by the sober second thought of the South. The sun, stayed, is again
+travelling in the greatness of his strength, and will shine brighter and
+brighter to the perfect day.
+
+My only fear, Mr. Moderator, is that, as you Northern people are so prone
+to go to extremes in your zeal and run every thing into the ground, you
+may, perhaps, become _too pro-slavery;_ and that we may have to take
+measures against your coveting, over much, our daughters, if not our
+wives, our men-servants, our maid-servants, our houses, and our lands.
+(Laughter.)
+
+Sir, I come now to the Bible argument. I begin at the beginning of
+eternity! (Laughter.) WHAT is RIGHT AND WRONG? _That's the question of
+questions_.
+
+Two theories have obtained in the world. The one is, that right and wrong
+are eternal facts; that they exist _per se_ in the nature of things; that
+they are ultimate truths above God; that he must study, and does study, to
+know them, as really as man. And that he comprehends them more clearly
+than man, only because he is a better student than man. Now, sir, _this
+theory is atheism_. For if right and wrong are like mathematical
+truths--fixed facts--then I may find them out, as I find out mathematical
+truths, without instruction from God. I do not ask God to tell me that one
+and one make two. I do not ask him to reveal to me the demonstrations of
+Euclid. I thank him for the mind to perceive. But I perceive mathematical
+relations without his telling me, because they exist independent of his
+will. If, then, moral truths, if right and wrong, if rectitude and sin,
+are, in like manner, fixed, eternal facts,--if they are out from and above
+God, like mathematical entities,--then I may find them for myself. I may
+condescend, perhaps, to regard the Bible as a hornbook, in which God, an
+older student than I, tells _me_ how to _begin_ to learn what he had to
+study; or I may decline to be taught, through the Bible, how to learn
+right and wrong. I may think the Bible was good enough, may be, for the
+Israelite in Egypt and in Canaan; good enough for the Christian in
+Jerusalem and Antioch and Rome, but not good enough, even as a hornbook,
+for me,--the man of the nineteenth century,--the man of Boston, New York,
+and Brooklyn! Oh, no. I may think I need it not at all. What next? Why,
+sir, if I may think I need not God to teach me moral truth, I may think I
+need him not to teach me any thing. What next? The irresistible conclusion
+is, I may think I can live without God; that Jehovah is a myth,--a name; I
+may bid him stand aside, or die. Oh, sir, _I will be_ the fool to say
+there is no God. This is the result of the notion that right and wrong
+exist in the nature of things.
+
+The other theory is, that right and wrong are results brought into being,
+mere contingencies, means to good, made to exist solely by the will of
+God, expressed through his word; or, when his will is not thus known, he
+shows it in the human reason by which he rules the natural heart. This is
+so; because God, in making all things, saw that in the relations he would
+constitute between himself and intelligent creatures, and among
+themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass. In his benevolent
+wisdom, he then _willed_ LAW, to control this _natural good and evil_. And
+he thereby made _conformity_ to that law to be _right_, and
+_non-conformity_ to be _wrong_. Why? Simply because he saw it to be good,
+and made it to be right; not because _he saw it to be right_, but because
+he _made it to be right_.
+
+Hence, the ten specific commandments of the one moral law of love are just
+ten rules which God made to regulate the natural good and evil which he
+knew would be in the ten relations, which he himself constituted between
+himself and man, and between man and his neighbor. The Bible settles the
+question:--_sin is the transgression of the law, and where there is no law
+there is no sin_.
+
+I must-advance one step further. _What is sin_, as a mental state? Is
+it some quality--some concentrated essence--some elementary moral
+particle in the nature of things--something black, or red, like
+crimson, in the constitution of the soul, or the soul and body as
+amalgamated? No. Is it self-love? No. Is it selfishness? No. What is
+it? Just exactly, _self-will._ Just that. I, the creature, WILL _not
+submit_ to _thy_ WILL, God, the Creator. It is the I AM, _created_, who
+dares to defy and dishonor the I AM, not created,--the Lord God, the
+Almighty, Holy, Eternal.
+
+_That_ IS SIN, _per se_. And that is all of it,--so help me God! Your
+child there--John--says to his father, "I WILL _not to submit_ to your
+will." "Why not, John?" And he answers and says, "Because I WILL _not_."
+There, sir, John has revealed _all of sin_, on earth or in hell. Satan has
+never said--can never say--more. "I, Satan, WILL NOT, because I WILL _not
+to submit_ to thee, God; MY WILL, not thine, shall be."
+
+This beautiful theory is the ray of light which leads us from night, and
+twilight, and fog, and mist, and mystification, on this subject, to clear
+day. I will illustrate it by the law which has controlled and now
+regulates the most delicate of all the relations of life,--viz.: that of
+the intercourse between the sexes. I take this, because it presents the
+strongest apparent objections to my argument.
+
+Cain and Abel married their sisters. Was it wrong in the nature of things?
+[Here Dr. Wisner spoke out, and said, "Certainly."] I deny it. What an
+absurdity, to suppose that God could not provide for the propagation of
+the human race from one pair, without _requiring them to sin!_ Adam's sons
+and daughters must have married, had they remained in innocence. They must
+then have sinned in Eden, from the very necessity of the command upon the
+race:--"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." (Gen. i. 28).
+What pure nonsense! There, sir!--_that_, my one question, Dr. Wisner's
+reply, and my rejoinder, bring out, perfectly, the two theories of right
+and wrong. Sir, Abraham married his half-sister. And there is not a word
+forbidding such marriage, until God gave the law (Lev. xviii.) prohibiting
+marriage in certain degrees of consanguinity. That law made, then, such
+marriage _sin_. But God gave no such law in the family of Adam; because he
+made, himself, the marriage of brother and sister the way, and the only
+way, for the increase of the human race. _He commanded them thus to marry.
+They would have sinned had they not thus married_; for they would have
+transgressed his law. Such marriage was not even a natural evil, in the
+then family of man. But when, in the increase of numbers, it became a
+natural evil, physical and social, God placed man on a higher platform for
+the development of civilization, morals, and religion, and then made the
+law regulating marriages in the particulars of blood. But he still left
+polygamy untouched. [Here Dr. Wisner again asked if Dr. R. regarded the
+Bible as sustaining the polygamy of the Old Testament.] Dr. R.--Yes, sir;
+yes, sir; yes, sir. Let the reporters mark _that_ question, and my answer.
+(Laughter.) My principle vindicates God from unintelligible abstractions.
+I fearlessly tell what the Bible says. In its strength, I am not afraid of
+earth or hell. I fear only God. God made no law against polygamy, in the
+beginning. Therefore it was no sin for a man to have more wives than one.
+God sanctioned it, and made laws in regard to it. Abraham had more wives
+than one; Jacob had, David had, Solomon had. God told David, by the mouth
+of Nathan, when he upbraided him with his ingratitude for the blessings
+he had given him, and said, "And I gave thee thy master's house, and _thy
+master's wives_ into thy bosom." (2 Sam. xvii. 8.)
+
+God, in the gospel, places man on another platform, for the revelation of
+a nobler social and spiritual life. He now forbids polygamy. _Polygamy now
+is sin_--not because it is in itself sin. No; but because God forbids
+it,--to restrain the natural and social evil, and to bring out a higher
+humanity. And see, sir, how gently in the gospel the transition from the
+lower to the higher table-land of our progress upward is made. Christ and
+his apostles do not declare polygamy to be sin. The new law is so wisely
+given that nothing existing is rudely disturbed. The minister of God,
+unmarried, must have only one wife at the same time. This law, silently
+and gradually, by inevitable and fair inference of its meaning, and from
+the example of the apostles, passed over the Christian world. God, in the
+gospel, places us in this higher and holier ground and air of love. We
+sin, then, if we marry the sister, and other near of kin; and we sin if we
+marry, at the same time, more wives than one, not because there is sin in
+the thing itself, whatever of natural evil there might be, but because in
+so doing we transgress God's law, given to secure and advance the good of
+man. I might comment in the same way on every one of the ten commandments,
+but I pass on.
+
+The subject of slavery, in this view of _right and wrong_, is seen in the
+very light of heaven. And you, Mr. Moderator, know that, if the view I
+have presented be true, I have got you. (Great laughter.)
+
+[The Moderator said, very pleasantly--Yes--_if_--but it is a _long if_.]
+(Continued laughter.)
+
+Dr. R. touched the Moderator on the shoulder, and said, Yes, _if_--it is a
+_long if_; for it is this:--_if_ there is a God, he is not Jupiter, bowing
+to the Fates, but God, the sovereign over the universe he has created, in
+which he makes right, by making law to be known and obeyed by angels and
+men, in their varied conditions.
+
+He gave Adam _that_ command,--sublime in its simplicity, and intended to
+vindicate the principle I am affirming,--that there is no right and wrong
+in the nature of things. There was no right or wrong, _per se_, in eating
+or willing to eat of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
+
+But God made the law,--_Thou shall not eat of that tree_. As if he had
+said,--I seek to _test_ the submission of your will, freely, to my will.
+And, that your test may be perfect, I will let your temptation be
+nothing more than your natural desire for that fruit. Adam sinned. What
+was the sin?
+
+Adam said, in heart, MY WILL, _not thine_, SHALL BE. _That_ was the
+sin,--_the simple transgression of God's law_, when there was neither sin
+nor evil in the _thing_ which God forbade to be done.
+
+Man fell and was cursed. The law of the control of the superior over the
+inferior is now to begin, and is to go on in the depraved conditions of
+the fallen and cursed race. And, FIRST, God said to the woman, "_Thy
+desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." There,_ in
+that law, is _the beginning of government ordained of God. There_ is the
+beginning of the rule of the superior over the inferior, bound to obey.
+_There_, in the family of Adam, is the germ of the rule in the tribe,--the
+state. Adam, in his right, from God, to rule over his wife and his
+children, had _all the authority_ afterwards expanded in the patriarch and
+the king. This simple, beautiful fact, there, on the first leaf of the
+Bible, solves the problem, whence and how has man right to rule over man.
+In that great fact God gives his denial to the idea that government over
+man is the result of a social compact, in which each individual man living
+in a state of natural liberty, yielded some of that liberty to secure the
+greater good of government. Such a thing never was; such a thing never
+could have been. _Government was ordained and established before the first
+child was born:_--"HE SHALL RULE OVER THEE." Cain and Abel were born in a
+_state_ as perfect as the empire of Britain or the rule of these United
+States. All that Blackstone, and Paley, and Hobbs, or anybody else, says
+about the social compact, is flatly and fully denied and upset by the
+Bible, history, and common sense. Let any New York lawyer--or even a
+Philadelphia lawyer--deny this if he dares. _Life, liberty, and the
+pursuit of happiness_ never were the _inalienable_ right of the
+_individual_ man.
+
+His self-control, in all these particulars, _from the beginning_, was
+subordinate to the good of the family,--the empire. The command to Noah
+was,--"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
+(Gen. ix. 6.)
+
+This command to shed blood was, and is, in perfect harmony with the
+law,--"Thou shalt not kill." There is nothing right or wrong in _the
+taking of life_, per se, or in itself considered. It may or it may not be
+a natural good or evil. As a _general fact_, the taking of life is a
+natural evil. Hence, "Thou shalt not kill" is the general rule, to
+preserve the good there is in life. To take life under the forbidden
+conditions is sin, simply because God forbids it under those conditions.
+The sin is not in taking life, but in transgressing God's law.
+
+But _sometimes_ the taking of life will secure a greater good. God, then,
+commands that life be taken. Not to take life, under the commanded
+conditions, is sin,--solely because God then commands it.
+
+This power over life, for the good of the one great family of man, God
+_delegated_ to Noah, and through him to the tribe, the clan, the kingdom,
+the empire, the democracy, the republic, as they may be governed by chief,
+king, emperor, parliament, or congress. Had Ham killed Shem, Noah would
+have commanded Japheth to slay him. So much for the origin of the power
+over life: now for the power over liberty.
+
+The right to take life included the right over liberty. But God intended
+the rule of the superior over the inferior, in relations of service,
+should _exemplify human depravity, his curse and his overruling blessing_.
+
+The rule and the subordination which is essential to the existence of the
+family, God made commensurate with mankind; for _mankind is only the
+congeries of families_. When Ham, in his antediluvian recklessness,
+laughed at his father, God took occasion to give to the world the rule of
+the superior over the inferior. _He cursed him. He cursed him because he
+left him unblessed_. The withholding of the father's blessing, in the
+Bible, was curse. Hence Abraham prayed God, when Isaac was blessed, that
+Ishmael might not be passed by. Hence Esau prayed his father, when Jacob
+was blessed, that he might not be left untouched by his holy hands. Ham
+was cursed to render service, forever, to Shem and Japheth. The _special_
+curse on Canaan made the general curse on Ham conspicuous, historic, and
+explanatory, simply because his descendants were to be brought under the
+control of God's peculiar people. Shem was blessed to rule over Ham.
+Japheth was blessed to rule over both. God sent Ham to Africa, Shem to
+Asia, Japheth to Europe. Mr. Moderator, you have read Guyot's "_Earth and
+Man_." That admirable book is a commentary upon this part of Genesis. It
+is the philosophy of geography. And it is the philosophy of the rule of
+the higher races over the inferior, written on the very face of the earth.
+He tells you why the continents are shaped as they are shaped; why the
+mountains stand where they stand; why the rivers run where they run; why
+the currents of the sea and the air flow as they flow. And he tells you
+that the earth south of the Equator makes the inferior man. That the
+oceanic climate makes the inferior man in the Pacific Islands. That South
+America makes the inferior man. That the solid, unindented Southern Africa
+makes the inferior man. That the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent Asia
+makes the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent man. That Europe, indented by
+the sea on every side, with its varied scenery, and climate, and Northern
+influences, makes the varied intellect, the versatile power and life and
+action, of the master-man of the world. And it is so. Africa, with here
+and there an exception, has never produced men to compare with the men of
+Asia. For six thousand years, save the unintelligible stones of Egypt, she
+has had no history. Asia has had her great men and her name. But Europe
+has ever shown, and now, her nobler men and higher destiny. Japheth has
+now come to North America, to give us his past greatness and his
+transcendent glory. (Applause.) And, sir, I thank God our mountains stand
+where they stand; and that our rivers run where they run. Thank God they
+run not across longitudes, but across latitudes, from north to south. If
+they crossed longitudes, we might fear for the Union. But I hail the
+Union,--made by God, strong as the strength of our hills, and ever to live
+and expand,--like the flow and swell of the current of our streams.
+(Applause.)
+
+These two theories of Right and Wrong,--these two ideas of human
+liberty,--the right, in the nature of things, or the right as made by
+God,--the liberty of the individual man, of Atheism, of Red Republicanism,
+of the devil,--or the liberty of man, in the family, in the State, the
+liberty from God,--these two theories now make the conflict of the world.
+This anti-slavery battle is only part of the great struggle: God will be
+victorious,--and we, in his might.
+
+I now come to particular illustrations of the world-wide law that service
+shall be rendered by the inferior to the superior. The relations in which
+such service obtains are very many. Some of them are these:--husband and
+wife; parent and child; teacher and scholar; commander and
+soldier,--sailor; master and apprentice; master and hireling; master and
+slave. Now, sir, all these relations are ordained of God. They are all
+directly commanded, or they are the irresistible law of his providence, in
+conditions which must come up in the progress of depraved nature. The
+relations themselves are all good in certain conditions. And there may be
+no more of evil in the lowest than in the highest. And there may be in the
+lowest, as really as in the highest, the fulfilment of the commandment to
+love thy neighbor as thyself, and of doing unto him whatsoever thou
+wouldst have him to do unto thee.
+
+Why, sir, the wife everywhere, except where Christianity has given her
+elevation, is _the slave_. And, sir, I say, without fear of saying too
+strongly, that for every sigh, every groan, every tear, every agony of
+stripe or death, which has gone up to God from the relation of master and
+slave, there have been more sighs, more groans, more tears, and more agony
+in the rule of the husband over the wife. Sir, I have admitted, and do
+again admit, without qualification, that every fact in Uncle Tom's Cabin
+has occurred in the South. But, in reply, I say deliberately, what one of
+your first men told me, that he who will make the horrid examination will
+discover in New York City, in any number of years past, more cruelty from
+husband to wife, parent to child, _than in all the South from master to
+slave_ in the same time. I dare the investigation. And you may extend it
+further, if you choose,--to all the results of honor and purity. I fear
+nothing on this subject. I stand on rock,--the Bible,--and therefore, just
+before I bring the Bible, to which all I have said is introductory, I will
+run a parallel between the relation of master and slave and that of
+husband and wife. I will say nothing of the grinding oppression of capital
+upon labor, in the power of the master over the hireling--the crushed
+peasant--the chain-harnessed coal-pit woman, a thousand feet under ground,
+working in darkness, her child toiling by her side, and another child not
+born; I will say nothing of the press-gang which fills the navy of
+Britain--the conscription which makes the army of France--the terrible
+floggings--the awful court-martial--the quick sentence--the
+lightning-shot--the chain, and ball, and every-day lash--the punishment of
+the soldier, sailor, slave, who had run away. I pass all this by: I will
+run the parallel between the slave and wife.
+
+Do you say, The slave is held to _involuntary service?_ So is the wife.
+Her relation to her husband, in the immense majority of cases, is made for
+her, and not by her. And when she makes it for herself, how often, and how
+soon, does it become involuntary! How often, and how soon, would she
+throw off the yoke if she could! O ye wives, I know how superior you are
+to your husbands in many respects,--not only in personal attraction,
+(although in that particular, comparison is out of place,) in grace, in
+refined thought, in passive fortitude, in enduring love, and in a heart to
+be filled with the spirit of heaven. Oh, I know all this. Nay, I know you
+may surpass him in his own sphere of boasted prudence and worldly wisdom
+about dollars and cents. Nevertheless, he has authority, from God, to rule
+over you. You are under service to him. You are bound to obey him _in all
+things_. Your service is very, very, very often involuntary from the
+first, and, if voluntary at first, becomes hopeless necessity afterwards.
+I know God has laid upon the husband to love you as Christ loved the
+church, and in that sublime obligation has placed you in the light and
+under the shadow of a love infinitely higher, and purer, and holier than
+all talked about in the romances of chivalry. But the husband may not so
+love you. He may rule you with the rod of iron. What can you do? Be
+divorced? God forbids it, save for crime. Will you say that you are
+free,--that you will go where you please, do as you please? Why, ye dear
+wives, your husbands may forbid. And listen, you cannot leave New York,
+nor your palaces, any more than your shanties. No; you cannot leave your
+parlor, nor your bedchamber, nor your couch, if your husband commands you
+to stay there! What can you do? Will you run away, with your stick and
+your bundle? He can advertise you!! What can you do? You can, and I fear
+some of you do, wish him, from the bottom of your hearts, at the bottom of
+the Hudson. Or, in your self-will, you will do just as you please. (Great
+laughter.)
+
+[A word on the subject of divorce. One of your standing denunciations on
+the South is the terrible laxity of the marriage vow among the slaves.
+Well, sir, what does your Boston Dr. Nehemiah Adams say? He says, after
+giving eighty, sixty, and the like number of applications for divorce, and
+nearly all granted at individual quarterly courts in New England,--he says
+he is not sure but that the marriage relation is as enduring among _the
+slaves in the South_ as it is among white people in New England. I only
+give what Dr. Adams says. I would fain vindicate the marriage relation
+from this rebuke. But one thing I will say: you seldom hear of a divorce
+in Virginia or South Carolina.]
+
+But to proceed:--
+
+Do you say the slave is _sold and bought?_ So is the wife the world over.
+Everywhere, always, and now as the general fact, however done away or
+modified by Christianity. The savage buys her. The barbarian buys her. The
+Turk buys her. The Jew buys her. The Christian buys her,--Greek, Armenian,
+Nestorian, Roman Catholic, Protestant. The Portuguese, the Spaniard, the
+Italian, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the New
+England man, the New Yorker,--especially the upper ten,--_buy the
+wife_--in many, very many cases. She is seldom bought in the South, and
+never among the slaves themselves; for they always marry for love.
+(Continued laughter.) Sir, I say the wife is bought in the highest
+circles, too often, as really as the slave is bought. Oh, she is not sold
+and purchased in the public market. But come, sir, with me, and let us
+take the privilege of spirits out of the body to glide into that gilded
+saloon, or into that richly comfortable family room, of cabinets, and
+pictures, and statuary: see the parties, there, to sell and buy that human
+body and soul, and make her a chattel! See how they sit, and bend towards
+each other, in earnest colloquy, on sofa of rosewood and satin,--_Turkey_
+carpet (how befitting!) under feet, sunlight over head, softened through
+stained windows: or it is night, and the gas is turned nearly off, and the
+burners gleam like stars through the shadow from which the whisper is
+heard, in which that old ugly brute, with gray goatee--how fragrant!--bids
+one, two, five, ten hundred thousand dollars, and _she_ is knocked off to
+him,--that beautiful young girl asleep up there, amid flowers, and
+innocent that she is sold and bought. Sir, that young girl would as soon
+permit a baboon to embrace her, as that old, ignorant, gross, disgusting
+wretch to approach her. Ah, has she not been sold and bought for money?
+But--But what? But, you say, she freely, and without parental authority,
+accepted him. Then she sold herself for money, and was guilty of _that_
+which is nothing better than legal prostitution. I know what I say; you
+know what I say. Up there in the gallery you know: you nod to one another.
+Ah! you know the parties. Yes, you say: All true, true, true. (Laughter.)
+
+Now, Mr. Moderator, I will clinch all I have said by nails sure, and
+fastened from the word of God.
+
+There is King James's English Bible, with its magnificent dedication. I
+bring the English acknowledged translation. And just one word more to
+push gently aside--for I am a kind man to those poor, deluded anti-slavery
+people--their last argument. It is _that_ this English Bible, in those
+parts which treat of slavery, don't give the ideas which are found in the
+original Hebrew and Greek. Alas for the common people!--alas for this good
+old translation! Are its days numbered? No, sir; no, sir. The Unitarian,
+the Universalist, the Arminian, the Baptist, when pressed by this
+translation, have tried to find shelter for their false isms by making or
+asking for a new rendering. And now the anti-slavery men are driving hard
+at the same thing. (Laughter.) Sir, shall we permit our people everywhere
+to have their confidence in this noble translation undermined and
+destroyed by the isms and whims of every or any man in our pulpits? I
+affirm, whatever be our perfect liberty of examination into God's meaning
+in all the light of the original languages, that there is a respect due to
+this received version, and that great caution should be used, lest we
+teach the people to doubt its true rendering from the original word of
+God. I protest, sir, against having a Doctor-of-Divinity _priest_, Hebrew
+or Greek, to tell the people what God has spoken on the subject of
+slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin
+priest,--I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,--I would as soon go to
+Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,--I would as soon have the Pope at once in
+his fallible infallibility,--as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery
+Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible
+rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet
+produced this Bible, in its plain unanswerable authority, for the relation
+of master and slave, but the anti-slavery man ran away into the fog of
+_his_ Hebrew or Greek, (laughter,) or he jabbered the nonsense that God
+permitted the _sin_ of slaveholding among the Jews, but that he don't do
+it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it
+right, they know, then and now. Having thus taken the last puff of wind
+out of the sails of the anti-slavery phantom ship, turn to the
+twenty-first chapter of Exodus, vs. 2-5. God, in these verses, gave the
+Israelites his command how they should buy and hold the Hebrew
+servant,--how, under certain conditions, he went free,--how, under other
+circumstances, he might be held to service forever, with his wife and her
+children. There it is. Don't run into the Hebrew. (Laughter.)
+
+But what have we here?--vs. 7-11:--"And if a man sell his daughter to be a
+maid-servant, she shall not go out as the men-servants do. If she please
+not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her
+be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power,
+seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he hath betrothed her
+unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he
+take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage
+shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall
+she go out free without money." Now, sir, the wit of man can't dodge that
+passage, unless he runs away into the Hebrew. (Great laughter.) For what
+does God say? Why, this:--that an Israelite might sell his own daughter,
+not only into servitude, but into polygamy,--that the buyer might, if he
+pleased, give her to his son for a wife, or take her to himself. If he
+took her to himself, and she did not please him, he should not sell her
+unto a strange nation, but should allow her to be redeemed by her family.
+But, if he took him another wife before he allowed the first one to be
+redeemed, he should continue to give the first one _food_, her _raiment_,
+and her _duty of marriage_; that is to say, _her right to his bed_. If he
+did not do _these three things_, she should go out free; _i.e._ cease to
+be his slave, without his receiving any money for her. There, sir, God
+sanctioned the Israelite father in selling his daughter, and the Israelite
+man to buy her, into slavery and into polygamy. And it was then right,
+because God made it right. In verses 20 and 21, you have these
+words:--"And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die
+under his hand, he shall be surely punished; notwithstanding, if he
+continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."
+What does this passage mean? Surely this:--if the master gave his slave a
+hasty blow with a rod, and he died under his hand, he should be punished.
+But, if the slave lived a day or two, it would so extenuate the act of the
+master he should not be punished, inasmuch as he would be in that case
+sufficiently punished in losing his money in his slave. Now, sir, I affirm
+that God was more lenient to the degraded Hebrew master than Southern laws
+are to the higher Southern master in like cases. But there you have what
+was the divine will. Find fault with God, ye anti-slavery men, if you
+dare. In Leviticus, xxv. 44-46, "Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which
+thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them
+shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the
+strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their
+families that are with you, which they beget in your land: and they shall
+be your 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."
+
+Sir, I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command
+his people to buy slaves from the heathen round about them, and from the
+stranger, and of their families sojourning among them. The passage has no
+other meaning. Did God merely permit sin?--did he merely tolerate a
+dreadful evil? God does not say so anywhere. He gives his people law to
+buy and hold slaves of the heathen forever, on certain conditions, and to
+buy and hold Hebrew slaves in variously-modified particulars. Well, how
+did the heathen, then, get slaves to sell? Did they capture them in
+war?--did they sell their own children? Wherever they got them, they sold
+them; and God's law gave his people the right to buy them.
+
+God in the New Testament made no law prohibiting the relation of master
+and slave. But he made law regulating the relation under Greek and Roman
+slavery, which was the most oppressive in the world.
+
+God saw that these regulations would ultimately remove the evils in the
+Greek and Roman systems, and do it away entirely from the fitness of
+things, as there existing; for Greek and Roman slaves, for the most part,
+were the equals in all respects of their masters. Æsop was a slave;
+Terence was a slave. The precepts in Colossians iv. 18, 23, 1 Tim. vi.
+1-6, and other places, show, unanswerably, that God as really sanctioned
+the relation of master and slave as those of husband and wife, and parent
+and child; and that all the obligations of the moral law, and Christ's law
+of love, might and must be as truly fulfilled in the one relation as in
+the other. The fact that he has made the one set of relations permanent,
+and the other more or less dependent on conditions of mankind, or to pass
+away in the advancement of human progress, does not touch the question. He
+sanctioned it under the Old Testament and the New, and ordains it now
+while he sees it best to continue it, and he now, as heretofore, proclaims
+the duty of the master and the slave. Dr. Parker's admirable explanation
+of Colossians, and other New Testament passages, saves me the necessity of
+saying any thing more on the Scripture argument.
+
+One word on the Detroit resolutions, and I conclude. Those resolutions of
+the Assembly of 1850 decide that slavery is sin, unless the master holds
+his slave as a guardian, or under the claims of humanity.
+
+Mr. Moderator, I think we had on this floor, yesterday, proof conclusive
+that those resolutions mean any thing or nothing; that they are a fine
+specimen of Northern skill in platform-making; that it put in a plank
+here, to please this man,--a plank there, to please that man,--a plank for
+the North, a broad board for the South. It is Jackson's judicious tariff.
+It is a gum-elastic conscience, stretched now to a charity covering all
+the multitude of our Southern sins, contracted now, giving us hardly a
+fig-leaf of righteousness. It is a bowl of punch,--
+
+  A little sugar to make it sweet,
+    A little lemon to make it sour,
+  A little water to make it weak,
+    A little brandy to give it power. (Laughter.)
+
+As a Northern argument against us, it is a mass of lead so heavy that it
+weighed down even the strong shoulders of Judge Jessup. For, sir, when he
+closed his speech, I asked him a single question I had made ready for him.
+It was this:--"Do you allow that Mr. Aiken, of South Carolina, may, under
+the claims of humanity, hold three thousand slaves, or must he emancipate
+them?" The Judge staggered, and stammered, and said, "No man could rightly
+hold so many." I then asked, "How many may he hold, in humanity?" The
+Judge saw his fatal dilemma. He recovered himself handsomely, and fairly
+said, "Mr. Aiken might hold three thousand slaves, in harmony with the
+Detroit action." I replied, "Then, sir, you have surrendered the whole
+question of Southern slavery." And, sir, the Judge looked as if he felt he
+had surrendered it. And every man in this house, capable of understanding
+the force of that question, felt it had shivered the whole anti-slavery
+argument, on those resolutions, to atoms. Why, sir, if a man can hold
+three slaves, with a right heart and the approbation of God, he may hold
+thirty, three hundred, three thousand, or thirty thousand. It is a mere
+question of heart, and capacity to govern. The Emperor of Russia holds
+sixty millions of slaves: and is there a man in this house so much of a
+fool as to say that God regards the Emperor of Russia a sinner because he
+is the master of sixty millions of slaves? Sir, that Emperor has certainly
+a high and awful responsibility upon him. But, if he is good as he is
+great, he is a god of benevolence on earth. And so is every Southern
+master. His obligation is high, and great, and glorious. It is the same
+obligation, in kind, he is under to his wife and children, and in some
+respects immensely higher, by reason of the number and the tremendous
+interests involved for time and eternity in connection with this great
+country, Africa, and the world. Yes, sir, _I know_, whether Southern
+masters fully know it or not, that _they hold from God_, individually and
+collectively, _the highest and the noblest responsibility ever given by
+Him to individual private men on all the face of the earth._ For God has
+intrusted to them to train millions of the most degraded in form and
+intellect, but, at the same time, the most gentle, the most amiable, the
+most affectionate, the most imitative, the most susceptible of social and
+religious love, of all the races of mankind,--to train them, and to give
+them civilization, and the light and the life of the gospel of Jesus
+Christ. And I thank God he has given this great work to that type of the
+noble family of Japheth best qualified to do it,--to the Cavalier
+stock,--the gentleman and the lady of England and France, born to command,
+and softened and refined under our Southern sky. May they know and feel
+and fulfil their destiny! Oh, may they "know that they also have a Master
+in heaven."
+
+
+
+
+Letter from Dr. Ross.
+
+
+
+I need only say, in reference to this letter, that my friends
+having questioned my position as to the good of the agitation, I
+wrote the following letter to vindicate that point, as given, in
+the New York speech:--
+
+HUNTSVILLE, ALA., July 14, 1856.
+
+_Brother Blackburn_:--I affirmed, in my New York speech, that the Slavery
+agitation has done, and will accomplish, good.
+
+Your very kind and courteous disagreement on that point I will make the
+occasion to say something more thereon, without wishing you, my dear
+friend, to regard what I write as inviting any discussion.
+
+I said _that_ agitation has brought out, and would reveal still more
+fully, the Bible, in its relation to slavery and liberty,--also the
+infidelity which long has been, and is now, leavening with death the whole
+Northern mind. And that it would result in the triumph of the _true_
+Southern interpretation of the Bible; to the honor of God, and to the
+good of the master, the slave, the stability of the Union, and be a
+blessing to the world. To accomplish this, the sin _per se_ doctrine will
+be utterly demolished. That doctrine is the difficulty in every _Northern
+mind,_ (where there is any difficulty about slavery,) whether they confess
+it or not. Yes, the difficulty with every Northern man is, that _the
+relation of_ master and slave is felt _to be_ sin. I know that to be the
+fact. I have talked with all grades of Northern men, and come in contact
+with all varieties of Northern mind on this subject. And I know that the
+man who says and tries to believe, and does, partially in sober judgment,
+believe, that slavery is not sin, yet, _in his feelings, in his educated
+prejudices_, he feels that slavery is sin.
+
+Yes, _that_ is the difficulty, and _that_ is the whole of the difficulty,
+_between the North and the South_, so far as the question is one of the
+Bible and morals. Now, I again say, that that _sin per se_ doctrine will,
+in this agitation, be utterly demolished. And when that is done,--when the
+North will know and feel fully, perfectly, that the relation of master and
+slave is not sin, but sanctioned of God,--then, and not till then, the
+North and South can and will, without anger, consider the following
+questions:--Whether slavery, as it exists in the United States, all
+things considered, be or be not a great good, and the greatest good for a
+time, notwithstanding its admitted evils? Again, whether these evils can
+or cannot be modified and removed? Lastly, whether slavery itself can or
+cannot pass away from this land and the world? Now, sir, the moment the
+sin question is settled, then all is peace. For these other questions
+belong entirely to another category of morals. They belong entirely to the
+category of _what is_ wise _to realize_ good. This agitation will bring
+this great result. And therefore I affirm the agitation to be good.
+
+There is another fact also, the result, in great measure, of this
+agitation, which in my view proves it to have been and to be of great
+good. I mean the astonishing rise and present stability of the slave-power
+of the United States. This fact, when examined, is undeniable. And it is
+equally undeniable that it has been caused, in great part, by the slavery
+question in all its bearings. It is a wonderful development made by God.
+And I must believe he intends thereby either to destroy or bless this
+great Union. But, as I believe he intends to bless, therefore I am
+fortified in affirming the good there has been and is in this agitation.
+Let me bring out to view this astonishing fact.
+
+1. Twenty-five years ago, and previously, the whole slave-holding South
+and West had a strong tendency to emancipation, in some form. But the
+abolition movement then began, and arrested that Southern and Western
+leaning to emancipation. Many people have said, and do say, that that
+_arrest_ was and is a great evil. I say it was and is a great good. Why?
+Answer: It was and would now be premature. Had it been carried out, it
+would have been and would now be evil, immense, inconceivable,--to master,
+slave, America, Africa, and the world; because neither master, slave,
+America, Africa, the world, were, or are, ready for emancipation. God has
+a great deal to do before he is ready for emancipation. He tells us so by
+this _arrest_ put upon that tendency to emancipation years ago. For He put
+it into the hearts of abolitionists _to make the arrest_. And He stopped
+the Southern movement all the more perfectly by permitting Great Britain
+to emancipate Jamaica, and letting that experiment prove, as it has, a
+perfect failure and a terrible warning. JAMAICA IS DESTROYED. And now,
+whatever be done for its negroes must be done with the full admission that
+what has been attempted was in violation of the duty Britain owed to
+those negroes. But her failure in seeing and doing her duty, God has given
+to us to teach us knowledge; and, through us, to instruct the world in the
+demonstration of the problem of slavery.
+
+2. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to give Texas to the South. Texas, a territory so vast that
+a bird, as Webster said, can't fly over it in a week. Many in the South
+did not want Texas. But many longer-headed ones did want it. And Northern
+men voted and gave to the South exactly what these longer-headed Southern
+statesmen wanted. This, I grant, was Northern anti-slavery fatuity,
+utterly unaccountable but that God made them do it.
+
+3. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to vote for Polk, Dallas, and Texas. This gave us the
+Mexican War; and that immense territory, its spoil,--a territory which,
+although it may not be favorable for slave-labor, has increased, and will,
+in many ways, extend the slave-power.
+
+4. This leads me to say that God put it into the hearts of many Northern
+men--especially abolitionists--to believe what Great Britain
+said,--namely, that _free trade_ would result in slave-emancipation. _But
+lo! the slave-holder wanted free trade_. So Northern abolitionists helped
+to destroy the _tariff policy_, and thus to expand the demand for, and the
+culture of, cotton. Now, see, the gold of California has _perpetuated free
+trade_ by enabling our merchants to meet the enormous demand for specie
+created by free trade. So California helps the slave-power. But the
+abolitionists gave us Polk, the Mexican War, and California.
+
+5. God put it into the hearts of the North, and especially abolitionists,
+to stimulate the settlement of new free States, and to be the ardent
+friends of an immense foreign emigration. The result has been to send down
+to the South, with railroad speed and certainty, corn, wheat, flour, meal,
+bacon, pork, beef, and every other imaginable form of food, in quantity
+amazing, and so cheap that the planter can spread wider and wider the
+culture of cotton.
+
+6. God has, by this growth of the Northwest, made the demand for cotton
+enormous in the North and Northwest. Again, he has made English and French
+experiments to procure cotton somewhere else than from the United States
+_dead failures_,--in the East Indies, Egypt, Algeria, Brazil. God has
+thus given to the Southern planter an absolute monopoly. A monopoly so
+great that he, the Southern planter, sits now upon his throne of cotton
+and wields the commercial sceptre of the world. Yes, it is the Southern
+planter who says to-day to haughty England, Go to war, if you dare;
+dismiss Dallas, if you dare. Yes, he who sits on the throne of the
+cotton-bag has triumphed at last over him who sits on the throne of the
+wool-sack. England is prostrate at his feet, as well as the abolitionists.
+
+7. God has put it into the hearts of abolitionists to prevent half a
+million of free negroes from going to Liberia; and thereby the
+abolitionists have made them consumers of slave-products to the extension
+of the slave-power. And, by thus keeping them in America, the
+abolitionists have so increased their degradation as to prove all the more
+the utter folly of emancipation in the United States.
+
+8. God has permitted the anti-slavery men in the North, in England, in
+France, and everywhere, so to blind themselves in hypocrisy as to give the
+Southern slave-holder his last perfect triumph over them; for God tells
+the planter to say to the North, to England, to France, to all who buy
+cotton, "Ye men of Boston, New York, London, Paris,--ye hypocrites,--ye
+brand me as a pirate, a kidnapper, a murderer, a demon, fit only for hell,
+and yet ye buy my blood-stained cotton. O ye hypocrites!--ye Boston
+hypocrites! why don't ye throw the cotton in the sea, as your fathers did
+the tea? Ye Boston hypocrites! ye say, _if we had been in the days of our
+fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the
+slave-trade!_ Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the
+children of them who, in fact, kidnapped and bought in blood, and sold the
+slave in America! for now, ye hypocrites, ye buy the blood-stained cotton
+in quantity so immense, that _ye_ have run up the price of slaves to
+be more than a thousand dollars,--the average of old and young! O ye
+hypocrites! ye denounce slavery; then ye bid it live, and not die,--in
+that ye buy sugar, rice, tobacco, and, above all, cotton! Ye hypocrites!
+ye abuse the devil, and then fall down and worship him!--ye
+hypocrites,--ye New England hypocrites,--ye Old England hypocrites,--ye
+French hypocrites,--ye Uncle Tom's Cabin hypocrites,--ye Beecher
+hypocrites,--ye Rhode Island Consociation hypocrites! Oh, your holy
+twaddle stinks in the nostrils of God, and he commands me to lash you
+with my scorn, and his scorn, so long as ye gabble about the sin of
+slavery, and then bow down to me, and buy and spin cotton, and thus work
+for me as truly as my slaves! O ye fools and blind, fill ye up the measure
+of your folly, and blindness, and shame! And this ye are doing. Ye have,
+like the French infidels, made _reason_ your goddess, and are exalting her
+above the Bible; and, in your unitarianism and neology and all modes of
+infidelity, ye are rejecting and crucifying the Son of God."
+
+Now, my brother, this controlling slave-power is a world-wide fact. Its
+statistics of bales count by millions; its tonnage counts by hundreds of
+thousands; its manufacture is reckoned by the workshops of America and
+Europe; its supporters are numbered by all who must thus be clothed in the
+world. This tremendous power has been developed in great measure by the
+abolition agitation, controlled by God. I believe, then, as I have already
+said, that God intends one of two things. He either intends to destroy the
+United States by this slave-power, or he intends to bless my country and
+the world by the unfoldings of his wisdom in this matter. I believe he
+will bless the world in the working out of this slavery. I rejoice, then,
+in the agitation which has so resulted, and will so terminate, to reveal
+the Bible, and bless mankind.
+
+Your affectionate friend,
+
+F.A. Ross.
+
+REV. A. BLACKBURN.
+
+
+
+
+What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?
+
+
+
+My position as to this all-important question, in my New York speech, was
+made subject of remark in the "Presbyterian Herald," Louisville, Kentucky,
+to which I replied at length in the "Presbyterian Witness," Knoxville,
+Tennessee. No rejoinder was ever made to that reply. But, recently, an
+extract from the younger Edwards was submitted to me. To that I gave the
+following letter. The subject is of the first and the last importance, and
+bears directly, as set forth in my New York speech, on infidelity, and, of
+course, the slavery question:--
+
+Mr. Editor:--In your paper of Tuesday, 24th ult., there is an article,
+under this head, giving the argument of Edwards (the son) against my views
+as to _the foundation of moral obligation_.
+
+I thank the writer for his argument, and his courteous manner of
+presenting it. In my third letter to Mr. Barnes, I express my preparation
+to meet "_all comers_" on this question; and I am pleased to see this
+"_comer_". If my views cannot be refuted by Edwards, I may wait long
+for an "_uglier customer_."
+
+A word, introductory, to your correspondent. He says, "His [Dr. Ross's]
+theory was advanced and argued against in a former age." By this, I
+understand him to express his belief that my theory has been rejected
+heretofore. Well. It may, nevertheless, be the true theory. The Copernican
+astronomy was argued against in a former age and rejected; yet it has
+prevailed. Newton's law of gravitation was argued against and rejected by
+a whole generation of philosophers on the continent of Europe; yet it has
+prevailed. And now all school-boys and girls would call anybody a fool who
+should deny it. Steam, in all its applications, was argued against and
+rejected; yet it has prevailed. So the electric telegraph; and, to go back
+a little, the theory of vaccination,--the circulation of the blood,--a
+thousand things; yea, Edwards's (the father) theory of virtue, although
+received by many, has been argued against, and by many rejected; yet it
+will prevail. Yea, his idea of the unity of the race in Adam was and is
+argued against and rejected; yet it will prevail. I feel, therefore, no
+fear that my theory of moral obligation will not be acknowledged because
+it was argued against and rejected by many in a former age, and may be
+now. Nay; facts to prove it are accumulating,--facts which were not
+developed in Edwards's day,--facts showing, irresistibly, that Edwards's
+theory, which is _that_ most usually now held, is what I say it is,--_the
+rejection of revelation, infidelity, and atheism_. The evidence amounts to
+demonstration.
+
+The question is in a nutshell; it is this:--_Shall man submit to the
+revealed will of God_, or _to his own will?_ That is the naked question
+when the fog of confused ideas and unmeaning words is lifted and
+dispersed.
+
+My position, expressed in the speech delivered in the General Assembly,
+New York, May, 1856, is this:--"God, in making all things, saw that, in
+the relations he would constitute between himself and intelligent
+creatures, and among themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass.
+In his benevolent wisdom, he then _willed_ LAW to control this _good_ and
+_evil_; and he thereby made _conformity_ to that law to be _right_, and
+_non-conformity_ to be _wrong_. Why? Simply because he saw it to be
+_good_, and _made it to be_ RIGHT; not because _he saw it to be right_,
+but because _he made it to be right_."
+
+Your correspondent replies to this theory in the following words of
+Edwards:--"Some hold that the foundation of moral obligation is
+primarily in the will of God. But the will of God is either benevolent
+or not. If it be benevolent, and on that account the foundation of moral
+obligation, it is not the source of obligation merely because it is the
+will of God, but because it is benevolent, and is of a tendency to
+promote happiness; and this places the foundation of obligation in a
+tendency to happiness, and not primarily in the will of God. But if the
+will of God, and that which is the expression of it, the divine law, be
+allowed to be not benevolent, and are foundation of obligation, we are
+obliged to conform to them, whatever they be, however malevolent and
+opposite to holiness and goodness the requirements be. But this, I
+presume, none will pretend." Very fairly and strongly put; that's to say,
+if I understand Edwards, he supposes, if God was the devil and man what
+he is, then man would not be under obligation to obey the devil's will!
+That's it! Well, I suppose so too; and I reckon most _Christians_ would
+agree to that statement, Nay, more: I presume nobody ever taught that the
+mere naked _will_, abstractly considered, if it could be, from the
+_character_ of God, was the ground of moral obligation? Nay, I think
+nobody ever imagined that the notion of an infinite Creator presupposes
+or includes the idea that he is a malevolent Being! I agree, then, with
+Edwards, that the ultimate ground of obligation _is_ in the _fact_ that
+God is benevolent, or is a good God. I said _that_ in my speech quoted
+above. I formally stated that "_God, in his benevolent wisdom, willed law
+to control the natural good and evil_," &c. What, then, is the point of
+disagreement between my view and Edwards's? It is in _the different ways
+by which we_ GET AT _the_ FACT _of divine benevolence_. I hold that the
+REVEALED WORD _tells us who God is and what he does_, and is, therefore,
+the ULTIMATE GROUND OF OBLIGATION. But Edwards holds that HUMAN REASON
+_must tell us who God is and what he does_, and IS, therefore, the
+PRIMARY GROUND OF OBEDIENCE. _That_ is my issue with Edwards and others;
+and it is as broad an issue as _faith in revelation_, or the REJECTION OF
+IT. I do not charge that Edwards did, or that all who hold with him do,
+deny the word of God; but I do affirm that their argument does. The
+matter is plain. For what is revelation? It is that God has appeared in
+person, and _told_ man in WORD that he is GOD; and _told_ him first in
+WORD (to be expanded in studying _creation_ and _providence_) that God is
+a Spirit, eternal, infinite in power, wisdom, goodness, holiness,--the
+Creator, Preserver, Benefactor. That WORD, moreover, he proved by
+highest evidence--namely, supernatural evidence--to be _absolute,
+perfect_ TRUTH as to all FACT affirmed _of him_ and _what_ he _does_.
+REVELATION, as claimed in the Bible, was and is THAT THING.
+
+Man, then, having this revelation; is under obligation ever to believe
+every jot and tittle of that WORD. He at first, no doubt, knew little of
+the meaning of some _facts_ declared; nay, he may have comprehended
+nothing of the sense or scope of many _facts_ affirmed. Nay, he may now,
+after thousands of years, know most imperfectly the meaning of that WORD.
+But he was and he is, notwithstanding, to believe with absolute faith the
+WORD,--that God _is_ all he says he is, and _does_ all he says he
+does,--however that WORD may _go beyond_ his reason, or _surprise_ his
+feelings, or _alarm_ his conscience, or _command_ his will.
+
+This statement of what revelation is, settles the whole question as
+presented by Edwards. For REVELATION, as explained, does FIX _forever the
+foundation of man's moral obligation in the benevolence of God_,
+PRIMARILY, as it is _expressed_ in the word of God. REVELATION does then,
+in that sense, FIX _obligation in the_ MERE WILL OF GOD; for, the moment
+you attempt to establish the foundation _somewhere else_, you have
+abandoned the ground of revelation. You have left the WILL OF GOD _in his
+word_, and you have made your rule of right to be the WILL OF MAN _in the_
+SELF _of the_ HEART. The proof of what I here say is so plain, even as the
+writing on the tables of Habakkuk's vision, that he may run that readeth
+it. Read, then, even as on the _tables_.
+
+God _says_ in his WORD, "I am all-powerful, all-wise, the Creator." "You
+may be," says Edwards, "but I want _primary foundation_ for my faith; and
+I can't take your _word_ for it. I must look first into _nature_ to see if
+evidence of infinite power and wisdom is there,--to see if evidence of a
+Creator is there,--and if thou art he!"
+
+Again, God _says_ in his word, "I am benevolent, and _my will_ in my law
+is expression of that benevolence." "You may tell the truth," Edwards
+replies, "but I want _primary ground_ for my belief, and I must hold your
+word suspended until I examine into my reason, my feelings, my conscience,
+my will,--to see if your WORD _harmonizes_ with my HEART,--to see if what
+you reveal tends to _happiness_ IN MY NOTION OF HAPPINESS; _or tends to
+right_ IN MY NOTION OF RIGHT!" That's it. That's the theory of Edwards,
+Barnes, and others.
+
+And what is this but the attempt to know the divine attributes and
+character in _some other way_ than through the divine WORD? And what is
+this but the denial of the divine WORD, except so far as it agrees with
+the knowledge of the attributes and character of God, obtained in THAT
+_some other way?_ And what is this but to make the word of God
+_subordinate_ to the teaching of the HUMAN HEART? And what is this but to
+make the WILL _of God_ give place to the WILL _of man?_ And what is this
+but the REJECTION OF REVELATION? Yet this is the result (though not
+intended by him) of the whole scheme of obligation, maintained by Edwards
+and by all who agree with him.
+
+Carry it out, and what is the progress and the end of it? This. Human
+reason--the human heart--will be supreme. Some, I grant, will hold to a
+revelation of some sort. A thing more and more transcendental,--a thing
+more and more of fog and moonshine,--fog floating in German cellars from
+fumes of lager-beer, and moonshine gleaming from the imaginations of the
+drinkers. Some, like Socrates and Plato, will have a God supreme,
+personal, glorious, somewhat like the true; and with him many inferior
+deities,--animating the stars, the earth, mountains, valleys, plains, the
+sea, rivers, fountains, the air, trees, flowers, and all living things.
+Some will deny a personal God, and conceive, instead, the intelligent mind
+of the universe, without love. Some will contend for mere law,--of
+gravitation and attraction; and some will suggest that all is the result
+of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Here, having passed through the
+shadows and the darkness, we have reached the blackness of
+infidelity,--blank atheism. No God--yea, all the way the "_fools_" were
+saying in their hearts, no God. What now is man? Alas! some, the Notts and
+Gliddons, tell us, man was indeed _created_ millions of ages ago, the Lord
+only knows when, in swarms like bees to suit the zones of the
+earth,--while other some, the believers in the _vestiges of creation_, say
+man is the result of development,--from fire, dust, granite, grass, the
+creeping thing, bird, fish, four-footed beast, monkey. Yea, and some of
+these last philosophers are even now going to Africa to try to find men
+they have heard tell of, who still have tails and are jumping and climbing
+somewhere in the regions around the undiscovered sources of the Nile.
+
+This is the progress and the result of the Edwards theory; because, deny
+or hesitate about revelation, and man cannot prove, _absolutely_, any of
+the things we are considering. Let us see if he can. Edwards writes, "On
+the supposition that the will or law of God is the primary foundation,
+reason, and standard of right and virtue, every attempt _to prove the
+moral perfection or attributes of God is absurd_." Here, then, Edwards
+believes, that, to reach the primary foundation of right and virtue, he
+must not take God's word as to his perfection or attributes, no matter how
+fully _God_ may have _proved_ his word: no; but he, Edwards, he, man, must
+first _prove_ them in _some other way_. And, of course, he believes he can
+reach such primary foundation by such other proof. Well, let us see how he
+goes about it. I give him, to try his hand, the easiest
+attribute,--"POWER." I give him, then, all creation, and providence
+besides, as his _black-board_, on which to work his demonstration. I give
+him, then, the lifetime of Methuselah, in which to reach his conclusion of
+proof.--Well, I will now suppose we have all lived and waited that long
+time: what is his _proof_ OF INFINITE POWER? Has he found the EXHIBITION
+of _infinite power?_ No. He has found _proof_ of GREAT POWER; but he has
+not reached the DISPLAY of _infinite power_. What then is his _faith_ in
+infinite power after such _proof?_ Why, just this: he INFERS _only_, that
+THE POWER, _which did the things he sees, can go on, and on, and on, to
+give greater, and greater, and greater manifestations of itself!_ VERY
+GOOD: _if so be, we can have no better proof_. But _that_ PROOF is
+infinitely below ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. And all
+manifestations of power to a _finite creature_, even to the archangel
+Michael, during countless millions of ages, never gives, because it never
+can give to him, ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. But the word of GOD
+gives the PROOF ABSOLUTE, _and in a moment of time!_ "I AM THE ALMIGHTY!"
+The _perfect proof_ is in THAT WORD OF GOD.
+
+I might set Edwards to work to prove the _infinite wisdom_, the _infinite
+benevolence_, the _infinite holiness_--yea, the EXISTENCE--of God. And he,
+finite man, in any examination of creation or providence, must fall
+infinitely below the PERFECT PROOF.
+
+So then I tell Edwards, and all agreeing with him, that _it is absurd_ to
+attempt to _prove_ the moral perfection and attributes of God, if he
+thereby seeks to reach the HIGHEST EVIDENCE, _or if he thereby means to
+find the_ PRIMARY GROUND _of moral obligation_.
+
+Do I then teach that man should not seek the _proof_ there is, of the
+perfection and attributes of God, in _nature and providence_? No. I hold
+that such proof unfolds the _meaning_ of the FACTS declared in the WORD of
+God, and is all-important, as such expansion of meaning. But I say, by
+authority of the Master, that _the highest proof, the absolute proof, the
+perfect proof_, of the FACTS as to _who God is, and what he does_, and the
+PRIMARY OBLIGATION _thereupon, is in the_ REVEALED WORD.
+
+FRED. A. ROSS.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., April 3, 1857.
+
+N.B.--In notice of last Witness's extract from Erskine, I remark that
+Thomas Erskine was, and may yet be, a lawyer of Edinburgh. He wrote
+_three works_:--_one_ on the _Internal Evidences_, the _next_ on
+_Faith_, the _last_ on the _Freeness of the Gospel_. They are all
+written with great ability, and contain much truth. But all have in them
+fundamental _untruths_. There is least in the Evidences; more in the
+essay on Faith; most in the tract on the Freeness of the Gospel,--which
+last has been utterly refuted, and has passed away. His _Faith_ is,
+also, not republished. The Evidences is good, like good men,
+notwithstanding the evil.
+
+
+
+
+Letters to Rev. A. Barnes.
+
+
+
+
+Introduction.
+
+
+
+As part of the great slavery discussion, Rev. A. Barnes, of Philadelphia,
+published, in October, 1856, a pamphlet, entitled, "The CHURCH and
+SLAVERY." In this tract he invites every man to utter his views on the
+subject. And, setting the example, he speaks his own with the greatest
+freedom and honesty.
+
+In the same freedom of speech, I have considered his views unscriptural,
+false, fanatical, and infidel. Therefore, while I hold him in the highest
+respect, esteem, and affection, as a divine and Christian gentleman, and
+cherish his past relations to me, yet I have in these letters written to
+him, and of him, just as I would have done had he lived in France or
+Germany, a stranger to me, and given to the world the refined scoff of the
+one, or the muddy transcendentalism of the other.
+
+My first letter is merely a glance at some things in his pamphlet, in
+which I show wherein I agree and disagree with him,--_i.e._ in our
+estimate of the results of the agitation; in our views of the Declaration
+of Independence; in our belief of the way men are made infidels; and in
+our appreciation of the testimonies of past General Assemblies.
+
+The other letters I will notice in similar introductions.
+
+These letters first appeared as original contributions to the Christian
+Observer, published and edited by Dr. A. Converse, Philadelphia.
+
+I take this occasion to express my regard for him, and my sense of the
+ability with which he has long maintained the rights and interests of the
+Presbyterian body, to which we both belong; and the wise and masterly way
+in which he has vindicated, from the Bible, the truth on the slavery
+question. To him, too, the public is indebted for the first exhibition of
+Mr. Barnes's errors in his recent tract which has called forth my reply.
+
+
+
+
+No. I.
+
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+_Dear Sir_:--You have recently published a tract:--"The Church and
+Slavery."
+
+"The opinion of each individual," you remark, "contributes to form public
+sentiment, as the labor of the animalcule in the ocean contributes to the
+coral reefs that rise above the waves."
+
+True, sir, and beautifully expressed. But while, in harmony with your
+intimation, I must regard you one of the animalcules, rearing the coral
+reef of public opinion, I cannot admit your disclaimer of "special
+influence" among them in their work. Doubtless, sir, you have "special
+influence,"--and deserve to have. I make no apology for addressing you. I
+am one of the animalcules.
+
+I agree, and I disagree, with you. I harmonize in your words,--"The
+present is eminently a time when the views of every man on the subject of
+slavery should be uttered in unambiguous tones." I agree with you in this
+affirmation; because the subject has yet to be fully understood; because,
+when understood, if THE BIBLE does _not_ sanction the system, the MASTER
+must cease to be the master. The SLAVE must cease to be the slave. He must
+be _free_, AND EQUAL IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE. _That_ is your
+"_unambiguous tone_". Let it be heard, if _that_ is the word of God.
+
+But if THE BIBLE _does_ sanction the system, then _that_ "unambiguous
+tone" will silence abolitionists who admit the Scriptures; it will satisfy
+all good men, and give peace to the country. That is the "_tone_" I want
+men to hear. Listen to it in the past and present speech of providence.
+The time was when _you_ had the very _public sentiment_ you are now trying
+to form. From Maine to Louisiana, the American mind was softly yielding to
+the impress of emancipation, in some hope, however vague and imaginary.
+Southern as well as Northern men, in the church and out of it, not having
+sufficiently studied the word of God, and, under our own and French
+revolutionary excitement, looking only at the evils of slavery, wished it
+away from the land. It was a _mistaken_ public sentiment. Yet, such as it
+was, you had it, and it was doing your work. It was Quaker-like, mild and
+affectionate. It did not, however, work fast enough for you. You thought
+that the negro, with his superior attributes of body and mind and higher
+advantages of the nineteenth century, might reach, in a day, the liberty
+and equality which the Anglo-American had attained after the struggle of
+his ancestors during a thousand years! You got up the agitation. You got
+it up in the Church and State. You got it up over the length and breadth
+of this whole land. Let me show you some things you have secured, as the
+results of your work.
+
+
+
+_First Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+1. The most consistent abolitionists, affirming the sin of slavery, on the
+maxim of created equality and unalienable right, after torturing the Bible
+for a while, to make it give the same testimony, felt they could get
+nothing from the book. They felt that the God of the Bible disregarded the
+thumb-screw, the boot, and the wheel; that he would not speak for them,
+but against them. These consistent men have now turned away from the
+word, in despondency; and are seeking, somewhere, an abolition Bible, an
+abolition Constitution for the United States, and an abolition God.
+
+This, sir, is the _first result_ of your agitation:--the very van of your
+attack repulsed, and driven into infidelity.
+
+
+
+_A Second Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+2. Many others, and you among them, are trying in exactly the same way
+just mentioned to make the Bible speak against slave-holding. You get
+nothing by torturing the English version. People understand English. Nay,
+you get little by applying the rack to the Hebrew and Greek; even before a
+tribunal of men like you, who proclaim beforehand that Moses, in Hebrew,
+and Paul, in Greek, _must_ condemn slavery because "_it is a violation of
+the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence_." You find it
+difficult to persuade men that Moses and Paul were moved by the Holy Ghost
+to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson! You find it hard to make
+men believe that Moses saw in the mount, and Paul had vision in heaven,
+that this future _apostle of Liberty_ was inspired by Jesus Christ.
+
+You torture very severely. But the muscles and bones of those old men are
+tough and strong. They won't yield under your terrible wrenchings. You get
+only groans and mutterings. You claim these voices, I know, as testimony
+against slavery. But you cannot torture in secret as in olden times. When
+putting the question, you have to let men be present,--who tell us that
+Moses and Paul won't speak for you,--that they are silent, like Christ
+before Pilate's scourging-men; or, in groans and mutterings,--the voices
+of their sorrow and the tones of their indignation,--they rebuke your
+pre-judgment of the Almighty when you say if the Bible sanctions slavery,
+"it neither ought to be nor could be received by mankind as a divine
+revelation."
+
+This, sir, is the _second result_ you have gained by your agitation. You
+have brought a thousand Northern ministers of the gospel, with yourself,
+to the verge of the same denial of the word of God which they have made,
+who are only a little ahead of you in the road you are travelling.
+
+
+
+_A Third Result of Agitation._
+
+
+3. Meanwhile, many of your most pious men, soundest scholars, and
+sagacious observers of providence, have been led to study the Bible more
+faithfully in the light of the times. And they are reading it more and
+more in harmony with the views which have been reached by the highest
+Southern minds, to wit:--That the relation of master and slave is
+sanctioned by the Bible;--that it is a relation belonging to the same
+category as those of husband and wife, parent and child, master and
+apprentice, master and hireling;--that the relations of husband and wife,
+parent and child, _were ordained in Eden for man, as man_, and _modified
+after the fall_, while the relation of slavery, as a system of labor, is
+_only one form of the government ordained of God over fallen and degraded
+man_;--that the _evils_ in the system are _the same evils_ of OPPRESSION
+we see in the relation of husband and wife, and all other forms of
+government;--that slavery, as a relation, suited to the more degraded or
+the more ignorant and helpless types of a sunken humanity, is, like all
+government, intended _as the proof of the curse of such degradation, and
+at the same time to elevate and bless_;--that the relation of husband and
+wife, being for man, as man, _will ever be over him_, while slavery will
+remain so long as God sees it best, as a controlling power over the
+ignorant, the more degraded and helpless;--and that, when he sees it for
+the good of the country, he will cause it to pass away, if the slave can
+be elevated to liberty and equality, political and social, with his
+master, _in_ that country; or _out of_ that country, if such elevation
+cannot be given therein, but may be realized in some other land: all which
+result must be left to the unfoldings of the divine will, _in harmony with
+the Bible_, and not to a newly-discovered dispensation. These facts are
+vindicated in the Bible and Providence. In the Old Testament, they stare
+you in the face:--in the family of Abraham,--in his slaves, bought with
+his money and born in his house,--in Hagar, running away under her
+mistress's hard dealing with her, and yet sent back, as a fugitive slave,
+by the angel,--in the law which authorized the Hebrews to hold their
+brethren as slaves for a time,--in which parents might sell their children
+into bondage,--in which the heathen were given to the Hebrews as their
+slaves forever,--in which slaves were considered so much the money of
+their master, that the master who killed one by an unguarded blow was,
+under certain circumstances, sufficiently punished in his slave's death,
+because he thereby lost his money,--in which the difference between
+_man-stealing_ and _slave-holding_ is, by law, set forth,--in which the
+runaway from heathen masters may not be restored, because God gave him
+the benefits of an adopted Hebrew. In the New Testament:--wherein the
+slavery of Greece and Rome was recognised,--in the obligations laid on
+master and slave,--in the close connection of this obligation with the
+duties of husband and wife, parent and child,--in the obligation to return
+the fugitive slave to his master,--and _in the condemnation of every
+abolition principle_, "AS DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH." (1 Tim. vi. 1-5.)
+
+This view of slavery is becoming more and more, not only the settled
+decision of the Southern but of the best Northern mind, with a movement so
+strong that you have been startled by it to write the pamphlet now lying
+before me.
+
+This is the _third result_ you have secured:--to make many of the best men
+in the North see the infidelity of your philosophy, falsely so called, on
+the subject of slavery, in the clearer and clearer light of the
+Scriptures.
+
+
+
+_Another Result of Agitation_.
+
+
+4. The Southern slave-holder is now satisfied, as never before, that the
+relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible; and he feels, as
+never before, the obligations of the word of God. He no longer, in his
+ignorance of the Scriptures, and afraid of its teachings, will seek to
+defend his common-sense opinions of slavery by arguments drawn from "Types
+of Mankind," and other infidel theories; but he will look, in the light of
+the Bible, on all the good and evil in the system. And when the North, as
+it will, shall regard him holding from God this high power for great
+good,--when the North shall no more curse, but bid him God-speed,--then he
+will bless himself and his slave, in nobler benevolence. With no false
+ideas of created equality and unalienable right, but with the Bible in his
+heart and hand, he will do justice and love mercy in higher and higher
+rule. Every evil will be removed, and the negro will be elevated to the
+highest attainments he can make, and be prepared for whatever destiny God
+intends. This, sir, is the _fourth result_ of your agitation:--to make the
+Southern master _know_, from the Bible, his right to be a master, and his
+duty to his slave.
+
+These _four results_ are so fully before you, that I think you must see
+and feel them. You have brought out, besides, tremendous political
+consequences, giving astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on
+these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of
+the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep
+of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I
+rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly
+purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long
+latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and
+South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of
+God and to speak it to the land. I rejoice that all the South now know
+that God gives the right to hold slaves, and, with that right,
+obligations they must fulfil. I rejoice that the day has dawned in which
+the North and South will think and feel and act together on the subject
+of slavery. I thank God for the agitation. May he forgive the folly and
+wickedness of many who have gotten it up! May he reveal more and more,
+that surely the wrath of man shall praise him, while the remainder of
+wrath he will restrain!
+
+
+
+_Declaration of Independence_.
+
+
+I agree with you, sir, that _the second paragraph_ of the Declaration of
+Independence contains _five affirmations_, declared to be self-evident
+truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every
+thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to
+liberty,--to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to
+their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident
+truth, or a truth at all. On the contrary, that each one is contrary to
+the Bible; that each one, separately, is denied; and that all five,
+collectively, are denied and upset by the Bible, by the natural history of
+man, and by providence, in every age of the world. I say this now. In a
+subsequent communication, I will prove what I affirm. For the present I
+merely add, that the Declaration of Independence stands in no need of
+these false affirmations. It was, and is, a beautiful whole without them.
+It was, and is, without these imaginary maxims, the simple statement of
+the grievances the colonies had borne from the mother-country, and their
+right _as colonies_, when thus oppressed, to declare themselves
+independent. That is to say, the right given of God to oppressed children
+to seek protection in another family, or to set up for themselves somewhat
+before _twenty-one_ or natural maturity; right belonging to them _in the
+British family;_ right sanctioned of God; right blessed of God, in the
+resistance of the colonies _as colonies_--not as individual men--to the
+attempt of the mother-country to consummate her tyranny. But God gives no
+sanction to the affirmation that he has _created all men equal_; that this
+is _self-evident,_ and that he has given them _unalienable rights;_ that
+he has made government to _derive its power solely from their consent_,
+and that he has given them _the right to change that government in their
+mere pleasure_. All this--every word of it, every jot and tittle--is the
+liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times
+in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if
+Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed
+it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as
+time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru
+Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, Garrison, or Barnes.
+
+Sir, that paragraph is an _excrescence_ on the tree of our liberty. I pray
+you take it away. Worship it if you will, and in a manner imitate the
+Druid. He gave reverence to the _mistletoe_, but first he removed the
+_parasite_ from the noble tree. Do you the same. Cut away _this mistletoe_
+with golden knife, as did the Druid; enshrine its imaginary divinity in a
+grove or cave; then retire there, and leave our oak to stand in its glory
+in the light of heaven. Men have been afraid to say all this for years,
+just as they have been timid to assert that God has placed master and
+slave in the same relation as husband and wife. Public sentiment, which
+you once had and have lost, suppressed this utterance as the other. But
+now, men speak out; and I, for one, will tell you what the Bible reveals
+as to that part of the Declaration of Independence, as fearlessly as I
+tell you what it says of the system of slavery.
+
+
+
+_How Men are made Infidels_.
+
+
+I agree with you that some men have been, are, and will be, made infidels
+by hearing that God has ordained slavery as one form of his government
+over depraved mankind. But how does this fact prove that the Bible does
+not sanction slavery? Why, sir, you have been all your life teaching that
+some men are made infidels by hearing any truth of the Bible;--that some
+men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement,
+Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. True: and these men
+find "_great laws of their nature,--instinctive feelings_"--just such as
+you find against slavery, and not more perverted in them than in you,
+condemning all this Bible. And they hold now, with your sanction, that a
+book affirming such facts "_cannot be from God_."
+
+Sir, some men are made infidels by hearing the Ten Commandments, and they
+find "_great laws of their nature_," as strong in them as yours in you
+against slavery, warring against every one of these commandments. And
+they declare now, with your authority, that a book imposing such
+restraints upon human nature, "_cannot be from God_" Sir, what is it
+makes infidels? You have been wont to answer, "They _will not_ have God
+_to rule over them_. They _will not_ have the BIBLE _to control the great
+laws of their nature."_ Sir, that is the true answer. And you know that
+_the great instinct of liberty_ is only one of _three great laws_,
+needing special teaching and government:--that is to say, _the instinct
+to rule; the instinct to submit to be ruled; and the instinct for
+liberty._ You know, too, that the instinct _to submit_ is the strongest,
+the instinct _to rule_ is next, and that the _aspiration for liberty_ is
+the weakest. Hence you know the overwhelming majority of men have ever
+been willing to be slaves; masters have been next in number; while the
+few have struggled for freedom.
+
+The Bible, then, in proclaiming God's will _as to these three great
+impulses_, will be rejected by men, exactly as they have yielded forbidden
+control to the one or the other of them. The Bible will make infidels of
+_masters_, when God calls to them to rule right, or to give up rule, if
+they have allowed _the instinct of power_ to make them hate God's
+authority. Pharaoh spoke for all infidel rulers when he said, "_Who is the
+Lord that I should obey his voice?_"
+
+The Bible will make infidels of _slaves_, when God calls to them to aspire
+to be free, if they have permitted _the instinct of submission to_ make
+them hate his commands. The Israelites in the wilderness revealed ten
+times, in their murmuring, _the slave-instinct_ in all ages:--"_Would to
+God we had died in the wilderness!_"
+
+You know all this, and you condemn these infidels. Good.
+
+But, sir, you know equally well that the Bible will make infidels of men
+_affirming the instinct of liberty,_ when God calls them to learn of him
+how _much liberty_ he gives, and _how_ he gives it, and _when_ he gives
+it, if they have so yielded to this law of their nature as to make them
+despise the word of the Lord. Sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram spoke out
+just what the liberty-and-equality men have said in all time:--"_Ye, Moses
+and Aaron, take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy,
+every one of them: wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the
+congregation?"_ Verily, sir, these men were intensely excited by "_the
+great law of our nature,--the great instinct of freedom."_ Yea, they told
+God to his face they had looked within, and found the _higher law of
+liberty and equality--the eternal right--in their intuitional
+consciousness_; and that they would not submit to his will in the
+elevation of Moses and Aaron _above them_.
+
+Verily, sir, you, in the spirit of Korah, now proclaim and say, "Ye
+masters, and ye white men who are not masters, North and South, ye take
+too much upon you, seeing the negro is created your equal, and, by
+unalienable right, is as free as you, and entitled to all your political
+and social life. Ye take, then, too much upon you in excluding him from
+your positions of wealth and honor, from your halls of legislation, and
+from your palace of the nation, and from your splendid couch, and from
+your fair women with long hair on that couch and in that gilded chariot:
+wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the negro?"
+
+Verily, sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram said all we have ever heard from
+abolition-platforms or now listen to from you. But the Lord made the
+earth swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram!
+
+I agree with you then, sir, fully, that some men have been, are, and will
+be, made infidels by hearing that God, in the Bible, has ordained slavery.
+But I hold this to be no argument against the fact that the Bible does so
+teach, because men are made infidels by any other doctrine or precept they
+hate to believe.
+
+Sir, no man has said all this better than you. And I cannot express my
+grief that you--in the principle now avowed, _that every man must
+interpret the Bible as he chooses to reason and feel_--sanction all the
+infidelity in the world, obliterate your "_Notes_" on the Bible, and deny
+the preaching of your whole life, so far as God may, in his wrath, permit
+you to expunge or recall the words of the wisdom of your better day.
+
+
+
+_Testimonies of General Assemblies_.
+
+
+I agree with you that the Presbyterian Church, both before and since its
+division, has testified, after a fashion, against slavery. But some of its
+action has been very curious testimony. I know not how the anti-slavery
+resolutions of 1818 were gotten up; nor how in some Assemblies since. I
+can guess, however, from what I do know, as to how such resolutions passed
+in Buffalo in 1853, and in New York in 1856. I know that in Buffalo they
+were at first voted down by a large majority. Then they were reconsidered
+in mere courtesy to men who said they wanted to speak. So the resolutions
+were passed after some days, in which the _screws_ were applied and
+turned, in part, _by female hands_, to save the chairman of the committee
+from _the effects_ of the resolutions being finally voted down!
+
+I know that, in New York, the decision of the Assembly to spread the
+minority report on the minutes was considered, in the body and out of it,
+as a Southern victory; for it revealed, however glossed over, that many in
+the house, who could not vote directly for the minority report, did in
+fact prefer it to the other.
+
+I was not in Detroit in 1850; but I think it was established in New York
+last May that that Detroit testimony was so admirably worded that both
+Southern and Northern men might vote for it with clear consciences!
+
+I need not pursue the investigation. I admit that, after this sort, you
+have the stultified abstractions of the New School Presbyterian
+Church,--while I have its common sense; you have its Delphic words,--I
+have its actions; you have the traditions of the elders making void the
+word of God,--I have the providence of God restraining the church from
+destroying itself and our social organization under folly, fanaticism, and
+infidelity.
+
+You, sir, seem to acknowledge this; for, while you appear pleased with the
+testimony of the New School Presbyterian Church, such as it is, you lament
+that the Old School have not been true to the resolutions of 1818,--that,
+in that branch of the church, it is questionable whether those resolutions
+could now be adopted. You lament the silence of the Episcopal, the
+Southern Methodist, and the Baptist denominations; you might add the
+Cumberland Presbyterian Church. And you know that in New England, in New
+York, and in the Northwest, many testify against _us_ as a pro-slavery
+body. You lament that so many members of the church, ministers of the
+gospel, and editors of religious papers, defend the system; you lament
+that so large a part of the religious literature of the land, though
+having its seat North and sustained chiefly by Northern funds, shows a
+perpetual deference to the slave-holder; you lament that, after fifty
+years, nothing has been done to arrest slavery; you lament and ask, "Why
+should this be so?" In saying this, you acknowledge that, while you have
+been laboring to get and have reached the abstract testimony of the
+church, all diluted as it is, the common-sense fact has been and is more
+and more brought out, in the providence of God, that _the slave-power has
+been and is gaining ground in the United States_. In one word, you have
+contrived to get, in confused utterance, the voice of the Sanhedrim; while
+Christ himself has been preaching in the streets of our Jerusalem the true
+meaning of slavery as one form of his government over fallen men.
+
+These, then, are some of the things I promised to show as the results of
+your agitation. This is the "_tone_" of the past and present speech of
+Providence on the subject of slavery. You seem disturbed. I feel sure
+things are going on well as to that subject. Speak on, then, "in
+unambiguous tones." But, sir, when you desire to go from words to
+actions,--when you intimate that the constitution of the Presbyterian
+Church may be altered to permit such action, or that, without its
+alteration, the church can detach itself from slavery by its existing laws
+or the modification of them,--then I understand you to mean that you
+desire to deal, in fact, with slave-holders as _offenders_. Then, sir,
+_you mean to exscind the South_; for it is absurd to imagine that you
+suppose the South will submit to such action. You mean, then, to _exscind
+the South, or to exscind yourself and others_, or to _compel the South to
+withdraw_. Your tract, just published, is, I suppose, intended by you to
+prepare the next General Assembly for such movement? What then? Will you
+make your "American Presbyterian," and your Presbyterian House, effect
+that great change in the religious literature of the land whereby the
+subject of slave-holding shall be approached _precisely_ as you deal with
+"theft, highway-robbery, or piracy?" Will you, then, by act of Assembly,
+Synod, Presbytery, Session, deny your pulpits, and communion-bread and
+wine, to slave-holding ministers, elders, and members? Will you, then,
+tell New England, and especially little Rhoda, We have purified our skirts
+from the blood: forgive us, and take us again to your love? What then?
+Will you then ostracize the South and compel the abolition of slavery?
+Sir, do you bid us fear these coming events, thus casting their shadow
+before from the leaves of your book?
+
+Sir, you may destroy the integrity of the New School Presbyterian Church.
+So much evil you may do; but you will hereby only add immensely to the
+great power and good of the Old School; and you will make disclosures of
+Providence, unfolding a consummation of things very different from the end
+you wish to accomplish for your country and the world.
+
+I write as one of the animalcules contributing to the coral reef of
+public opinion.
+
+F. A. Ross.
+
+
+
+
+No. II.
+
+Government Over Man a Divine Institute.
+
+
+
+This letter is the examination and refutation of the infidel theory of
+human government foisted into the Declaration of Independence.
+
+I had written this criticism in different form for publication, before Mr.
+Barnes's had appeared. I wrote it to vindicate my affirmation in the
+General Assembly which met in New York, May last, on this part of the
+Declaration. My views were maturely formed, after years of reflection, and
+weeks--nay months--of carefully-penned writing.
+
+And thus these truths, from the Bible, Providence, and common sense, were
+like rich freight, in goodly ship, waiting for the wind to sail; when lo,
+Mr. Barnes's abolition-breath filled the canvas, and carried it out of
+port into the wide, the free, the open sea of American public thought.
+There it sails. If pirate or other hostile craft comes alongside, the good
+ship has guns.
+
+I ask that this paper be carefully read more than once, twice, or three
+times. Mr. Barnes, I presume, will not so read it. He is committed.
+Greeley may notice it with his sparkling wit, albeit he has too much sense
+to grapple with its argument. The Evangelist-man will say of it, what he
+would say if Christ were casting out devils in New York,--"He casteth
+out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils." Yea, this
+Evangelist-man says that my version of the golden rule is "diabolical;"
+when truly that version is the _word_ of the Spirit, as Christ's casting
+out devils was the _work_ of the Holy Ghost.
+
+Gerrett Smith, Garrison, Giddings, do already agree with me, that they are
+right if Jefferson spoke the truth. Yea, whether the Bible be true, is no
+question with them no more than with him. Yea, they hold, as he did, that
+whether there be one God or twenty, it matters not: the fact either way,
+in men's minds, neither breaks the leg nor picks the pocket. (See
+Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.) Messrs. Beecher and Cheever will find
+nothing in me to aid them in speaking to the mobs of Ephesus and Antioch.
+They are making shrines, and crying, Great is Diana. Mrs. Stowe is on the
+Dismal Swamp, with Dred for her Charon, to paddle her light canoe, by the
+fire-fly lamps, to the Limbo of Vanity, of which she is the queen. None of
+these will read with attention or honesty, if at all, this examination of
+what Randolph long ago said was a _fanfaronade of nonsense_. These are all
+wiser "than seven men that can render a reason."
+
+But there are thousands, North and South, who will read this refutation,
+and will feel and acknowledge that in the light of God's truth the notion
+of created equality and unalienable right is falsehood and infidelity.
+
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--In my first letter I promised to prove that the paragraph in
+the Declaration of Independence, which contains the affirmation of
+created equality and unalienable rights, has no sanction from the word of
+God. I now meet my obligation.
+
+The time has come when civil liberty, as revealed in the Bible and in
+Providence, must be re-examined, understood, and defended against infidel
+theories of human rights. The slavery question has brought on this
+conflict; and, strange as it may seem, the South, the land of the slave,
+is summoned by God to defend the liberty he gives; while the North, the
+clime of the free, misunderstands and changes the truth of God into a
+lie,--claiming a liberty he does not give. Wherefore is this? I reply:---
+
+God, when he ordained government over men, gave to the individual man
+RIGHTS, _only_ as he is under government. He first established the family;
+hence all other rule is merely the family expanded. The _good_ of the
+family limited the _rights_ of every member. God required the family, and
+then the state, so to rule as to give to every member the _good_ which is
+his, in harmony with the welfare of the whole; and he commanded the
+individual to seek _that good_, and NO MORE.
+
+Now, mankind being depraved, government has ever violated its obligation
+to rule for the benefit of the entire community, and has wielded its
+power in oppression. Consequently, the governed have ever struggled to
+secure the good which was their right. But, in this struggle, they have
+ever been tempted to go beyond the limitation God had made, and to seek
+supposed good, not given, in rights, prompted by _self-will_, destructive
+of the state.
+
+Government thus ever existing in oppression, and people thus ever rising
+up against despotism, have been the history of mankind.
+
+The Reformation was one of the many convulsions in this long-continued
+conflict. In its first movements, men claimed the liberty the Bible
+grants. Soon they ran into licentiousness. God then stayed the further
+progress of emancipation in Europe, because the spread of the asserted
+liberty would have made infidelity prevail over that part of the
+continent where the Reformation was arrested. God preferred Romanism,
+and other despotisms, modified as they were by the struggle, to rule for
+a time, than have those countries destroyed under the sway of a
+licentious freedom.
+
+In this contest the North American colonies had their rise, and they
+continued the strife with England until they declared themselves
+independent.
+
+That "Declaration" affirmed not only the liberty sanctioned of the Bible,
+but also the liberty constituting infidelity. Its first paragraph, to the
+word "_separation_," is a noble introduction. Omit, then, what follows,
+to the sentence beginning "_Prudence will dictate_," and the paper, thus
+expurgated, is complete, and is then simply the complaint of the colonies
+against the government of England, which had oppressed them beyond
+further submission, and the assertion of their right to be free and
+independent States.
+
+This declaration was, in that form, nothing more than the affirmation of
+the right God gives to children, in a family, applied to the colonies, in
+regard to their mother-country. That is to say, children have, from God,
+RIGHT, AS CHILDREN, when cruelly treated, to secure the good to which they
+are entitled, as children, IN THE FAMILY. They may secure _this_ good by
+becoming part of another family, or by setting up for themselves, if old
+enough. So the colonies had, from God, _right_ as colonies, when oppressed
+beyond endurance, to exchange the British family for another, or, if of
+sufficient age, to establish their own household. The Declaration, then,
+in that complaint of oppression and affirmation of right, in the colonies,
+to be independent, asserts liberty sanctioned by the word of God. And
+therefore the pledge to _that_ Declaration, of "lives, fortune, and sacred
+honor," was blessed of Heaven, in the triumph of their cause.
+
+But the Declaration, in the part I have omitted, affirms other things, and
+very different. It asserts facts and rights as appertaining to man, not in
+the Scriptures, but contrary thereto. Here is the passage:--
+
+  "We hold these truths to be self-evident,--that all men are created
+  equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
+  unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
+  pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are
+  instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
+  the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
+  destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
+  abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation
+  on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to
+  them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
+
+_This is the affirmation of the liberty claimed by infidelity._ It teaches
+as a fact _that_ which is not true; and it claims as right _that_ which
+God has not given. It asserts nothing new, however. It lays claim to that
+individual right beyond the limitation God has put, which man has ever
+asserted when in his struggle for liberty he has refused to be guided and
+controlled by the word and providence of his Creator.
+
+The paragraph is a chain of four links, each of which is claimed to be a
+self-evident truth.
+
+The _first_ and controlling assertion is, "that ALL MEN ARE CREATED
+EQUAL;" which proposition, as I understand it, is, that _every man and
+woman on earth is created with equal attributes of body and mind_.
+
+_Secondly_, and consequently, that every individual has, by virtue of his
+or her being created the equal of each and every other individual, the
+right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, _so in his or her
+own keeping that that right is unalienable without his or her consent_.
+
+_Thirdly_, it follows, that government among men must derive its just
+powers only from the _consent_ of the governed; and, as the governed are
+the aggregate of individuals, _then each person must consent to be thus
+controlled before he or she can be rightfully under such authority_.
+
+_Fourthly_, and finally, that whenever any form of government becomes
+destructive of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+_as each such individual man or woman may think_, then each such person
+may rightly set to work to alter or abolish such form, and institute a new
+government, on such principles and in such form as to them shall seem most
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.
+
+This is the celebrated averment of created equality, and unalienable right
+to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, with the necessary
+consequences. I have fairly expanded its meaning. It is the old infidel
+averment. It is not true in any one of its assertions.
+
+
+
+_All Men not created equal_.
+
+
+It is not a truth, _self-evident,_ that all men are created equal.
+Webster, in his dictionary, defines "Self-evident--Evident without proof
+or reason: clear conviction upon a bare presentation to the mind, as that
+two and three make five."
+
+Now, I affirm, and you, I think, will not contradict me, that the
+position, "_all men are created equal"_ is _not_ self-evident; that the
+nature of the case makes it impossible for it to be self-evident. For the
+created nature of man is not in the class of things of which such
+self-evident propositions can by possibility be predicated. It is equally
+clear and beyond debate, that it is not _self-evident_ that all men have
+_unalienable rights_, that governments derive their just powers from the
+_consent_ of the governed, and may be altered or abolished whenever _to
+them_ such rights may be better secured. All these assertions can be known
+to be true or false only from revelation of the Creator, or from
+examination and induction of reasoning, covering the nature and the
+obligations of the race on the whole face of the earth. What revelation
+and examination of facts do teach, I will now show. The whole
+battle-ground, as to the truth of this series of averments, is on the
+first affirmation, "_that all men are created equal_." Or, to keep up my
+first figure, the strength of the chain of asserted truths depend on
+_that_ first link. It must then stand the following perfect trial.
+
+God reveals to us that he created man in his image, _i.e._ a spirit
+endowed with attributes resembling his own,--to reason, to form rule of
+right, to manifest various emotions, to will, to act,--and that he gave
+him a body suited to such a spirit, (Gen. i. 26, 27, 28;) that he created
+MAN "_male and female_," (Gen. i. 27;) that he made the woman "_out of the
+man_," (Gen. ii. 23;) that he made "_the man the image and glory of God_,
+but the woman _the glory of the man_. For the man is not of the woman, but
+the woman of the man. Neither was the man _created for the woman_, but the
+woman _for the man_," (1 Cor. xi.;) that he made the woman to be the
+weaker vessel, (1 Pet. iii. 7.) Here, then, God created _the race_ to be
+in the beginning TWO,--a male and a female MAN; one of them _not equal_ to
+the other _in attributes of body and mind_, and, as we shall see
+presently, not equal in rights as to government. Observe, this inequality
+was fact as to the TWO, in the perfect state wherein they were _created_.
+
+But these two fell from that perfect state, became depraved, and began to
+be degraded in body and mind. This statement of the original inequality in
+which man was created controls all that comes after, in God's providence
+and in the natural history of the race.
+
+_Providence_, in its comprehensive teaching, "says that God, soon after
+the flood, subjected the races to all the influences of the different
+zones of the earth;"--"That he hath made of one blood all nations of men
+for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times
+before appointed and the bounds of their habitation; that they should
+seek the Lord if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he
+be not far from every one of us." (Acts xvii. 26, 27.)
+
+These "bounds of their habitation" have had much to do in the natural
+history of man; for "_all men_" have been "_created_," or, more
+correctly, _born_, (since the race was "created" once only at the first,)
+with attributes of body and mind derived from the TWO unequal parents,
+and these attributes, in every individual, the combined result of the
+parental natures. "_All men_," then, come into the world under influences
+upon the amalgamated and transmitted body and mind, from depravity and
+degradation, sent down during all the generations past; and, therefore,
+under causes of inequality, acting on each individual from climate, from
+scenery, from food, from health, from sickness, from love, from hatred,
+from government, inconceivable in variety and power. Under such causes,
+to produce infinite shades of inequality, physical and mental, in
+birth--if "all men" were created equal (_i.e._ born equal) in attributes
+of body and mind--such "creation" would be a violation of all the known
+analogies in the world of life.
+
+Do, then, the facts in man's natural history exhibit this departure from
+the laws of life and spirit? Do they prove that "all men are created
+equal"? Do they show that every man and every woman of Africa, Asia,
+Europe, America, and the islands of the seas, is created each one equal in
+body and mind to each other man or woman on the face of the earth, and
+that this has always been?
+
+Need I extend these questions? Methinks, sir, I hear you say, what others
+have told me, that the "Declaration" is not to be understood as affirming
+what is so clearly false, but merely asserts that all men are "created
+equal" in _natural rights._
+
+I reply that _that_ is _not_ the meaning of the clause before us; for
+_that_ is the meaning of the next sentence,--the _second_ in the series we
+are considering.
+
+There are, as I have said, four links to the chain of thought in this
+passage:--1. That all men are created equal. 2. That they are endowed by
+the Creator with certain unalienable rights. 3. That government derives
+its just powers from the consent of the governed. 4. That the people may
+alter and abolish it, &c.
+
+These links are logical sequences. All men--man and woman--are created
+equal,--equal in _attributes of body and mind_; (for _that_ is the only
+sense in which they could be _created_ equal;) _therefore_ they are
+endowed with right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,
+unalienable, except in their consent; _consequently_ such consent is
+essential to all rightful government; and, _finally_ and _irresistibly_,
+the people have supreme right to alter or abolish it, &c.
+
+The meaning, then, I give to that first link, and to the chain following,
+_is_ the sense, because, if you deny that meaning to the _first link_,
+then the others have no logical truth whatever. Thus:--
+
+If all men are _not_ created equal in attributes of body and mind, then
+the _inequality_ may be _so great_ that such men cannot be endowed with
+right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, unalienable save in
+their _consent_; then government over such men cannot rightfully rest upon
+their _consent_; nor can they have right to alter or abolish government in
+their mere determination.
+
+Yea, sir, you concede every thing if you admit that the "Declaration"
+does _not_ mean to affirm that all men are "_created_" _equal in body
+and mind_.
+
+I will suppose in the Alps a community of Cretins,--_i.e._ deformed and
+helpless idiots,--but among them many from the same parents, who, in body
+and mind, by birth are comparatively _Napoleons_. Now, this _inequality_,
+physical and mental, by birth, makes it impossible that the government
+over these Cretins can be in their "_consent_." _The Napoleons must rule_.
+The Napoleons must absolutely control their "life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness," for the good of the community. Do you reply that I have taken
+an extreme case? that everybody admits sensible people must govern natural
+fools? Ay, sir, there is the rub. _Natural fools_! Are some men, then,
+"_created_" natural fools? Very well. Then you also admit that some men
+are _created_ just a degree above natural fools!--and, consequently, that
+men are "_created_" in all degrees, gradually rising in the scale of
+intelligence. Are they not "_created_" just above the brute, with savage
+natures along with mental imbecility and physical degradation? Must the
+Napoleons govern the Cretins without their "consent"? Must they not also
+govern without their "consent" these types of mankind, whether one, two,
+three, thirty, or three hundred degrees above the Cretins, if they are
+still greatly inferior by nature? Suppose the Cretins removed from the
+imagined community, and a colony of Australian ant-catchers or California
+lizard-eaters be in their stead: must not the Napoleons govern these? And,
+if you admit inequality to be in birth, then that inequality is the very
+ground of the reason why the Napoleons must govern the ant-catchers and
+lizard-eaters. Remove these, and put in their place an importation of
+African negroes. Do you admit _their inferiority by_ "CREATION?" Then the
+same control over them must be the irresistible fact in common sense and
+Scripture of God. _The Napoleons must govern_. They must govern without
+asking "consent,"--if the inequality be such that "_consent_" would be
+evil, and not good, in the family--the state.
+
+Yea, sir, if you deny that the "Declaration" asserts "all men are created
+equal" in body and mind, then you admit the inequality may be such as to
+make it impossible that in such cases men have rights unalienable save in
+their "consent;" and you admit it to be impossible that government in such
+circumstances can exist in such "_consent_" But, if you affirm the
+"Declaration" _does_ mean that men are "_created_ equal" in attributes of
+body and mind, then you hold to an equality which God, in his word, and
+providence, and the natural history of man, denies to be truth.
+
+I think I have fairly shown, from Scripture and facts, that the first
+averment is not the truth; and have reduced it to an absurdity. I will now
+regard the second, third, and fourth links of the chain.
+
+I know they are already broken; for, the whole chain being but an electric
+current from a vicious imagination, I have destroyed the whole by breaking
+the first link. Or was it but a cluster from a poisonous vine, then I have
+killed the branches by cutting the vine. I will, however, expose the other
+three sequences by a distinct argument covering them all.
+
+
+
+_Authority Delegated to Adam_.
+
+
+God gave to Adam sovereignty over the human race, in his first
+decree:--"_He shall rule over thee_." _That_ was THE INSTITUTION OF
+GOVERNMENT. It was not based on the "_consent_" of Eve, the governed. It
+was from God. He gave to Adam like authority to rule his children. It was
+not derived from their "_consent_". It was from God. He gave Noah the same
+sovereignty, with express power over life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness. It was not founded in "_consent_" of Shem, Ham, and Japheth,
+and their wives. It was from God. He then determined the habitations of
+men on all the face of the earth, and _indicated_ to them, in every clime,
+the _form_ and _power_ of their governments. He gave, directly, government
+to Israel. He just as truly gave it to Idumea, to Egypt, and to Babylon,
+to the Arab, to the Esquimaux, the Caffre, the Hottentot, and the negro.
+
+God, in the Bible, decides the matter. He says, "Let every soul be subject
+unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that
+be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
+the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
+damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.
+Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou
+shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for
+good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid, for he beareth not the
+sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath
+upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for
+wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also:
+for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
+Render, therefore, to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due;
+custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor." (Rom.
+xiii. 1-7.)
+
+Here God reveals to us that he has _delegated to government his own_ RIGHT
+_over life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness_; and that that RIGHT is
+not, in any sense, from the "_consent_" of the governed, but is directly
+from him. Government over men, whether in the family or in the state, is,
+then, as directly from God as it would be if he, in visible person, ruled
+in the family or in the state. I speak not only of the RIGHT simply to
+govern, but the _mode_ of the government, and the _extent_ of the power.
+Government _can do_ ALL which God _would do,--just_ THAT,--_no more, no
+less_. And it is _bound to do just_ THAT,--_no more, no less_. Government
+is responsible to God, if it fails to do _just_ THAT which He himself
+would do. It is under responsibility, then, to rule in righteousness. It
+must not oppress. It must _give_ to every individual "_life, liberty, and
+pursuit of happiness_," in harmony with the _good_ of the family,--the
+state,--_as God himself would give it_,--_just_ THAT, _no more, no less_.
+
+This passage of Scripture settles the question, From whence has
+government RIGHT to rule, and what is the _extent_ of its power? The
+RIGHT is from God, and the EXTENT of the power is _just_ THAT to which
+God would exercise it if he were personally on the earth. God, in this
+passage, and others, settles, with equal clearness, from whence is the
+OBLIGATION to _submit_ to government, and what is the _extent_ of the
+duty of obedience? The OBLIGATION to submit is not from individual RIGHT
+to consent or not to consent to government,--but the OBLIGATION _to
+submit_ is directly from God.
+
+The EXTENT of the duty of obedience is equally revealed--in this wise: so
+long as the government rules in righteousness, the duty is perfect
+obedience. So soon, however, as government requires _that_ which God, in
+his word, _forbids the subject to do_, he must obey God, and not man. He
+must refuse to obey man. But, inasmuch as the obligation to submit to
+authority of government is so great, the subject must _know_ it is the
+will of God, that he shall refuse to obey, before he assumes the
+responsibility of resistance to the powers that be. His _conscience_ will
+not justify him before God, if he mistakes his duty. _He may be all the
+more to blame for having_ SUCH A CONSCIENCE. Let him, then, be CERTAIN he
+can say, like Peter and John, "Whether it be right, in the sight of God,
+to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
+
+But, when government requires _that_ which God _does not forbid_ the
+subject to do, although _in that_ the government may have transcended the
+line of its righteous rule, the subject must, nevertheless,
+submit,--_until_ oppression has gone to _the point_ at which _God makes_
+RESISTANCE _to be duty._ And _that point_ is when RESISTANCE will clearly
+be _less of evil, and more of good_, TO THE COMMUNITY, than further
+submission.
+
+_That_ is the rule of _duty_ God gives to the _whole_ people, or to the
+_minority_, or to the _individual_, to guide them in resistance to the
+powers that be.
+
+It is irresistibly _certain_ that _He who ordains_ government _has, alone,
+the right to alter or abolish it_,--that He who institutes the powers that
+be has, alone, the right to say when and how the people, in whole or in
+part, may resist. So, then, the people, in whole, or in part, have no
+right to resist, to alter, or abolish government, simply because _they_
+may deem it destructive of the end for which it was instituted; but they
+may resist, alter, or abolish, _when it shall be seen that God so regards
+it_. This places the great fact where it must be placed,--_under the_
+CONTROL _of the_ BIBLE _and_ PROVIDENCE.
+
+
+
+_Illustrations_.
+
+
+I will conclude with one or two illustrations. God, in his providence,
+ordains the Russian form of government,--_i.e._ He places the sovereignty
+in one man, because He sees that such government can secure, for a time,
+more good to that degraded people than any other form. Now, I ask, Has the
+emperor _right_, from God, to change at once, in his mere "_consent_," the
+_form_ of his government to _that_ of the United States? No. God forbids
+him. Why? Because he would thereby destroy the good, and bring immense
+evil in his empire. I ask again, Have the Russian serfs and nobles,--yea,
+all,--"consenting," the right, from God, to make that change? No. For the
+government of the United States is not suited to them. And, in such an
+attempt, they would deprive themselves of the blessings they now have, and
+bring all the horrors of anarchy.
+
+Do you ask if I then hold, that God ordains the Russian type of rule to be
+perpetual over that people? No. The emperor is bound to secure all of
+"_life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness_," to each individual,
+consistent with the good of the nation. And he is to learn his obligation
+from the Bible, and faithfully apply it to the condition of his subjects.
+_He will thus gradually elevate them_; while they, on their part, are
+bound to strive for this elevation, in all the ways in which God may show
+them the good, and the right, which, more and more, will belong to them in
+their upward progress. The result of such government and such obedience
+would be that of a father's faithful training, and children's
+corresponding obedience. The Russian people would thus have, gradually,
+that measure of liberty they could bear, under the one-man power,--and
+then, in other forms, as they might be qualified to realize them. This
+development would be without convulsion,--as the parent gives place, while
+the children are passing from the lower to their higher life. It would be
+the exemplification of Carlyle's illustration of the snake. He says, A
+people should change their government only as a snake sheds his skin: the
+new skin is gradually formed under the old one,--and then the snake
+wriggles out, with just a drop of blood here and there, where the old
+jacket held on rather tightly.
+
+God ordains the government of the United States. And _He places_ the
+_sovereignty_ in the _will_ of the majority, because He has trained the
+people, through many generations in modes of government, to such an
+elevation in moral and religious intelligence, that such sovereignty is
+best suited to confer on them the highest right, as yet, to "life,
+liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But God requires that _that will
+of the majority_ be in perfect submission to Him. Once more then I
+inquire,--Whether the people of this country, yea all of them consenting,
+have right from God, to abolish now, at this time, our free institutions,
+and set up the sway of Russia? No. But why? There is one answer only. He
+tells us that our happiness is in this form of government, and in it, its
+developed results.
+
+
+
+_The "Social Compact" not recognised in the Divine Institute_.
+
+
+Here I pause. So, then, God gives no sanction to the notion of a SOCIAL
+COMPACT. He never gave to man individual, isolated, natural rights,
+unalienably in his keeping. He never made him a Caspar Hauser, in the
+forest, without name or home,--a Melchisedek, in the wilderness, without
+father, without mother, without descent,--a Robinson Crusoe, on his
+island, in skins and barefooted, waiting, among goats and parrots, the
+coming of the canoes and the savages, to enable him to "_consent_" if he
+would, to the relations of social life.
+
+And, therefore, those five sentences in that second paragraph of the
+Declaration of Independence are not the truth; so, then, it is not
+_self-evident_ truth that all men are created equal. So, then, it is not
+the truth, in fact, that they are created equal. So, then, it is not the
+truth that God has endowed all men with unalienable right to life,
+liberty, and pursuit of happiness. So, then, it is not the truth that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So,
+then, it is not the truth that the people have right to alter or abolish
+their government, and institute a new form, whenever to them it shall seem
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.
+
+The manner in which these unscriptural dogmas have been modified or
+developed in the United States, I will examine in another paper.
+
+I merely add, that the opinions of revered ancestors, on these questions
+of right and their application to American slavery, must now, as never
+before, be brought to the test of the light of the Bible. F.A. Ross.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 1857.
+
+
+
+
+Man-Stealing.
+
+
+
+This argument on the abolition charge, against the slave-holder,--that he
+is a man-stealer,--covers the whole question of slavery, especially as it
+is seen in the Old Testament. The headings in the letter make the subject
+sufficiently clear.
+
+
+
+No. III.
+
+
+
+Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--In my first letter, I merely touched some points in your tract,
+intending to notice them more fully in subsequent communications. I have,
+in my second paper, sufficiently examined the imaginary maxims of created
+equality and unalienable rights.
+
+In this, I will test your views by Scripture more directly. "To the law
+and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is
+because there is no light in them." (Isaiah viii. 20).
+
+The abolitionist charges the slave-holder with being a _man-stealer_. He
+makes this allegation in two affirmations. First, that the slave-holder
+is thus guilty, because, the negro having been kidnapped in Africa,
+therefore those who now hold him, or his children, in bondage, lie under
+the guilt of that first act. Secondly, that the slave-holder, by the very
+fact that he is such, is guilty of stealing from the negro his unalienable
+right to freedom.
+
+This is the charge. It covers the whole subject. I will meet it in all
+its parts.
+
+
+
+_The Difference between Man-Stealing and Slave-Holding, as set forth in
+the Bible_.
+
+
+The Bible reads thus: (Exodus xxi. 16:)--"He that stealeth a man
+and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be
+put to death."
+
+What, then, is it to kidnap or steal a man? Webster informs us--To kidnap
+is "to steal a human being, a man, woman, or child; or to seize and
+forcibly carry away any person whatever, from his own country or state
+into another." The idea of "_seizing and forcibly carrying away"_ enters
+into the meaning of the word in all the definitions of law.
+
+The crime, then, set forth in the Bible was not _selling_ a man: but
+selling a _stolen_ man. The crime was not having a man _in his hand as a
+slave_; but......in _his_ hand, as a slave, a _stolen_ man. And hence, the
+penalty of _death_ was affixed, not to selling, buying, or holding man, as
+a slave, but to the specific offence of _stealing and selling, or holding_
+a man _thus stolen, contrary to this law_. Yea, it was _this law_, and
+this law _only_, which made it _wrong_. For, under some circumstances, God
+sanctioned the seizing and forcibly carrying away a man, woman, or child
+from country or state, into slavery or other condition. He sanctioned the
+utter destruction of every male and every married woman, and child, of
+Jabez-Gilead, and the seizure, and forcibly carrying away, four hundred
+virgins, unto the camp to Shiloh, and there, being given as wives to the
+remnant of the slaughtered tribe of Benjamin, in the rock Rimmon. Sir,
+how did that destruction of Jabez-Gilead, and the kidnapping of those
+young women, differ from the razing of an African village, and forcibly
+seizing, and carrying away, those not put to the sword? The difference is
+in this:--God commanded the Israelites to seize and bear off those young
+women. But he forbids the slaver to kidnap the African. Therefore, the
+Israelites did right; therefore, the trader does wrong. The Israelites,
+it seems, gave wives, in that way, to the spared Benjamites, because they
+had sworn not to give their daughters. But there were six hundred of these
+Benjamites. Two hundred were therefore still without wives. What was done
+for them? Why, God authorized the elders of the congregation to tell the
+two hundred Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of
+Shiloh, when they came out to dance, in the feast of the Lord, on the
+north side of Bethel. And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them
+wives, "whom they caught:" (Judges xxi.) God made it right for those
+Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of Shiloh. But he
+makes it wrong for the trader to catch his slaves of the sons or daughters
+of Africa. Lest you should try to deny that God authorized this act of the
+children of Israel, although I believe he did order it, let me remind you
+of another such case, the authority for which you will not question.
+
+Moses, by direct command from God, destroyed the Midianites. He slew all
+the males, and carried away all the women and children. He then had all
+the married women and male children killed; but all the virgins,
+thirty-two thousand, were divided as spoil among the people. And
+_thirty-two_ of these virgins, _the Lord's tribute_, were given unto
+Eleazar, the priest, "as the Lord commanded Moses." (Numbers xxxi.)
+
+Sir, Thomas Paine rejected the Bible on this fact among his other
+objections. Yea, _his_ reason, _his_ sensibilities, _his_ great law of
+humanity, _his_ intuitional and eternal sense of right, made it impossible
+for him to honor such a God. And, sir, on your now avowed principles of
+interpretation, which are those of Paine, you sustain him in his rejection
+of the books of Moses and all the word of God.
+
+God's command _made it right_ for Moses to destroy the Midianites and make
+slaves of their daughters; and I have dwelt upon these facts, to reiterate
+what I hold to be THE FIRST TRUTH IN MORALS:--that a thing is right, not
+because it is ever so _per se_, but because God _makes it right_; and, of
+course, a thing is wrong, not because it is so in the nature of things,
+but because God makes it wrong. I distinctly have taken, and do take, that
+ground in its widest sense, and am prepared to maintain it against all
+comers. He made it right for the sons of Adam to marry their sisters. He
+made it right for Abraham to marry his half-sister. He made it right for
+the patriarchs, and David and Solomon, to have more wives than one. He
+made it right when he gave command to kill whole nations, sparing none. He
+made it right when he ordered that nations, or such part as he pleased,
+should be spared and enslaved. He made it right that the patriarchs and
+the Israelites should hold slaves in harmony with the system of servile
+labor which had long been in the world. He merely modified that system to
+suit his views of good among his people. So, then, when he saw fit, they
+might capture men. So, then, when he forbade the individual Israelite to
+steal a man, he made it crime, and the penalty death. So, then, that crime
+was not the mere _stealing_ a man, nor the _selling_ a man, nor the
+_holding_ a man,--but the _stealing and selling_, or _holding_, a man
+_under circumstances thus forbidden of God_.
+
+
+
+_Was the Israelite Master a Man-Stealer?_
+
+
+I now ask, Did God intend to make man-stealing and slave-holding the same
+thing? Let us see. In that very chapter of Exodus (xxi.) which contains
+the law against man-stealing, and only four verses further on, God says,
+"If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his
+hand, he shall be surely punished: notwithstanding, if he continue a day
+or two he shall not be punished; for he is his money." (Verses 20, 21.)
+
+Sir, that man was not a hired servant. He was bought with money. He was
+regarded by God _as the money_ of his master. He was his slave, in the
+full meaning of a slave, then, and now, bought with money. God, then, did
+not intend the Israelites to understand, and not one of them ever
+understood, from that day to this, that Jehovah in his law to Moses
+regarded the slave-holder as a man-stealer. Man-stealing was a specific
+offence, with its specific penalty. Slave-holding was one form of God's
+righteous government over men,--a government he ordained, with various
+modifications, among the Hebrews themselves, and with sterner features in
+its relation to heathen slaves.
+
+In Exodus xxi. and Leviticus xxv., various gradations of servitude were
+enacted, with a careful particularity which need not be misunderstood.
+Among these, a Hebrew man might be a slave for six years, and then go free
+with his wife, if he were married when he came into the relation; but if
+his master had given him a wife, and she had borne him sons or daughters,
+the wife and her children should be her master's, and he should go out by
+himself. That is, the man by the law became free, while his wife and
+children remained slaves. If the servant, however, plainly said, "I love
+my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his
+master brought him unto the judges, also unto the doorpost, and his master
+bored his ear through with an awl, and he served him forever." (Ex. xxi.
+1-6.) Sir, you have urged discussion:--give us then your views of that
+passage. Tell us how that man was separated from his wife and children
+according to _the eternal right_. Tell us what was the condition of the
+woman in case the man chose to "go out" without her? Tell us if the Hebrew
+who thus had his ear bored by his master with an awl was not a slave for
+life? Tell us, lastly, whether those children were not slaves? And, while
+on that chapter, tell us whether in the next verses, 7-11, God did not
+allow the Israelite father to sell his own daughter into bondage and into
+polygamy by the same act of sale?
+
+I will not dwell longer on these milder forms of slavery, but read to you
+the clear and unmistakable command of the Lord in Leviticus xxv. 44,
+46:--"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be
+of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and
+bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn
+among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you,
+which they beget in your land: and they shall be your possession: and ye
+shall take them for an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit
+them for a possession; and they shall be your bondmen forever."
+
+Sir, the sun will grow dim with age before that Scripture can be tortured
+to mean any thing else than just what it says; that God commanded the
+Israelites to be slave-holders in the strict and true sense over the
+heathen, in manner and form therein set forth. Do you tell the world that
+this cannot be the sense of the Bible, because it is "a violation of the
+first principles of the American Declaration of Independence;" because it
+grates upon your "instinct of liberty;" because it reveals God in
+opposition to the "spirit of the age;" because, if it be the sense of the
+passage, then "the Bible neither ought to be, nor can be, received by
+mankind as a divine revelation"? _That_ is what you say: _that_ is what
+Albert Barnes affirms in his philosophy. But what if God in his word says,
+"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have shall be of the
+heathen that are round about you"? What if we may then choose between
+Albert Barnes's philosophy and God's truth?
+
+Or will you say, God, under the circumstances, _permitted_ the Israelites
+_to sin_ in the matter of slave-holding, just as he permitted them _to
+sin_ by living in polygamy. _Permitted_ them _to sin!_ No, sir; God
+_commanded_ them to be slave-holders. He _made it_ the law of their social
+state. He _made it_ one form of his ordained government among them.
+Moreover, you take it for granted all too soon, that the Israelites
+committed sin in their polygamy. God sanctioned their polygamy. It was
+therefore not sin in them. It was right. But God now forbids polygamy,
+under the gospel; and now it is sin.
+
+Or will you tell us the iniquity of the Canaanites was then full, and
+God's time to punish them had come? True; but the same question comes
+up:--Did God punish the Canaanites by placing them in the relation of
+slaves to his people, by express command, which compelled them to sin?
+That's the point. I will not permit you to evade it. In plainer
+words:--Did God command the Hebrews to make slaves of their fellow-men, to
+buy them and sell them, to regard them as their money? He did. Then, did
+the Hebrews sin when they obeyed God's command? No. Then they did what was
+right, and it was right because God made it so. Then _the Hebrew
+slave-holder was not a man-stealer_. But, you say, the Southern
+slave-holder is. Well, we shall see presently.
+
+Just here, the abolitionist who professes to respect the Scriptures is
+wont to tell us that the whole subject of bondage among the Israelites was
+so peculiar to God's ancient dispensation, that no analogy between that
+bondage and Southern slavery can be brought up. Thus he attempts to raise
+a dust out of the Jewish institutions, to prevent people from seeing that
+slaveholding then was the same thing that it is now. But, to sustain my
+interpretation of the plain Scriptures given, I will go back five hundred
+years before the existence of the Hebrew nation.
+
+I read at that time, (Gen. xiv. 14:)--"And when Abraham heard that his
+brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own
+house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them even unto Damascus,"
+&c. (Gen. xvii. 27:)--"And all the men of his house, born, in the house,
+and bought with the money of the stranger, were circumcised." (Gen. xx.
+14:)--"And Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and men-servants and
+women-servants, and gave them unto Abraham." (Gen. xxiv. 34, 35:)--"And he
+said, I am Abraham's servant; and the Lord hath blessed my master greatly,
+and he is become great; and he hath given him flocks and herds, and silver
+and gold, and men-servants and maid-servants, and camels and asses."
+
+
+
+_Was Abraham a Man-Stealer?_
+
+
+Sir, what is the common sense of these Scriptures? Why, that the
+slave-trade existed in Abraham's day, as it had long before, and has ever
+since, in all the regions of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, in which
+criminals and prisoners of war were sold,--in which parents sold their
+children. Abraham, then, it is plain, bought, of the sellers in this
+traffic, men-servants and maid-servants; he had them born in his house; he
+received them as presents.
+
+Do you tell me that Abraham, by divine authority, made these servants part
+of his family, social and religious? Very good. But still he regarded them
+as his slaves. He took Hagar as a wife, but he treated her as his
+slave,--yea, as Sarah's slave; and as such he gave her to be chastised,
+for misconduct, by her mistress. Yea, he never placed Ishmael, the son of
+the bondwoman, on a level with Isaac, the son of the freewoman. If, then,
+he so regarded Hagar and Ishmael, of course he never considered his other
+slaves on an equality with himself. True, had he been childless, he would
+have given his estate to Eliezer: but he would have given it to his slave.
+True, had Isaac not been born, he would have given his wealth to Ishmael;
+but he would nave given it to the son of his bondwoman. Sir, every
+Southern planter is not more truly a slave-holder than Abraham. And the
+Southern master, by divine authority, may, to-day, consider his slaves
+part of his social and religious family, just as Abraham did. His relation
+is just that of Abraham. He has slaves of an inferior type of mankind from
+Abraham's bondmen; and he therefore, for that reason, as well as from the
+fact that they are his slaves, holds them lower than himself. But,
+nevertheless, he is a slave-holder in no other sense than was Abraham. Did
+Abraham have his slave-household circumcised? Every Southern planter may
+have his slave-household baptized. I baptized, not long since, a
+slave-child,--the master and mistress offering it to God. What was done
+in the parlor might be done with divine approbation on every plantation.
+
+So, then, Abraham lived in the midst of a system of slave-holding exactly
+the same in nature with that in the South,--a system ordained of God as
+really as the other forms of government round about him. He, then, with
+the divine blessing, made himself the master of slaves, men, women, and
+children, by buying them,--by receiving them in gifts,--by having them
+born in his house; and he controlled them as property, just as really as
+the Southern master in the present day. I ask now, _was Abraham a
+man-stealer?_ Oh, no, you reiterate: but the Southern master is. Why?
+
+
+
+_Is the Southern Master a Man-Stealer_?
+
+
+Do you, sir, or anybody, contend that the Southern master seized his slave
+in Africa, and forcibly brought him away to America, contrary to law?
+That, and that alone, was and is kidnapping in divine and human statute.
+No. What then? Why, the abolitionist responds, The African man-stealer
+sold his victim to the slave-holder; he, to the planter; and the negro has
+been ever since in bondage: therefore _the guilt_ of the man-stealer has
+cleaved to sellers, buyers, and inheritors, to this time, and will
+through all generations to come. That is the charge.
+
+And it brings up the question so often and triumphantly asked by the
+abolitionist; _i.e._ "You," he says to the slave-holder,--"you admit it
+was wrong to steal the negro in Africa. Can the slave-holder, then, throw
+off wrong so long as he holds the slave at any time or anywhere
+thereafter?" I answer, yes; and my reply shall be short, yet conclusive. It
+is this:--_Guilt_, or criminality, is that state of a moral agent which
+results from _his_ actual commission of a crime or offence knowing it to
+be crime or violation of law. _That_ is the received definition of
+_guilt_, and _you_, I know, do accept it. The _guilt_, then, of kidnapping
+_terminated_ with the man-stealer, the seller, the buyer, and holders,
+who, knowingly and intentionally, carried on the traffic contrary to the
+divine law. THAT GUILT attaches in no sense whatever, as a personal, moral
+responsibility, to the present slave-holder. Observe, I am here
+discussing, _not the question of mere slave-holding,_ but whether the
+master, who has had nothing to do with the slave-trade, can _now_ hold the
+slave without the moral guilt of the man-stealer? I have said that _that_
+guilt, in no sense whatever, rests upon him; for he neither stole the
+man, nor bought him from the kidnapper, nor had any _complicity_ in the
+traffic. Here, I know, the abolitionist insists that the master _is_
+guilty of this _complicity_, unless he will at once emancipate the slave;
+because, so long as he holds him, he thereby, personally and _voluntarily,
+assumes the same relation which the original kidnapper or buyer held to
+the African_.
+
+This is Dr. Cheever's argument in a recent popular sermon. He thinks it
+unanswerable; but it has no weight whatever. It is met perfectly by adding
+_one_ word to his proposition. Thus:--_The master does_ NOT _assume the
+same relation which the original man-stealer or buyer held to the
+African_. The master's _relation_ to God and to his slave is now _wholly
+changed_ from that of the man-stealer, and those engaged in the trade; and
+his obligation is wholly different. What is his relation? and what is his
+obligation? They are as follows:----
+
+The master finds himself, with no taint of personal concern in the African
+trade, in a Christian community of white Anglo-Americans, holding control
+over his black fellow-man, who is so unlike himself in complexion, in
+form, in other peculiarities, and so unequal to himself in attributes of
+body and mind, that it is _impossible, in every sense_, to place him on a
+level with himself in the community. _This is his relation to the negro_.
+What, then, does God command him to do? Does God require him to send the
+negro back to his heathen home from whence he was stolen? That home no
+longer exists. But, if it did remain, does God command the master to send
+his Christianized slave into the horrors of his former African heathenism?
+No. God has placed the master under law entirely different from his
+command to the slave-trader. God said to the trader, _Let the negro
+alone_. But he says to the present master, _Do unto the negro all the good
+you can; make him a civilized man; make him a Christian man; lift him up
+and give him all he has a right to claim in the good of the whole
+community_. This the master can do; this he must do, and then leave the
+result with the Almighty.
+
+We reach the same conclusion by asking, What does God say to the
+negro-slave?
+
+Does he tell him to ask to be sent back to heathen Africa? No. Does he
+give him authority to claim a created equality and unalienable right to
+be on a level with the white man in civil and social relations? No. To
+ask the first would be to ask a great evil; to claim the second is to
+demand a natural and moral impossibility. No. God tells him to seek none
+of these things. But he commands him to know the facts in his case as
+they are in the Bible, and have ever been, and ever will be in
+Providence:--that he is not the white man's equal,--that he can never
+have his level--that he must not claim it; but that he can have, and
+ought to have, and must have, all of good, in his condition as a slave,
+until God may reveal a higher happiness for him in some other relation
+than that _he must ever_ have to the Anglo-American. The present
+slave-holder, then, by declining to emancipate his bondman, does not
+place himself in _the guilt_ of the man-stealer or of those who had
+complicity with him; but he stands _exactly_ in that NICK _of time and
+place_, in the course of Providence, where _wrong_, in the transmission
+of African slavery, _ends_, and _right begins_.
+
+I have, sir, fairly stated this, your strongest argument, and fully met
+it. _The Southern master is not a man-stealer._ The abolitionist--repulsed
+in his charge that the slave-owner is a kidnapper, either in fact or by
+voluntarily assuming any of the relations of the traffic--then makes his
+impeachment on his second affirmation, mentioned at the opening of this
+letter. That the slave-holder is, nevertheless, thus _guilty_, because,
+in the simple fact of being a master, he _steals_ from the negro his
+unalienable right to freedom.
+
+This, sir, looks like a new view of the subject. The crime forbidden in
+the Bible was stealing and selling a man; _i.e._ seizing and forcibly
+carrying away, from country or State, a human being--man, woman, or
+child--contrary to law, and selling or holding the same. But the
+abolitionist gives us to understand this crime rests on the slave-holder
+in another sense:--namely, that he steals from the negro a metaphysical
+attribute,--his unalienable right to liberty!
+
+This is a new sort of kidnapping. This is, I suppose, _stealing the man
+from himself_, as it is sometimes elegantly expressed,--_robbing him of
+his body and his soul_. Sir, I admit this is a strong figure of speech, a
+beautiful personification, a sonorous rhetorical flourish, which must make
+a deep impression on Dr. Cheever's people, Broadway, New York, and on your
+congregation, Washington Square, Philadelphia; but it is certainly not the
+Bible crime of man-stealing. And whether the Southern master is _guilty_
+of this sublimated thing will be understood by us when you prove that the
+negro, or anybody else, has such metaphysical right to be stolen,--such
+transcendental liberty not in subordination to the good of the whole
+people. In a word, sir, this refined expression is, after all, just the
+old averment that the slave-holder is guilty of _sin per se!_ That's it.
+
+I have given you, in reply, the Old Testament. In my next, I propose to
+inquire what the New Testament says in the light of the _Golden Rule_.
+
+F.A. Ross.
+
+Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 31, 1857.
+
+
+
+
+The Golden Rule.
+
+
+
+This view of the Golden Rule is the only exposition of that great text
+which has ever been given in words sufficiently clear, and, with practical
+illustrations, to make the subject intelligible to every capacity. The
+explanation is the truth of God, and it settles forever the slavery
+question, so far as it rests on this precept of Jesus Christ.
+
+
+
+
+No. IV.
+
+
+
+Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--The argument against slave-holding, founded on the Golden Rule,
+is the strongest which can be presented, and I admit that, if it cannot be
+perfectly met, the master must give the slave liberty and equality. But if
+it can be absolutely refuted, then the slave-holder in this regard may
+have a good conscience; and the abolitionist has nothing more to say. Here
+is the rule.
+
+"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to
+you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets."
+(Matt. vii. 12.)
+
+In your "_Notes_," on this passage you thus write:--"This command has been
+usually called the Savior's _Golden Rule_; a name given to it on account
+of its great value.--_All that you_ EXPECT or DESIRE _of others, in
+similar circumstances_, DO TO THEM."
+
+This, sir, is your exposition of the Savior's rule of right. With all due
+respect, I decline your interpretation. You have missed the meaning by
+leaving out ONE word. Observe,--you do not say, All that you OUGHT to
+_expect_ or _desire_, &c., THAT _do to them_. No. But you make the
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE, _which every man_ ACTUALLY HAS _in similar
+circumstances_, THE MEASURE _of his_ DUTY _to every other man_. Or, in
+different words, you make, without qualification or explanation, the MERE
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE which every man,--with no instruction, or any sort
+of training,--wise or simple, good or bad, heathen, Mohammedan, nominal
+Christian,--WOULD HAVE _in similar circumstances_, THE LAW OF OBLIGATION,
+_always binding_ upon him TO DO THAT SAME THING _unto his neighbor!_
+
+Sir, you have left out _the very idea_ which contains the sense of that
+Scripture. It is this: Christ, in his rule, _presupposes_ that the man to
+whom he gives it _knows_, and from the Bible, (or providence, or natural
+conscience, _so far as in harmony_ with the Bible,) the _various
+relations_ in which God has placed him; and the _respective duties_ in
+those relations; _i.e._ The rule _assumes_ that he KNOWS what he OUGHT to
+_expect_ or _desire_ in similar circumstances.
+
+I will test this affirmation by several and varied illustrations. I will
+show how Christ, according to your exposition of his rule, speaks on the
+subject,--of _revenge, marriage, emancipation_,--_the fugitive from
+bondage_. And how he truly speaks on these subjects.
+
+
+
+_Revenge--Right according to your view of the Golden Rule_.
+
+
+Indian and Missionary--Prisoner tied to a tree, stuck over with burning
+splinters.
+
+Here is an Indian torturing his prisoner. The missionary approaches and
+beseeches him to regard _the Golden Rule_. "Humph!" utters the savage:
+"Golden Rule! what's that?" "Why" says the good man, "all that you
+_expect_ or _desired_ other Indians, in similar circumstances, do you
+even so to them." "Humph!" growls the warrior, with a fierce
+smile,--"Missionary--good: that's what I do now. If I was tied to that
+tree, I would _expect_ and _desire him_ to have _his_ revenge,--to do to
+me as I do to him; and I would sing my death-song, as he sings his.
+Missionary, your rule is Indian rule,--good rule, missionary. Humph!"
+And he sticks more splinters into his victim, brandishes his tomahawk,
+and yells.
+
+Sir, what has the missionary to say, after this perfect proof that you
+have mistaken the great law of right? Verily, he finds that the rule,
+with your explanation, tells the Indian to torture his prisoner. Verily,
+he finds that the wild man has the best of the argument. He finds he had
+left out the word OUGHT; and that he can't put it in, until he teaches
+the Indian things which as yet he don't know. Yea, he finds he gave the
+commandment too soon; for that he must begin back of that commandment,
+and teach the savage God's ordination of the relations in which he is to
+his fellow-men, before he can make him comprehend or apply the rule as
+Christ gives it.
+
+
+
+_Marriage--Void under your Interpretation of the Golden Rule_.
+
+
+Lucy Stone, and Moses--Lady on sofa, having just divorced herself--Moses,
+with the Tables of the Law, appears: she falls at his feet, and covers her
+face with her hands.
+
+This woman, everybody knows, was married some time since, after a fashion;
+that is to say, protesting publicly against all laws of wedlock, and
+entering into the relation so long only as she, or her husband, might
+continue pleased therewith.
+
+Very well. Then I, without insult to her or offense to my readers, suppose
+that about this time she has shown her unalienable right to liberty and
+equality by giving her husband a bill of divorcement. Free again, she
+reclines on her couch, and is reading the Tribune. It is mid-day. But
+there is a light, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about
+her. And _he_, who saw God on Sinai, stands before her, the glory on his
+face, and the tables of stone in his hands. The woman falls before him,
+veils her eyes with her trembling fingers, and cries out, "Moses, oh, I
+believed till now that thou practised deception, in claiming to be sent of
+God to Israel. But now, I know thou didst see God in the burning bush,
+and heard him speak that law from the holy mountain. Moses, I know ... I
+confess.".... And Moses answers, and says unto her, "Woman, thou art one
+of a great class in this land, who claim to be more just than God, more
+pure than their Maker, who have made their inward light their God. Woman,
+thou in '_convention_' hast uttered _Declaration of Independence_ from
+man. And, verily, thou hast asserted this claim to equality and
+unalienable right, even now, by giving thy husband his bill of
+divorcement, in thy sense of the Golden Rule. Yea, verily, thou hast done
+unto him all that thou _expectedst_ or _desiredst_ of him, in similar
+circumstances. And now thou thinkest thyself free again. Woman, thou art a
+sinner. Verily, thine inward light, and declaration of independence, and
+Golden Rule, do well agree the one with the other. Verily, thou hast
+learned of Jefferson, and Channing, and Barnes. But, woman,
+notwithstanding thou hast sat at the feet of these wise men, I, Moses, say
+thou art a sinner before the law, and the prophets, and the gospel. Woman,
+thy light is darkness; thy declaration of equality and right is vanity and
+folly; and thy Golden Rule is license to wickedness.
+
+"Woman, hast thou ears? Hear: I, by authority of God, ordained that the
+man should rule over thee. I placed thee, and children, and men-servants,
+and maid-servants, under the same law of subjection to the government
+ordained of God in the family,--the state. I for a time sanctioned
+polygamy, and made it right. I, for the hardness of men's hearts, allowed
+them, and made it right, to give their wives a bill of divorcement.
+Woman, hear. Paul, having the same Spirit of God, confirms my word. He
+commands _wives_, and children, and servants, after this manner:--'Wives,
+submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord;
+children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto
+the Lord; servants, obey in all things your masters according to the
+flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but in singleness of heart,
+fearing God.' Woman, Paul makes _that rule_ the same, and _that
+submission_, the same. The _manner_ of the rule he varies with the
+relations. He requires it to be, in the _love_ of the husband, even as
+Christ loved the church,--in the _mildness_ of the father, not provoking
+the children to anger, lest they be discouraged,--in _the justice and
+equity_ of the master, knowing that he also has a master in heaven:
+(Colossians.) Woman, hear. Paul says to thee, the man _now_ shall have
+one wife, and he _now_ shall not give her a bill of divorcement, save for
+crime. Woman, thou art not free from thy husband. Christ's Golden Rule
+must not be interpreted by thee as A. Barnes has rendered it; Christ
+_assumes_ that thou _believest_ God's truth,--that thou _knowest_ the
+relation of husband and wife, and the _obligations and rights_ of the
+same, _as in the Bible; then_, in the light of this _knowledge_, verily,
+thou art required to do what God says thou _oughtest_ to do. Woman, thou
+art a sinner. Go, sin no more. Go, find thy husband; see to it that he
+takes thee back. Go, submit to him, and honor him, and obey him."
+
+
+
+_Emancipation--Ruin--Golden Rule, in your meaning, carried out_.
+
+
+Island in the Tropics--Elegant houses falling to decay--Broad fields
+abandoned to the forest--Wharves grass-grown--Negroes relapsing into the
+savage state--A dark cloud over the island, through which the lightning
+glares, revealing, in red writing, these words:--"_Redeemed, regenerated,
+and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal
+emancipation"_.--[Gospel--according to Curran--and the British
+Parliament.]
+
+Jamaica, sir, to say nothing of St. Domingo, is illustration of your
+theory of the Golden Rule, in negro emancipation. You tell the Southern
+master that all he would _expect_ or _desire_, if he were a slave, he must
+do unto his bondman; that he must not pause to ask whether the relation of
+master and slave be ordained of God or not. No. You tell him, _if_ he
+would _expect_ or _desire_ liberty were he a slave, _that_ settles the
+question as to what he is to do! He must let his bondman go free. Yea,
+_that_ is what you teach: because the moment you put in the word OUGHT,
+and say, all that you OUGHT to _expect_ or _desire_,--_i.e._ all that you
+_know_ God commands you to _expect _ or _desire_ in your relations to men,
+_as established by him,_--THAT _do to them_. Sir, when you thus explain
+the Golden Rule, then your argument against slave-holding, so far as
+founded on this rule, is at once arrested; it is stopped short, in full
+career; it has to wait for reinforcement of FACT, which may never come up.
+For, suppose the FACT to be, that the relation of master and slave is one
+mode of the government ordained of God. Then, sir, the master, _knowing
+that_ FACT, and _knowing_ what the slave, _as a slave_, OUGHT to _expect_
+or _desire_, he, the master, then FULFILS THE GOLDEN RULE when he does
+that unto his slave which, in similar circumstances, he OUGHT to expect
+_to be done unto himself_. Now comes the question, OUGHT he then to
+_expect_ or _desire_ liberty and equality? THAT is the question of
+questions on this subject. And without hesitation I reply, The Golden Rule
+DECIDES _that question_ YEA or NAY, _absolutely_ and _perfectly_, as God's
+word or providence shows that the GOOD _of the family, the community, the
+state_, REQUIRES that the slave IS or IS NOT _to be set free and made
+equal_. THAT GOOD, _as God reveals it_, SETTLES THE QUESTION.
+
+Let the master then see to it, how he hears God's word as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, how he understands God's providence as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, that he makes no mistake as to THAT GOOD. For God will
+not hold him guiltless, if he will not hear what he tells him as to THAT
+GOOD. God will not justify him, if he has a bad conscience or blunders in
+his philosophy. God will punish him, if he fails to bless his land by
+letting the bond go free when, he OUGHT to emancipate. And God will punish
+him, if he brings a curse upon his country by freeing his slave when he
+OUGHT NOT to give him liberty.
+
+So, then, _the Golden Rule does not_, OF ITSELF, _reveal to man at all
+what are his_ RELATIONS _to his fellow-men; but it tells him what he is
+to_ DO, _when he_ ALREADY KNOWS THEM.
+
+So, then, you, sir, cannot be permitted to tell the world that this rule
+must emancipate all the negro slaves in the United States,--no matter how
+unprepared they may be,--no matter how degraded,--no matter how unlike and
+unequal to the white man by creation,--no matter if it be a natural and
+moral impossibility,--no matter: the Golden Rule must emancipate by
+authority of the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, and
+by obligation of the great law of liberty,--the intuitional consciousness
+of the eternal right!
+
+No. The Rule, as said, _presupposes_ that he who is required to obey it
+does already _know_ the relations in which God has placed him, and the
+respective duties in those conditions. Has God, then, established the
+relations of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave? Yes.
+Then the command comes. It says to the husband, To aid you in your known
+obligations to your wife,--to give you a lively sense of it,--suppose
+yourself to be the wife: whatsoever, therefore, you OUGHT, in that
+condition, to _expect_ or _desire_, that, as husband, do unto your wife.
+It says to the parent, Imagine yourself the child; and whatsoever, as
+such, you OUGHT to _expect_ or _desire, that_, as parent, do unto your
+child. It says to the master, Put yourself in the place of your slave;
+and whatsoever you OUGHT, in that condition, to _expect_ or _desire,
+that_, as master, do unto your slave. Let husband, parent, master, _know_
+his obligations from God, and obey the Rule.
+
+
+
+_Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule under your version_.
+
+
+Honorable Joshua R. Giddings and the Angel of the Lord--Hon. Gentleman at
+table--Nine runaway negroes dining with him--The Angel, uninvited, comes
+in and disturbs the feast.
+
+Giddings has boasted in Congress of having had nine fugitive slaves to
+break bread with him at one time. I choose, then, to imagine that, during
+the dinner, the angel who found Hagar by the fountain stands suddenly in
+the midst, and says to the negroes, "Ye slaves, whence came ye, and
+whither will ye go?" And they answer and say, "We flee from the face of
+our masters. This abolitionist told us to kill, and steal, and run away
+from bondage; and we have murdered and stolen and escaped. He, thou seest,
+welcomes us to liberty and equality. We _expect_ and _desire_ to be
+members of Congress, Governors of States, to marry among the great, and
+one of us to be President. Giddings, and all abolitionists, tell us that
+these honors belong to us equally as to white people, and will be given
+under the Golden Rule." And the angel of the Lord says to them, "Ye
+slaves, return unto your masters, and submit yourselves under their hands.
+I sent your fathers, and I send you, into bondage. I mean it unto good,
+and I will bring it to pass to save much people alive." Then, turning to
+the tempter, he says, "Thou, a statesman! thou, a reader of my word and
+providence! why hast thou not understood my speech to Hagar? I gave her, a
+slave, to Sarah. She fled from her mistress. I sent her back. Why hast
+thou not understood my word four thousand years ago,--that _the slave
+shall not flee from his master?_ Why hast thou also perverted my law in
+Deuteronomy, (xxiii. 15, 16?) I say therein, 'Thou shalt not deliver unto
+his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he
+shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall
+choose, in one of thy gates where it liketh him best: thou shalt not
+oppress him.' Why hast thou not known that I meant the _heathen slave_ who
+escaped from his _heathen master?_ I commanded, Israel, in such case, not
+to hold _him_ in bondage. I made this specific law for this specific fact.
+Why hast thou taught that, in this commandment, I gave license to all
+men-servants and maid-servants in the whole land of Israel to run away
+from their masters? Why hast thou thus made me, in one saying, contradict
+and make void all my laws wherein I ordained that the Hebrews should be
+slave-owners over their brethren during years, and over the heathen
+forever? Why hast thou in all this changed my Golden Rule? I, in that
+rule, _assume_ that men _know_ from revelation and providence the
+relations in which I have placed them, and their duties therein. I then
+command them to do unto others what they thus _know_ they _ought_ to do
+unto them in these relations; and I make the obligation quick and
+powerful, by telling every man to imagine himself in such conditions, and
+then he will _the better_ KNOW '_whatsoever_' he should do unto his
+neighbor. Why hast thou made void my law, by making me say, 'All that thou
+_expectest_ or _desirest_ of others, in similar circumstances, do to
+them'? I never imagined to give such license to folly and sin. Why hast
+thou imagined such license to iniquity? Verily, thou tempter, thou hast in
+thy Golden Rule made these slaves thieves and murderers, and art now
+eating with them the bread of sin and death.
+
+"Why hast thou tortured my speech wherein I say that I have made of _one
+blood_ all nations of men, to mean that I have created all men equal and
+endowed them with rights unalienable save in their consent? I never said
+that thing! I said that I made all men to descend from _one parentage!_
+That is what I say in that place! Why hast thou tortured that plain truth?
+Thou mightest as well teach that all 'the moving creatures that have life,
+and fowl that fly above the earth, in the open firmament of heaven,' are
+_created equal_, because I said I brought them forth _of the water_. Thou
+mightest as well say that 'all cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the
+earth, _are created equal_, because I said I brought them forth _of the
+earth_, as to affirm the _equality of men_ because I say they are _of one
+blood_. Nay, I have made men unequal as the leaves of the trees, the sands
+of the sea, the stars of heaven. I have made them so, in harmony with the
+infinite variety and inequality in every thing in my creation. And I have
+made them unequal in my _mercy_. Had I made all men equal in attributes of
+body and mind, then _unfallen man_ would never have realized the varied
+glories of his destiny. And had I given _fallen man_ equality of nature
+and unalienable rights, then I had made the earth an Aceldama and Valley
+of Gehenna. For what would be the _strife_ in all the earth among men
+equal in body and mind, equal in power, equal in depravity, equal in will,
+each one maintaining rights unalienable? When would the war end? Who would
+be the victors where all are giants? Who would sue for peace where none
+will submit? What would be _human social life?_ Who would be the weak, the
+loving? Who would seek or need forbearance, compassion, self-denying
+benevolence? Who would be the grateful? Who would be the humble, the meek?
+What would be _human_ virtue, what _human_ vice, what _human_ joy or
+sorrow? Nay, I have made men _unequal_ and given them _alienable rights_,
+that I might INSTITUTE HUMAN GOVERNMENT and reveal HUMAN CHARACTER.
+
+"Why hast thou been willingly ignorant of these first principles of the
+oracles of God, which would have made thee truly a Christian philosopher
+and statesman?"
+
+
+
+_Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule as Christ gave it_
+
+
+Rev. A. Barnes and the Apostle Paul--Minister of the gospel in his
+study--Fugitive slave, converted under his preaching, inquiring whether it
+is not his duty to return to his master--Paul appears and rebukes the
+minister for wresting his Gospel.
+
+With all respect and affection for you, sir, I imagine a slave, having run
+away from his master and become a Christian under your preaching, might,
+with the Bible in his hands and the Holy Spirit in his heart, have,
+despite your training, question of conscience, whether he did right to
+leave his master, and ought not to go back. And I think how Paul would
+listen, and what he would say, to your interpretation of his Epistle to
+Philemon. I think he would say,--
+
+"I withstand thee to thy face, because thou art to be blamed. Why hast
+thou written, in thy '_Notes_,' that the word I apply to Onesimus may
+mean, not _slave_, but _hired servant?_ Why hast thou said this in
+unsupported assertion? Why hast thou given no respect to Robinson, and all
+thy wise men, who agree that the word wherein I express Onesimus's
+relation to Philemon never means a hired servant, but a _slave_,--the
+property of his master,--a living possession?
+
+"Why hast thou called in question the fact that Philemon was a
+slave-holder? Why hast thou taught that, if he was a slave-holder when he
+became a Christian, he could not _continue, consistently_, to be a
+slave-owner and a Christian,--that if he did so _continue_, he would not
+be in _good standing_, but an _offender_ in the church? (See Notes.)
+
+"I say Philemon was the master of Onesimus, in the real sense of a
+slave-owner, under Roman law, in which he had the right of life and death
+over him,--being thereby a master in possession of power unknown in the
+United States. And yet I call Philemon 'our dearly beloved and
+fellow-laborer,' I tell him that I send to him again Onesimus, who had
+been unprofitable to him in time past; but now, being a Christian, he
+would be profitable. I tell him, I send him again, not a slave, (only,)
+but above a slave, a Christian brother, beloved, specially to me, but how
+much more unto him, both _in the flesh_ and in the Lord. Dost thou know,
+Albert Barnes, what I mean by that word, _in the flesh?_ Verily, I knew
+the things wherein the master and the slave are beloved, the one of the
+other, in the best affections of human nature, and in the Lord! therefore
+I say to Philemon that he, _as master_, could receive Onesimus _as his
+slave_, and yet as a _brother_, MORE _beloved, by reason of his relation
+to him as master_, than I could regard him! Yea, verily,--and I say to
+thee, Albert Barnes, thou hast never been in the South, and thou dost not
+understand, and canst not understand, the force, or even the meaning, of
+my words _in the flesh_; i.e. _in the love of the master and the slave to
+one another_. But Philemon I knew would feel its power, and so I made that
+appeal to him.
+
+"Why hast thou said, that I did not send Onesimus back _by authority?_ I
+did send him back by authority,--yea, by authority of the Lord Jesus
+Christ? For it was my duty to send him again to Philemon, whether he had
+been willing to go or not; and it was his duty to go. But he was willing.
+So we both felt our obligations; and, when I commanded, he cheerfully
+obeyed. What else was my duty and his? Had I not said, in line upon line
+and in precept upon precept, 'Servants, obey in all things your masters
+according to the flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in
+singleness of heart, pleasing God'? (Coloss. iii. 22.) Had not Peter
+written, 'Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to
+the good and gentle, but also to the froward'? (1 Pet. ii. 18.) Onesimus
+had broken these commandments when he fled from his master. Was it not
+then of my responsibility to send him again to Philemon? And was it not
+Christ's law to him to return and submit himself under his master's hand?
+
+"Why, then, hast thou not understood my speech? Has it been even because
+thou couldst not _hear_ my word? What else has hindered? What more could I
+have said, than (in 1 Tim. vi. 1-5) I do say, to rebuke all abolitionists?
+Yea, I describe them--I show their principles--as fully as if I had called
+them by name in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, and said they would
+live in 1857.
+
+"And yet thou hast, in thy commentary on my letter to Timothy, utterly
+distorted, maimed, and falsified my meaning. Thou hast mingled truth and
+untruth so together as to make me say what was not and is not in my mind.
+For thou teachest the slave, while professing not so to teach him, that I
+tell him that he is _not_ to count his master worthy of all honor; that he
+_is_ to _despise_ him; that he is _not_ to do him service as to a
+Christian faithful and beloved. _No_. But thou teachest the slave, in my
+name, to regard his Christian master an _offender_ in the sight of
+Christ, if he _continues_ a slave-owner.
+
+"Thou tellest him to obey _only_ in the sense in which he is to submit to
+injustice, oppression, and cruelty; and that he is ever to seek to throw
+off the yoke in his created equality and unalienable right to liberty.
+(See Notes.)
+
+"This is what thou hast taught as my gospel. But I commanded thee to
+teach and exhort _just the contrary_. I commanded thee to say after this
+way:--'Let as many servants as are under the yoke, count their own
+masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not
+blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise
+them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they
+are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach
+and exhort.'
+
+"Thou, in thy 'Notes,' art compelled, though most unwillingly, to confess
+that I do mean _slaves_ in this place, in the full and proper sense; yea,
+slaves under the Roman law. Good. Then do I here tell slaves to count
+their masters, even when not Christians, worthy of all honor; and, when
+Christians, to regard them as faithful and beloved, and not to despise
+them, and to do them service? Yet, after all this, do I say to these same
+slaves that they have a created equality and unalienable right to liberty,
+under which, whenever they think fit, I command them to dishonor their
+masters, despise them, and run away! Sir, I did never so instruct slaves;
+nay, I did never command thee so to teach them. But I did and do exhort
+thee not so to train them; for I said then and say now to thee, 'If any
+man teach [slaves] otherwise, [than to honor their masters as faithful and
+beloved, and to do them service,] and consent not to wholesome words, even
+the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according
+to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and
+strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
+perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH,
+supposing that gain is godliness; from such withdraw thyself,'
+
+"What more could I have said to the abolitionists of my day? What more can
+I say to them in this day? _That_ which was true of them two thousand
+years ago, is true now. I rebuked abolitionists then, and I rebuke them
+now. I tell them the things in their hearts,--the things on their
+tongues,--the things in their hands,--are contrary to wholesome words,
+even the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. Canst thou _hear_ my words in
+this place without feeling how faithfully I have given the head, and the
+heart, and the words, and the doings of the men, from whom thou hast not
+withdrawn thyself?
+
+"Verily, thou canst not _hear_ my speech, and therefore thou canst not
+interpret my gospel. Thou believest it is impossible that I sanction
+slavery! Hence it is impossible for thee to understand my words: for I do
+sanction slavery. How? Thus:--
+
+"I found slavery in Asia, in Greece, in Rome. I saw it to be one mode of
+the government ordained of God. I regarded it, in most conditions of
+fallen mankind, necessarily and irresistibly part of such government, and
+therefore as natural, as wise, as good, in such conditions, as the other
+ways men are ruled in the state or the family.
+
+"I took up slavery, then, as such ordained government,--wise, good, yea
+best, in certain circumstances, until, in the elevating spirit and power
+of my gospel, the slave is made fit for the liberty and equality of his
+master, if he can be so lifted up. Hence I make the RULE of magistrate,
+subject, master and servant, parent and child, husband and wife, THE SAME
+RULE; _i.e._ I make it THE SAME RIGHT in the _superior_ to control the
+_obedience_ and the _service_ of the _inferior_, bound to obey, whatever
+the difference in the relations and service to be rendered. Yea, I give
+_exactly the same command_ to all in these relations; and thus, in all my
+words, I make it plainly to be understood that I regard slavery to be as
+righteous a mode of government as that of magistrate and subject, parent
+and child, husband and wife, during the circumstances and times in which
+God is pleased to have it continue. I saw all the injustice, the
+oppression, the cruelty, masters might be guilty of, and were and are now
+guilty of; but I saw no more injustice, oppression, and cruelty, in the
+relation of master and slave, than I saw in all other forms of rule,--even
+in that of husband and wife, parent and child. In my gospel I condemn
+wrong in all these states of life, while I fully sanction and sustain the
+relations themselves. I tell the magistrate, husband, father, master, how
+to rule; I tell the subject, wife, child, servant, how to submit. Hence, I
+command the slave not to flee from bondage, just as I require the subject,
+the wife, the child, not to resist or flee from obedience. I warn the
+slave, if he leaves his master he has sinned, and must return; and I make
+it the duty of all men to see to it, that _he shall go back_. Hence, I
+myself did what I command others to do: I sent Onesimus back to his
+master.
+
+"Thus I sanction slavery everywhere in the New Testament. But it is
+impossible for thee, with thy principles,--thy law of reason,--thy law of
+created equality and unalienable right,--thy elevation of the Declaration
+of Independence above the ordinance of God,--to sustain slavery. Nay, it
+is impossible for thee, with thy interpretation of Christ's Golden Rule,
+to recognise the system of servile labor; nay, it is impossible for thee
+to tell _this_ slave to return to his master as I sent Onesimus back;
+nay, thou art guarded by thy Golden Rule. Thou tellest him that, if thou
+hadst been in his place, thou wouldst have _expected, desired_ freedom,
+that thou wouldst have run away, and that thou wouldst not now return;
+that thou wouldst have regarded thy created equality and unalienable
+right as thy supreme law, and have disregarded and scorned all other
+obligations as _pretended revelation from God_. Therefore thou now doest
+unto him '_whatsoever_' thou wouldst _expect_ or _desire_ him to do unto
+thee in similar circumstances; _i.e._ thou tellest him he did right to
+run away, and will do right not to return! This is thy Golden Rule. But
+I did not instruct thee so to learn Christ. Nay, this slave knows thou
+hast not not given him the mind of Christ; nay, he knows that Christ
+commands thee to send him to his master again. And thus do what thou
+OUGHTEST to _expect_ or _desire_ in similar circumstances; yea, _do_ now
+_thy duty_, and this slave, like Onesimus, will bless thee for giving him
+a good conscience whenever he will return to his obedience. Thus Paul,
+the aged, speaks to thee."
+
+So, then, the Golden Rule is the whole Bible; yea, Christ says it is-"the
+law and the prophets;" yea, it is the Old Testament and the New condensed;
+and with ever-increasing glory of Providence in one sublime aphorism,
+which can be understood and obeyed only by those who _know_ what the
+Bible, or Providence, reveals as to man's varied conditions and his
+obligations therein.
+
+I think, sir, I have refuted your interpretation of the Golden Rule, and
+have given its true meaning.
+
+The slave-holder, then, may have a good conscience under this commandment.
+Let him so exercise himself as to have a conscience void of offence
+towards God and towards men.
+
+Yours, &c. F.A. Ross.
+
+
+
+
+Conclusion.
+
+
+
+I intended to, and may yet, in a subsequent edition, write two more
+letters to A. Barnes. The _one_, to show how infidelity has been passing
+off from the South to the North,--especially since the _Christian death_
+of Jackson; the other, to meet Mr. Barnes's argument founded on the spirit
+of the age.
+
+
+The End.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Slavery Ordained of God
+by Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD ***
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+Project Gutenberg's Slavery Ordained of God, by Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
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+Title: Slavery Ordained of God
+
+Author: Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9171]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLAVERY ORDAINED OF GOD ***
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+
+
+<h1>Slavery Ordained of God.</h1>
+
+<p align="center" class="smallcaps">By</p>
+
+<h2>Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.</h2>
+
+
+<p align="center">"The powers that be are ordained of God."<br />Romans xiii. 1.</p>
+
+
+<p align="center">TO<br />
+The Men<br />
+NORTH AND SOUTH, <br />
+WHO HONOR THE WORD OF GOD<br />
+AND<br />
+LOVE THEIR COUNTRY.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Preface.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>The book I give to the public, is not made up of isolated articles. It is
+one harmonious demonstration--that slavery is part of the government
+ordained in certain conditions of fallen mankind. I present the subject in
+the form of speeches, actually delivered, and letters written just as
+published. I adopt this method to make a readable book.</p>
+
+<p>I give it to the North and South--to maintain harmony among Christians,
+and to secure the integrity of the union of this great people.</p>
+
+<p>This harmony and union can be preserved only by the view presented in this
+volume,--<i>i.e.</i> that <i>slavery is of God</i>, and to continue for the good of
+the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family,
+until another and better destiny may be unfolded.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>one great idea</i>, which I submit to North and South, is expressed in
+the speech, first in order, delivered in the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, May 27, 1853. I therein say:--</p>
+
+<p>"Let us then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend <i>two
+ideas</i>, and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern
+philanthropist learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave
+is not sin <i>per se</i>. Let him learn that God says nowhere it is sin. Let
+him learn that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no
+law there is no sin, and that <i>the Golden Rule</i> may exist in the
+relations of slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil <i>in
+certain circumstances</i>. Let him learn that <i>equality</i> is only the highest
+form of social life; that <i>subjection</i> to authority, even <i>slavery</i>, may,
+in <i>given conditions</i>, be <i>for a time</i> better than freedom to the slave
+of any complexion. Let him learn that <i>slavery</i>, like <i>all evils</i>, has
+its <i>corresponding</i> and <i>greater good</i>; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded <i>compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa</i>. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself: And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+<i>God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual</i>.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny."</p>
+
+<p>All which comes after, in the speech delivered in New York, 1856, and in
+the letters, is just the expansion of this one controlling thought, which
+must be understood, believed, and acted out North and South.</p>
+
+<p>The Author.</p>
+
+<p>Written in Cleveland, Ohio, May 28, 1857.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Contents.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p><a href="#01">Speech Before the General Assembly at Buffalo</a><br />
+<a href="#02">Speech Before the General Assembly at New York</a><br />
+<a href="#03">Letter to Rev. A. Blackburn</a><br />
+<a href="#04">What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation? </a></p>
+
+<p><b><a href="#letters">Letters to Rev. A. Barnes</a>:--</b></p>
+
+<p>  No. I.--<a href="#05">Results of the slavery agitation--Declaration of Independence--The way men are made infidels--Testimonies of General Assemblies</a><br />
+     II.--<a href="#06">Government over man a divine institute</a><br />
+    III.--<a href="#07">Man-stealing</a><br />
+     IV.--<a href="#08">The Golden Rule</a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="01"></a>Speech Delivered at Buffalo, Before the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>To understand the following speech, the reader will be pleased to
+learn--if he don't know already--that the General Assembly of the
+Presbyterian Church, before its division in 1838, and since,--both Old
+School and New School,--has been, for forty years and more, bearing
+testimony, after a fashion, against the system of slavery; that is to say,
+affirming, in one breath, that slave-holding is a "blot on our holy
+religion," &amp;c. &amp;c.; and then, in the next utterance, making all sorts of
+apologies and justifications for the slave-holder. Thus: this august body
+has been in the habit of telling the Southern master (especially in the
+Detroit resolutions of 1850) that he is a <i>sinner</i>, hardly meet to be
+called a <i>Christian</i>; but, nevertheless, if he will only sin "from
+unavoidable necessity, imposed by the laws of the States,"--if he will
+only sin under the "obligations of guardianship,"--if he will only sin
+"from the demands of humanity,"--why, then, forsooth, he may be a
+slave-holder as long as <i>he has a mind to</i>. Yea, he may hold one slave,
+one hundred or one thousand slaves, and till the day of judgment.</p>
+
+<p>Happening to be in attendance, as a member of the body, in Buffalo, May,
+1853, when, as usual, the system of slavery was touched, in a series of
+questions sent down to the church courts below, I made the following
+remarks, in good-natured ridicule of such preposterous and stultifying
+testimony; and, as an argument, opening the views I have since reproduced
+in the second speech of this volume, delivered in the General Assembly
+which convened in New York, May, 1856, and also in the letters
+following:--</p>
+
+<p>BUFFALO, FRIDAY, May 27, 1853.</p>
+
+<p>The order of the day was reached at a quarter before eleven, and the
+report read again,--viz.:</p>
+
+<p>"1. That this body shall reaffirm the doctrine of the second resolution
+adopted by the General Assembly, convened in Detroit, in 1850, and,</p>
+
+<p>"2. That with an express disavowal of any intention to be impertinently
+inquisitorial, and for the sole purpose of arriving at the truth, so as to
+correct misapprehensions and allay all causeless irritation, a committee
+be appointed of one from each of the synods of Kentucky, Tennessee,
+Missouri, and Virginia, who shall be requested to report to the next
+General Assembly on the following points:--1. The number of slave-holders
+in connection with the churches, and the number of slaves held by them. 2.
+The extent to which slaves are held from an unavoidable necessity imposed
+by the laws of the States, the obligations of guardianship, and the
+demands of humanity. 3. Whether the Southern churches regard the
+sacredness of the marriage relation as it exists among the slaves; whether
+baptism is duly administered to the children of the slaves professing
+Christianity, and in general, to what extent and in what manner provision
+is made for the religious well-being of the slave," &amp;c. &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Ross moved to amend the report by substituting the following,--with
+an express disavowal of being impertinently inquisitorial:--that a
+committee of <i>one</i> from each of the Northern synods of ---- be appointed,
+who shall be requested to report to the next General Assembly,--</p>
+
+<p>1. The number of Northern church-members concerned, directly or
+indirectly, in building and fitting out ships for the African slave-trade,
+and the slave-trade between the States.</p>
+
+<p>2. The number of Northern church-members who traffic with slave-holders,
+and are seeking to make money by selling them negro-clothing, handcuffs,
+and cowhides.</p>
+
+<p>3. The number of Northern church-members who have sent orders to New
+Orleans, and other Southern cities, to have slaves sold, to pay debts
+owing them from the South. [See Uncle Tom's Cabin.]</p>
+
+<p>4. The number of Northern church-members who buy the cotton, sugar, rice,
+tobacco, oranges, pine-apples, figs, ginger, cocoa, melons, and a thousand
+other things, raised by slave-labor.</p>
+
+<p>5. The number of Northern church-members who have intermarried with
+slave-holders, and have thus become slave-owners themselves, or enjoy the
+wealth made by the blood of the slave,--especially if there be any
+Northern ministers of the gospel in such a predicament.</p>
+
+<p>6. The number of Northern church-members who are the descendants of the
+men who kidnapped negroes in Africa and brought them to Virginia and New
+England in former years.</p>
+
+<p>7. The aggregate and individual wealth of members thus descended, and what
+action is best to compel them to disgorge this blood-stained gold, or to
+compel them to give dollar for dollar in equalizing the loss of the South
+by emancipation.</p>
+
+<p>8. The number of Northern church-members, ministers especially, who have
+advocated <i>murder</i> in resistance to the laws of the land.</p>
+
+<p>9. The number of Northern church-members who own stock in under-ground
+railroads, running off fugitive slaves, and in Sabbath-breaking railroads
+and canals.</p>
+
+<p>10. That a special commission be sent up Red River, to ascertain whether
+Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to death, (and who was a Northern
+<i>gentleman</i>,) be not still in connection with some Northern church in good
+and regular standing.</p>
+
+<p>11. The number of Northern church-members who attend meetings of
+Spiritual Rappers,--or Bloomers,--or Women's-Rights Conventions.</p>
+
+<p>12. The number of Northern church-members who are cruel husbands.</p>
+
+<p>13. The number of Northern church-members who are hen-pecked husbands.</p>
+
+<p>[As it is always difficult to know the temper of speaker and audience from
+a printed report, it is due alike to Dr. R., to the whole Assembly, and
+the galleries, to say, that he, in reading these resolutions, and
+throughout his speech, evinced great good-humour and kindness of feeling,
+which was equally manifested by the Assembly and spectators, repeatedly,
+while he was on the floor.]</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Ross then proceeded:--Mr. Moderator, I move this amendment in the best
+spirit. I desire to imitate the committee in their refinement and delicacy
+of distinction. I disavow all intention to be <i>impertinently</i>
+inquisitorial. I intend to be inquisitorial, as the committee say they
+are,--but not <i>impertinently</i> so. No, sir; not at all; not at all.
+(Laughter.) Well, sir, we of the South, who desire the removal of the evil
+of slavery, and believe it will pass away in the developments of
+Providence, are grieved when we read your graphic, shuddering pictures of
+the "middle passage,"--the slave-ship, piling up her canvas, as the shot
+pours after her from English or American guns,--see her again and again
+hurrying hogshead after hogshead, filled with living slaves, into the
+deep, and, thus lightened, escape. Sir, what horror to believe that
+clipper-ship was built by the hands of Northern, noisy Abolition
+church-members! ["Yes, I know some in New York and Boston," said one in
+the crowd.] Again, sir, when we walk along your <i>Broadways</i>, and see, as
+we do, the soft hands of your church-members sending off to the South, not
+only clothing for the slave, but manacles and whips, manufactured
+expressly for him,--what must we think of your consistency of character?
+[True, true.] And what must we think of your self-righteousness, when we
+know your church-members order the sale of slaves,--yes, slaves such as
+St. Clair's,--and under circumstances involving all the separations and
+all the loathsome things you so mournfully deplore? Your Mrs. Stowe says
+so, and it is so, without her testimony. I have read that splendid, bad
+book. Splendid in its genius, over which I have wept, and laughed, and got
+mad, (here some one said, "All at the same time?") yes--all at the same
+time. Bad in its theology, bad in its morality, bad in its temporary evil
+influence here in the North, in England, and on the continent of Europe;
+bad, because her isolated cruelties will be taken (whether so meant by her
+or not) as the general condition of Southern life,--while her Shelbys, and
+St. Clairs, and Evas, will be looked upon as angel-visitors, lingering for
+a moment in that earthly hell. The <i>impression made by the book is a
+falsehood</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Sir, why do your Northern church-members and philanthropists buy Southern
+products at all? You know you are purchasing cotton, rice, sugar,
+sprinkled with blood, literally, you say, from the lash of the driver! Why
+do you buy? What's the difference between my filching this blood-stained
+cotton from the outraged negro, and your standing by, taking it from me?
+What's the difference? You, yourselves, say, in your abstractions, there
+is no difference; and yet you daily stain your hands in this horrid
+traffic. You hate the traitor, but you love the treason. Your ladies,
+too,--oh, how they shun the slave-owner <i>at a distance</i>, in <i>the
+abstract</i>! But alas, when they see him in the <i>concrete</i>,--when they see
+the slave-owner <i>himself</i>, standing before them,--not the brutal driver,
+but the splendid gentleman, with his unmistakable grace of carriage and
+ease of manners,--why, lo, behold the lady says, "Oh, fie on your
+slavery!--what a <i>wretch</i> you are! But, indeed, sir, I love your
+sugar,--and truly, truly, sir, <i>wretch</i> as you are, I love you too." Your
+gentlemen talk just the same way when they behold our matchless women. And
+well for us all it is, that your good taste, and hearts, can thus
+appreciate our genius, and accomplishments, and fascinations, and
+loveliness, and sugar, and cotton. Why, sir, I heard this morning, from
+one pastor only, of two or three of his members thus intermarried in the
+South. May I thus give the mildest rebuke to your inconsistency of
+conduct? (Much good-natured excitement.)</p>
+
+<p>Sir, may we know who are the descendants of the New England kidnappers?
+What is their wealth? Why, here you are, all around me. You, gentlemen,
+made the best of that bargain. And you have kept every dollar of your
+money from the charity of emancipating the slave. You have left us,
+unaided, to give millions. Will you now come to our help? Will you give
+dollar for dollar to equalize our loss? [Here many voices cried out, "Yes,
+yes, we will."]</p>
+
+<p>Yes, yes? Then pour out your millions. Good. I may thank you personally.
+My own emancipated slaves would to-day be worth greatly more than
+$20,000. Will you give me back $10,000? Good. I need it now.</p>
+
+<p>I recommend to you, sirs, to find out your advocates of <i>murder</i>,--your
+owners of stock in under-ground railroads,--your Sabbath-breakers for
+money. I particularly urge you to find Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to
+death. He is a Northern <i>gentleman</i>, although having a somewhat Southern
+name. Now, sir, you know the Assembly was embarrassed all yesterday by
+the inquiry how the Northern churches may find their absent members, and
+what to do with them. Here then, sir, is a chance for you. Send a
+committee up Red River. You may find Legree to be a Garrison, Phillips,
+Smith, or runaway husband from some Abby Kelly. [Here Rev. Mr. Smith
+protested against Legree being proved to be a Smith. Great laughter.
+[Footnote: This gentleman was soon after made a D.D., and I think in part
+for that witticism.]] I move that you bring him back to lecture on the
+<i>cuteness</i> there is in leaving a Northern church, going South, changing
+his name, buying slaves, and calculating, without <i>guessing</i>, what the
+profit is of killing a negro with inhuman labor above the gain of
+treating him with kindness.</p>
+
+<p>I have little to say of spirit-rappers, women's-rights conventionists,
+Bloomers, cruel husbands, or hen-pecked. But, if we may believe your own
+serious as well as caricature writers, you have things up here of which we
+down South know very little indeed. Sir, we have no young Bloomers, with
+hat to one side, cigar in mouth, and cane tapping the boot, striding up to
+a mincing young gentleman with long curls, attenuated waist, and soft
+velvet face,--the boy-lady to say, "May I see you home, sir?" and the
+lady-boy to reply, "I thank ye--no; pa will send the carriage." Sir, we of
+the South don't understand your women's-rights conventions. Women have
+their wrongs. "The Song of the Shirt,"--Charlotte Elizabeth,--many, many
+laws,--tell her wrongs. But your convention ladies despise the Bible. Yes,
+sir; and we of the South are afraid <i>of them</i>, and <i>for you</i>. When women
+despise the Bible, what next? <i>Paris,--then the City of the Great Salt
+Lake,--then Sodom, before</i> and <i>after the Dead Sea</i>. Oh, sir, if slavery
+tends in any way to give the <i>honour of chivalry</i> to Southern young
+gentlemen towards ladies, and the exquisite delicacy and heavenly
+integrity and love to Southern maid and matron, it has then a glorious
+blessing with its curse.</p>
+
+<p>Sir, your inquisitorial committee, and the North so far as represented by
+them, (a small fraction, I know,) have, I take it, caught a Tartar this
+time. Boys say with us, and everywhere, I <i>reckon</i>, "You worry my dog, and
+I'll worry your cat." Sir, it is just simply a <i>fixed fact: the South will
+not submit to these questions</i>. No, not for an instant. We will not permit
+you to approach us at all. If we are morbidly sensitive, you have made us
+so. But you are directly and grossly violating the Constitution of the
+Presbyterian Church. The book forbids you to put such questions; the book
+forbids <i>you to begin discipline</i>; the book forbids your sending this
+committee to help common fame bear testimony against us; the book guards
+the honour of our humblest member, minister, church, presbytery, against
+all this impertinently-inquisitorial action. Have you a <i>prosecutor</i>, with
+his definite charge and witnesses? Have you <i>Common Fame</i>, with her
+specified charges and witnesses? Have you a request from the South that
+you send a committee to inquire into slanders? No. Then hands off. As
+gentlemen you may ask us these questions,--we will answer you. But,
+ecclesiastically, you cannot speak in this matter. You have no power to
+move as you propose.</p>
+
+<p>I beg leave to say, just here, that Tennessee [Footnote: At that time I
+resided in Tennessee.] will be more calm under this movement than any
+other slave-region. Tennessee has been ever high above the storm, North
+and South,--especially we of the mountains. Tennessee!--"there she
+is,--look at her,"--binding this Union together like a great, long,
+broad, deep stone,--more splendid than all in the temple of Baalbec or
+Solomon. Tennessee!--there she is, in her calm valour. I will not lower
+her by calling her unconquerable, for she has never been assailed; but I
+call her ever-victorious. King's Mountain,--her pioneer
+battles:--Talladega, Emucfau, Horse-shoe, New Orleans, San Jacinto,
+Monterey, the Valley of Mexico. Jackson represented her well in his
+chivalry from South Carolina,--his fiery courage from Virginia and
+Kentucky,--all tempered by Scotch-Irish Presbyterian prudence from
+Tennessee. We, in his spirit, have looked on this storm for years
+untroubled. Yes, Jackson's old bones rattled in their grave when that
+infamous disunion convention met in Nashville, and its members turned
+pale and fled aghast. Yes, Tennessee, in her mighty million, feels
+secure; and, in her perfect preparation to discuss this question,
+politically, ecclesiastically, morally, metaphysically, or physically,
+with the extreme North or South, she is willing and able <i>to persuade
+others to be calm</i>. In this connection, I wish to say, for the South to
+the North, and to the world, that we have no fears from our
+slave-population. There might be a momentary insurrection and bloodshed;
+but destruction to the black man would be inevitable. The Greeks and
+Romans controlled immense masses of white slaves,--many of them as
+intelligent as their lords. Schoolmasters, fabulists, and poets were
+slaves. Athens, with her thirty thousand freemen, governed half a
+million of bondmen. Single Roman patricians owned thirty thousand. If,
+then, the phalanx and the legion mastered such slaves for ages, when
+battle was physical force of man to man, how certain it is that
+infantry, cavalry, and artillery could hold in bondage millions of
+Africans for a thousand years!</p>
+
+<p>But, dear brethren, our Southern philanthropists do not seek to have this
+unending bondage; Oh, no, no. And I earnestly entreat you to "stand still
+and see the salvation of the Lord." Assume a masterly inactivity, and you
+will behold all you desire and pray for,--you will see <i>America liberated
+from the curse of slavery</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The great question of the world is, WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE
+AMERICAN SLAVE?--WHAT IS TO BE THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MASTER? The
+following <i>extract from the "Charleston Mercury"</i> gives my view of the
+subject with great and condensed particularity:--</p>
+
+<p>"Married, Thursday, 26th inst., the Hon. Cushing Kewang, Secretary of
+State of the United States, to Laura, daughter of Paul Coligny,
+Vice-President of the United States, and one of our noblest Huguenot
+families. We learn that this distinguished gentleman, with his bride, will
+visit his father, the Emperor of China, at his summer palace, in Tartary,
+north of Pekin, and return to the Vice-President's Tea Pavilion, on Cooper
+River, ere the meeting of Congress." The editor of the "Mercury" goes on
+to say: "This marriage in high life is only one of many which have
+signalized that immense emigration from Christianized China during the
+last seventy-five years, whereby Charleston has a population of 1,250,000,
+and the State of South Carolina over 5,000,000,--an emigration which has
+wonderfully harmonized with the great exodus of the negro race to
+Africa." [Some gentleman here requested to know of Dr. Ross the date of
+the "Charleston Mercury" recording this marriage. The doctor replied, "The
+date is 27th May, 1953, exactly one hundred years from this day." Great
+laughter.]</p>
+
+<p>Sir, this is a dream; but it is not all a dream. No, I verily believe you
+have there the Gordian knot of slavery untied; you have there the solution
+of the problem; you have there the curtain up, and the last scene in the
+last act of the great drama of Ham.</p>
+
+<p>I am satisfied with the tendencies of things. I stand on the mountain-peak
+above the clouds. I see, far beyond the storm, the calm sea and blue sky;
+I see the Canaan of the African. I like to stand there on the Nebo of his
+exodus, and look across, not the Jordan, but the Atlantic. I see the
+African crossing as certainly as if I gazed upon the ocean divided by a
+great wind, and piled up in walls of green glittering glass on either
+hand, the dry ground, the marching host, and the pillar of cloud and of
+fire. I look over upon the Niger, black with death to the white man,
+instinct with life to the children of Ham. <i>There</i> is the black man's
+home. Oh, how strange that you of the North see not how you degrade him
+when you keep him here! You will not let him vote; you will not let him
+rise to honors or social equality; you will not let him hold a pew in your
+churches. Send him away, then; tell him, begone. Be urgent, like the
+Egyptians: send him out of this land. <i>There</i>, in his fatherland, he will
+exhibit his own type of Christianity. He is, of all races, the most gentle
+and kind. The <i>man</i>, the most submissive; the <i>woman</i>, the most
+affectionate. What other slaves would love their masters better than
+themselves?--rock them and fan them in their cradles? caress them--how
+tenderly!--boys and girls? honor them, grown up, as superior beings? and,
+in thousands of illustrious instances, be willing to give life, and, in
+fact, die, to serve or save them? Verily, verily, this emancipated race
+may reveal the most amiable form of spiritual life, and the <i>jewel</i> may
+glitter on the Ethiop's brow in meaning more sublime than all in the
+poet's imagery. Brethren, let them go; and, when they are gone,--ay,
+before they go away,--rear a monument; let it grow in greatness, if not on
+your highest mountain, in your hearts,--in lasting memory of the
+South,--in memory of your wrong to the South,--in memory of the
+self-denial of the South, and her philanthropy in training the slave to
+be free, enlightened, and Christian.</p>
+
+<p>Can all this be? Can this double emigration civilize Africa and more than
+re-people the South? Yes; and I regard the difficulties presented here, in
+Congress, or the country, as little worth. God intends both emigrations.
+And, without miracle, he will accomplish both. Difficulties! There are no
+difficulties. Half a million emigrate to our shores, from Ireland, and all
+Europe, every year. And you gravely talk of difficulties in the negro's
+way to Africa! Verily, God will unfold their destiny as fast, and as
+fully, as he sees best for the highest good of the slave, the highest good
+of the master, and the glory of Christ in Africa.</p>
+
+<p>And, sir, there are forty thousand Chinese in California. And in Cuba,
+this day, American gentlemen are cultivating sugar, with Chinese hired
+labor, more profitably than the Spaniards and their slaves. Oh! there is
+China--half the population of the globe--just fronting us across that
+peaceful sea,--her poor, living on rats and a pittance of red rice,--her
+rich, hoarding millions in senseless idolatry, or indulging in the
+luxuries of birds'-nests and roasted ice. Massed together, they must
+migrate. Where can they go? They must come to our shores. They must come,
+even did God forbid them. But he will hasten their coming. They can live
+in the extremest South. It is their latitude,--their side of the ocean.
+They can cultivate cotton, rice, sugar, tea, and the silkworm. Their
+skill, their manipulation, is unrivalled. Their commonest gong you can
+neither make nor explain. They are a law-abiding people, without castes,
+accustomed to rise by merit to highest distinctions, and capable of the
+noblest training, when their idolatry, which is waxing old as a garment,
+shall be folded up as a vesture and changed for <i>that</i> whose years shall
+not fail. The English ambassador assures us that the Chinese negotiator of
+the late treaty was a splendid gentleman, and a diplomatist to move in any
+court of Europe. Shem, then, can mingle with Japheth in America.</p>
+
+<p>The Chinese must come. God will bring them. He will fulfil Benton's noble
+thought. The railroad must complete the voyage of Columbus. The statue of
+the Genoese, on some peak of the Rocky Mountains, high above the flying
+cars, must point to the West, saying, "There is the East! There is India
+and Cathay."</p>
+
+<p>Let us, then, North and South, bring our minds to comprehend <i>two ideas</i>,
+and submit to their irresistible power. Let the Northern philanthropist
+learn from the Bible that the relation of master and slave is not sin
+<i>per se</i>. Let him learn that God nowhere says it is sin. Let him learn
+that sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no law,
+there is no sin; and that <i>the golden rule</i> may exist in the relations of
+slavery. Let him learn that slavery is simply an evil <i>in certain
+circumstances</i>. Let him learn that <i>equality</i> is only the highest form of
+social life; that <i>subjection</i> to authority, even <i>slavery</i>, may, in
+<i>given conditions</i>, be <i>for a time</i> better than freedom to the slave, of
+any complexion. Let him learn that <i>slavery</i>, like <i>all evils</i>, has its
+<i>corresponding</i> and <i>greater good</i>; that the Southern slave, though
+degraded <i>compared with his master</i>, is <i>elevated</i> and <i>ennobled compared
+with his brethren in Africa</i>. Let the Northern man learn these things,
+and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren
+of the South, who are lovers of liberty as truly as himself. And let the
+Southern Christian--nay, the Southern man of every grade--comprehend that
+<i>God never intended the relation of master and slave to be perpetual</i>.
+Let him give up the theory of Voltaire, that the negro is of a different
+species. Let him yield the semi-infidelity of Agassiz, that God created
+different races of the same species--in swarms, like bees--for Asia,
+Europe, America, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Let him believe that
+slavery, although not a sin, is a degraded condition,--the evil, the
+curse on the South,--yet having blessings in its time to the South and to
+the Union. Let him know that slavery is to pass away, in the fulness of
+Providence. Let the South believe this, and prepare to obey the hand that
+moves their destiny.</p>
+
+<p>Ham will be ever lower than Shem; Shem will be ever lower than Japheth.
+All will rise in the Christian grandeur to be revealed. Ham will be lower
+than Shem, because he was sent to Central Africa. Man south of the
+Equator--in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa--is
+inferior to his Northern brother. The <i>blessing</i> was upon Shem in his
+magnificent Asia. The <i>greater blessing</i> was upon Japheth in his
+man-developing Europe. <i>Both blessings</i> will be combined, in America,
+<i>north of the Zone</i>, in commingled light and life. I see it all in the
+first symbolical altar of Noah on that mound at the base of Ararat. The
+father of all living men bows before the incense of sacrifice, streaming
+up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all
+flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of
+the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness,
+near the long-necked giraffe, type of his <i>Africa</i>,--his magnificent wife,
+seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her
+long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered with gems from
+mines before the flood. Higher up is Shem, leaning his arm over that
+mouse-colored horse,--his <i>Arab</i> steed. His wife, in pure white linen,
+feeds the elephant, and plays with his lithe proboscis,--the mother of
+Terah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, and Christ. And yet she looks
+up, and bows in mild humility, to <i>her</i> of Japheth, seated amid plumed
+birds, in robes like the sky. Her noble lord, meanwhile, high above all,
+stands, with folded arms, following that eagle which wheels up towards
+Ararat, displaying his breast glittering with stars and stripes of scarlet
+and silver,--radiant heraldry, traced by the hand of God. Now he purifies
+his eye in the sun, and now he spreads his broad wings in symbolic flight
+to the <i>West</i>, until lost to the prophetic eye of Japheth, under the bow
+of splendors set that day in the cloud. God's covenant with man,--oh, may
+the bow of covenant between us be here to-day, that the waters of <i>this
+flood</i> shall never again threaten our beloved land!</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Speech Delivered in the General Assembly<br />
+New York, 1856.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>The circumstances, under which this speech was delivered, are sufficiently
+shown in the statement below.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a hasty production. After being spoken, it was prepared for the
+"Journal of Commerce," with the greatest care I could give to it: most of
+it was written again and again. Unlike Pascal, who said, as to his longest
+and inferior sixteenth letter, that he had not had time to make it
+shorter, I had time; and I did condense in that one speech the matured
+reflections of my whole life. I am calmly satisfied I am right. I am sure
+God has said, and does say, "Well done."</p>
+
+<p>The speech brings to view a wide range of thought, all belonging to the
+subject of slavery, of immense importance. As introductory,--there is the
+question of the abolition agitation the last thirty years; then, what is
+right and wrong, and the foundation of moral obligation; then, the
+definition of sin; next, the origin of human government, and the
+relations, in which God has placed men under his rule of subjection;
+finally, the word of God is brought to sustain all the positions taken.</p>
+
+<p>The challenge to argue the question of slavery from the Bible was thrown
+down on the floor of the Assembly, as stated. Presently I took up the
+gauntlet, and made this argument. The challenger never claimed his glove,
+then nor since; nor has anybody, so far as I know, attempted to refute
+this speech. Nothing has come to my ears (save as to two points, to be
+noticed hereafter) but reckless, bold denial of God's truth, infidel
+affirmation without attempt at proof, and denunciations of myself.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Wisner</i> having said that he would argue the question on the Bible at
+a following time, Dr. Ross rose, when he took his seat, and, taking his
+position on the platform near the Moderator's chair, said,--</p>
+
+<p>"I accept the challenge given by Dr. Wisner, to argue the question of
+slavery from the Scriptures."</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Wisner</i>.--Does the brother propose to go into it here?</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Ross</i>.--Yes, sir.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Wisner</i>.--Well, I did not propose to go into it here.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Ross</i>.--You gave the challenge, and I accept it.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Wisner</i>.--I said I would argue it at a proper time; but it is no
+matter. Go ahead.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dr. Beman</i> hoped the discussion would be ruled out. He did not think it a
+legitimate subject to go into,--Moses and the prophets, Christ and his
+apostles, and all intermediate authorities, on the subject of what the
+General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America had done.</p>
+
+<p><i>Judge Jessup</i> considered the question had been opened by this report of
+the majority: after which <i>Dr. Beman</i> withdrew his objection, and <i>Dr.
+Ross</i> proceeded.</p>
+
+<p>I am not a slave-holder. Nay, I have shown some self-denial in that
+matter. I emancipated slaves whose money-value would now be $40,000. In
+the providence of God, my riches have entirely passed from me. I do not
+mean that, like the widow, I gave all the living I had. My estate was then
+greater than that slave-property. I merely wish to show I have no selfish
+motive in giving, as I shall, the true Southern defence of slavery.
+(Applause.) I speak from Huntsville, Alabama, my present home. That gem of
+the South, that beautiful city where the mountain softens into the
+vale,--where the water gushes, a great fountain, from the rock,--where
+around that living stream there are streets of roses, and houses of
+intelligence and gracefulness and gentlest hospitality,--and, withal,
+where so high honor is ever given to the ministers of God.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking then from that region where "<i>Cotton is king</i>," I affirm,
+contrary as my opinion is to that most common in the South, that the
+slavery agitation has accomplished and will do great good. I said so, to
+ministerial and political friends, twenty-five years ago. I have always
+favored the agitation,--just as I have always countenanced discussion
+upon all subjects. I felt that the slavery question needed examination.
+I believed it was not understood in its relations to the Bible and human
+liberty. Sir, the light is spreading North and South. 'Tis said, I know,
+this agitation has increased the severity of slavery. True, but for a
+moment only, in the days of the years of the life of this noble problem.
+Farmers tell us that deep ploughing in poor ground will, for a year or
+two, give you a worse crop than before you went so deep; but that that
+deep ploughing will turn up the under-soil, and sun and air and rain will
+give you harvests increasingly rich. So, this moral soil, North and
+South, was unproductive. It needed deep ploughing. For a time the harvest
+was worse. Now it is becoming more and more abundant. The political
+controversy, however fierce and threatening, is only for power. But the
+moral agitation is for the harmony of the Northern and Southern mind, in
+the right interpretations of Scripture on this great subject, and, of
+course, for the ultimate union of the hearts of all sensible people, to
+fulfil God's intention,--to bless the white man and the black man in
+America. I am sure of this. I take a wide view of the progress of the
+destiny of this vast empire. I see God in America. I see him in the North
+and in the South. I see him more honored in the South to-day than he was
+twenty-five years ago; and that that higher regard is due, mainly, to the
+agitation of the slavery question. Do you ask how? Why, sir, this is the
+how. Twenty-five years ago the religious mind of the South was leavened
+by wrong Northern training, on the great point of the right and wrong of
+slavery. Meanwhile, powerful intellects in the South, following the mere
+light of a healthy good sense, guided by the common grace of God, reached
+the very truth of this great matter,--namely, that the relation of the
+master and slave is not sin; and that, notwithstanding its admitted
+evils, it is a connection between the highest and the lowest races of
+man, revealing influences which may be, and will be, most benevolent for
+the ultimate good of the master and the slave,--conservative on the
+Union, by preserving the South from all forms of Northern fanaticism, and
+thereby being a great balance-wheel in the working of the tremendous
+machinery of our experiment of self-government. This seen result of
+slavery was found to be in absolute harmony with the word of God. These
+men, then, of highest grade of thought, who had turned in scorn from
+Northern notions, now see, in the Bible, that these notions are false
+and silly. They now read the Bible, never examined before, with growing
+respect. God is honored, and his glory will be more and more in their
+salvation. These are some of the moral consummations of this agitation in
+the South. The development has been twofold in the North. On the one
+hand, some anti-slavery men have left the light of the Bible, and
+wandered into the darkness until they have reached the blackness of the
+darkness of infidelity. Other some are following hard after, and are
+throwing the Bible into the furnace,--are melting it into iron, and
+forging it, and welding it, and twisting it, and grooving it into the
+shape and significance and goodness and gospel of Sharpe's rifles. Sir,
+are you not afraid that some of your once best men will soon have no
+better Bible than that?</p>
+
+<p>But, on the other hand, many of your brightest minds are looking intensely
+at the subject, in the same light in which it is studied by the highest
+Southern reason. Ay, sir, mother-England, old fogy as she is, begins to
+open her eyes. What, then, is our gain? Sir, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in many of
+its conceptions, could not have been written twenty-five years ago. That
+book of genius,--over which I and hundreds in the world have freely
+wept,--true in all its facts, false in all its impressions,--yea, as false
+in the prejudice it creates to Southern social life as if Webster, the
+murderer of Parkman, may be believed to be a personification of the
+<i>elite</i> of honor in Cambridge, Boston, and New England. Nevertheless,
+Uncle Tom's Cabin could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Dr.
+Nehemiah Adams's "<i>South-Side View</i>" could not have been written
+twenty-five years ago. Nor Dr. Nathan Lord's "<i>Letter of Inquiry</i>." Nor
+Miss Murray's book. Nor "<i>Cotton is King</i>". Nor Bledsoe's "<i>Liberty and
+Slavery"</i>. These books, written in the midst of this agitation, are all of
+high, some the highest, reach of talent and noblest piety; all give, with
+increasing confidence, the present Southern Bible reading on Slavery. May
+the agitation, then, go on! I know the New School Presbyterian church has
+sustained some temporary injury. But God is honored in his word. The
+reaction, when the first abolition-movement commenced, has been succeeded
+by the sober second thought of the South. The sun, stayed, is again
+travelling in the greatness of his strength, and will shine brighter and
+brighter to the perfect day.</p>
+
+<p>My only fear, Mr. Moderator, is that, as you Northern people are so prone
+to go to extremes in your zeal and run every thing into the ground, you
+may, perhaps, become <i>too pro-slavery;</i> and that we may have to take
+measures against your coveting, over much, our daughters, if not our
+wives, our men-servants, our maid-servants, our houses, and our lands.
+(Laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>Sir, I come now to the Bible argument. I begin at the beginning of
+eternity! (Laughter.) WHAT is RIGHT AND WRONG? <i>That's the question of
+questions</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Two theories have obtained in the world. The one is, that right and wrong
+are eternal facts; that they exist <i>per se</i> in the nature of things; that
+they are ultimate truths above God; that he must study, and does study, to
+know them, as really as man. And that he comprehends them more clearly
+than man, only because he is a better student than man. Now, sir, <i>this
+theory is atheism</i>. For if right and wrong are like mathematical
+truths--fixed facts--then I may find them out, as I find out mathematical
+truths, without instruction from God. I do not ask God to tell me that one
+and one make two. I do not ask him to reveal to me the demonstrations of
+Euclid. I thank him for the mind to perceive. But I perceive mathematical
+relations without his telling me, because they exist independent of his
+will. If, then, moral truths, if right and wrong, if rectitude and sin,
+are, in like manner, fixed, eternal facts,--if they are out from and above
+God, like mathematical entities,--then I may find them for myself. I may
+condescend, perhaps, to regard the Bible as a hornbook, in which God, an
+older student than I, tells <i>me</i> how to <i>begin</i> to learn what he had to
+study; or I may decline to be taught, through the Bible, how to learn
+right and wrong. I may think the Bible was good enough, may be, for the
+Israelite in Egypt and in Canaan; good enough for the Christian in
+Jerusalem and Antioch and Rome, but not good enough, even as a hornbook,
+for me,--the man of the nineteenth century,--the man of Boston, New York,
+and Brooklyn! Oh, no. I may think I need it not at all. What next? Why,
+sir, if I may think I need not God to teach me moral truth, I may think I
+need him not to teach me any thing. What next? The irresistible conclusion
+is, I may think I can live without God; that Jehovah is a myth,--a name; I
+may bid him stand aside, or die. Oh, sir, <i>I will be</i> the fool to say
+there is no God. This is the result of the notion that right and wrong
+exist in the nature of things.</p>
+
+<p>The other theory is, that right and wrong are results brought into being,
+mere contingencies, means to good, made to exist solely by the will of
+God, expressed through his word; or, when his will is not thus known, he
+shows it in the human reason by which he rules the natural heart. This is
+so; because God, in making all things, saw that in the relations he would
+constitute between himself and intelligent creatures, and among
+themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass. In his benevolent
+wisdom, he then <i>willed</i> LAW, to control this <i>natural good and evil</i>. And
+he thereby made <i>conformity</i> to that law to be <i>right</i>, and
+<i>non-conformity</i> to be <i>wrong</i>. Why? Simply because he saw it to be good,
+and made it to be right; not because <i>he saw it to be right</i>, but because
+he <i>made it to be right</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, the ten specific commandments of the one moral law of love are just
+ten rules which God made to regulate the natural good and evil which he
+knew would be in the ten relations, which he himself constituted between
+himself and man, and between man and his neighbor. The Bible settles the
+question:--<i>sin is the transgression of the law, and where there is no law
+there is no sin</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I must-advance one step further. <i>What is sin</i>, as a mental state? Is
+it some quality--some concentrated essence--some elementary moral
+particle in the nature of things--something black, or red, like
+crimson, in the constitution of the soul, or the soul and body as
+amalgamated? No. Is it self-love? No. Is it selfishness? No. What is
+it? Just exactly, <i>self-will.</i> Just that. I, the creature, WILL <i>not
+submit</i> to <i>thy</i> WILL, God, the Creator. It is the I AM, <i>created</i>, who
+dares to defy and dishonor the I AM, not created,--the Lord God, the
+Almighty, Holy, Eternal.</p>
+
+<p><i>That</i> IS SIN, <i>per se</i>. And that is all of it,--so help me God! Your
+child there--John--says to his father, "I WILL <i>not to submit</i> to your
+will." "Why not, John?" And he answers and says, "Because I WILL <i>not</i>."
+There, sir, John has revealed <i>all of sin</i>, on earth or in hell. Satan has
+never said--can never say--more. "I, Satan, WILL NOT, because I WILL <i>not
+to submit</i> to thee, God; MY WILL, not thine, shall be."</p>
+
+<p>This beautiful theory is the ray of light which leads us from night, and
+twilight, and fog, and mist, and mystification, on this subject, to clear
+day. I will illustrate it by the law which has controlled and now
+regulates the most delicate of all the relations of life,--viz.: that of
+the intercourse between the sexes. I take this, because it presents the
+strongest apparent objections to my argument.</p>
+
+<p>Cain and Abel married their sisters. Was it wrong in the nature of things?
+[Here Dr. Wisner spoke out, and said, "Certainly."] I deny it. What an
+absurdity, to suppose that God could not provide for the propagation of
+the human race from one pair, without <i>requiring them to sin!</i> Adam's sons
+and daughters must have married, had they remained in innocence. They must
+then have sinned in Eden, from the very necessity of the command upon the
+race:--"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." (Gen. i. 28).
+What pure nonsense! There, sir!--<i>that</i>, my one question, Dr. Wisner's
+reply, and my rejoinder, bring out, perfectly, the two theories of right
+and wrong. Sir, Abraham married his half-sister. And there is not a word
+forbidding such marriage, until God gave the law (Lev. xviii.) prohibiting
+marriage in certain degrees of consanguinity. That law made, then, such
+marriage <i>sin</i>. But God gave no such law in the family of Adam; because he
+made, himself, the marriage of brother and sister the way, and the only
+way, for the increase of the human race. <i>He commanded them thus to marry.
+They would have sinned had they not thus married</i>; for they would have
+transgressed his law. Such marriage was not even a natural evil, in the
+then family of man. But when, in the increase of numbers, it became a
+natural evil, physical and social, God placed man on a higher platform for
+the development of civilization, morals, and religion, and then made the
+law regulating marriages in the particulars of blood. But he still left
+polygamy untouched. [Here Dr. Wisner again asked if Dr. R. regarded the
+Bible as sustaining the polygamy of the Old Testament.] Dr. R.--Yes, sir;
+yes, sir; yes, sir. Let the reporters mark <i>that</i> question, and my answer.
+(Laughter.) My principle vindicates God from unintelligible abstractions.
+I fearlessly tell what the Bible says. In its strength, I am not afraid of
+earth or hell. I fear only God. God made no law against polygamy, in the
+beginning. Therefore it was no sin for a man to have more wives than one.
+God sanctioned it, and made laws in regard to it. Abraham had more wives
+than one; Jacob had, David had, Solomon had. God told David, by the mouth
+of Nathan, when he upbraided him with his ingratitude for the blessings
+he had given him, and said, "And I gave thee thy master's house, and <i>thy
+master's wives</i> into thy bosom." (2 Sam. xvii. 8.)</p>
+
+<p>God, in the gospel, places man on another platform, for the revelation of
+a nobler social and spiritual life. He now forbids polygamy. <i>Polygamy now
+is sin</i>--not because it is in itself sin. No; but because God forbids
+it,--to restrain the natural and social evil, and to bring out a higher
+humanity. And see, sir, how gently in the gospel the transition from the
+lower to the higher table-land of our progress upward is made. Christ and
+his apostles do not declare polygamy to be sin. The new law is so wisely
+given that nothing existing is rudely disturbed. The minister of God,
+unmarried, must have only one wife at the same time. This law, silently
+and gradually, by inevitable and fair inference of its meaning, and from
+the example of the apostles, passed over the Christian world. God, in the
+gospel, places us in this higher and holier ground and air of love. We
+sin, then, if we marry the sister, and other near of kin; and we sin if we
+marry, at the same time, more wives than one, not because there is sin in
+the thing itself, whatever of natural evil there might be, but because in
+so doing we transgress God's law, given to secure and advance the good of
+man. I might comment in the same way on every one of the ten commandments,
+but I pass on.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of slavery, in this view of <i>right and wrong</i>, is seen in the
+very light of heaven. And you, Mr. Moderator, know that, if the view I
+have presented be true, I have got you. (Great laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>[The Moderator said, very pleasantly--Yes--<i>if</i>--but it is a <i>long if</i>.]
+(Continued laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>Dr. R. touched the Moderator on the shoulder, and said, Yes, <i>if</i>--it is a
+<i>long if</i>; for it is this:--<i>if</i> there is a God, he is not Jupiter, bowing
+to the Fates, but God, the sovereign over the universe he has created, in
+which he makes right, by making law to be known and obeyed by angels and
+men, in their varied conditions.</p>
+
+<p>He gave Adam <i>that</i> command,--sublime in its simplicity, and intended to
+vindicate the principle I am affirming,--that there is no right and wrong
+in the nature of things. There was no right or wrong, <i>per se</i>, in eating
+or willing to eat of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.</p>
+
+<p>But God made the law,--<i>Thou shall not eat of that tree</i>. As if he had
+said,--I seek to <i>test</i> the submission of your will, freely, to my will.
+And, that your test may be perfect, I will let your temptation be
+nothing more than your natural desire for that fruit. Adam sinned. What
+was the sin?</p>
+
+<p>Adam said, in heart, MY WILL, <i>not thine</i>, SHALL BE. <i>That</i> was the
+sin,--<i>the simple transgression of God's law</i>, when there was neither sin
+nor evil in the <i>thing</i> which God forbade to be done.</p>
+
+<p>Man fell and was cursed. The law of the control of the superior over the
+inferior is now to begin, and is to go on in the depraved conditions of
+the fallen and cursed race. And, FIRST, God said to the woman, "<i>Thy
+desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." There,</i> in
+that law, is <i>the beginning of government ordained of God. There</i> is the
+beginning of the rule of the superior over the inferior, bound to obey.
+<i>There</i>, in the family of Adam, is the germ of the rule in the tribe,--the
+state. Adam, in his right, from God, to rule over his wife and his
+children, had <i>all the authority</i> afterwards expanded in the patriarch and
+the king. This simple, beautiful fact, there, on the first leaf of the
+Bible, solves the problem, whence and how has man right to rule over man.
+In that great fact God gives his denial to the idea that government over
+man is the result of a social compact, in which each individual man living
+in a state of natural liberty, yielded some of that liberty to secure the
+greater good of government. Such a thing never was; such a thing never
+could have been. <i>Government was ordained and established before the first
+child was born:</i>--"HE SHALL RULE OVER THEE." Cain and Abel were born in a
+<i>state</i> as perfect as the empire of Britain or the rule of these United
+States. All that Blackstone, and Paley, and Hobbs, or anybody else, says
+about the social compact, is flatly and fully denied and upset by the
+Bible, history, and common sense. Let any New York lawyer--or even a
+Philadelphia lawyer--deny this if he dares. <i>Life, liberty, and the
+pursuit of happiness</i> never were the <i>inalienable</i> right of the
+<i>individual</i> man.</p>
+
+<p>His self-control, in all these particulars, <i>from the beginning</i>, was
+subordinate to the good of the family,--the empire. The command to Noah
+was,--"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
+(Gen. ix. 6.)</p>
+
+<p>This command to shed blood was, and is, in perfect harmony with the
+law,--"Thou shalt not kill." There is nothing right or wrong in <i>the
+taking of life</i>, per se, or in itself considered. It may or it may not be
+a natural good or evil. As a <i>general fact</i>, the taking of life is a
+natural evil. Hence, "Thou shalt not kill" is the general rule, to
+preserve the good there is in life. To take life under the forbidden
+conditions is sin, simply because God forbids it under those conditions.
+The sin is not in taking life, but in transgressing God's law.</p>
+
+<p>But <i>sometimes</i> the taking of life will secure a greater good. God, then,
+commands that life be taken. Not to take life, under the commanded
+conditions, is sin,--solely because God then commands it.</p>
+
+<p>This power over life, for the good of the one great family of man, God
+<i>delegated</i> to Noah, and through him to the tribe, the clan, the kingdom,
+the empire, the democracy, the republic, as they may be governed by chief,
+king, emperor, parliament, or congress. Had Ham killed Shem, Noah would
+have commanded Japheth to slay him. So much for the origin of the power
+over life: now for the power over liberty.</p>
+
+<p>The right to take life included the right over liberty. But God intended
+the rule of the superior over the inferior, in relations of service,
+should <i>exemplify human depravity, his curse and his overruling blessing</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The rule and the subordination which is essential to the existence of the
+family, God made commensurate with mankind; for <i>mankind is only the
+congeries of families</i>. When Ham, in his antediluvian recklessness,
+laughed at his father, God took occasion to give to the world the rule of
+the superior over the inferior. <i>He cursed him. He cursed him because he
+left him unblessed</i>. The withholding of the father's blessing, in the
+Bible, was curse. Hence Abraham prayed God, when Isaac was blessed, that
+Ishmael might not be passed by. Hence Esau prayed his father, when Jacob
+was blessed, that he might not be left untouched by his holy hands. Ham
+was cursed to render service, forever, to Shem and Japheth. The <i>special</i>
+curse on Canaan made the general curse on Ham conspicuous, historic, and
+explanatory, simply because his descendants were to be brought under the
+control of God's peculiar people. Shem was blessed to rule over Ham.
+Japheth was blessed to rule over both. God sent Ham to Africa, Shem to
+Asia, Japheth to Europe. Mr. Moderator, you have read Guyot's "<i>Earth and
+Man</i>." That admirable book is a commentary upon this part of Genesis. It
+is the philosophy of geography. And it is the philosophy of the rule of
+the higher races over the inferior, written on the very face of the earth.
+He tells you why the continents are shaped as they are shaped; why the
+mountains stand where they stand; why the rivers run where they run; why
+the currents of the sea and the air flow as they flow. And he tells you
+that the earth south of the Equator makes the inferior man. That the
+oceanic climate makes the inferior man in the Pacific Islands. That South
+America makes the inferior man. That the solid, unindented Southern Africa
+makes the inferior man. That the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent Asia
+makes the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent man. That Europe, indented by
+the sea on every side, with its varied scenery, and climate, and Northern
+influences, makes the varied intellect, the versatile power and life and
+action, of the master-man of the world. And it is so. Africa, with here
+and there an exception, has never produced men to compare with the men of
+Asia. For six thousand years, save the unintelligible stones of Egypt, she
+has had no history. Asia has had her great men and her name. But Europe
+has ever shown, and now, her nobler men and higher destiny. Japheth has
+now come to North America, to give us his past greatness and his
+transcendent glory. (Applause.) And, sir, I thank God our mountains stand
+where they stand; and that our rivers run where they run. Thank God they
+run not across longitudes, but across latitudes, from north to south. If
+they crossed longitudes, we might fear for the Union. But I hail the
+Union,--made by God, strong as the strength of our hills, and ever to live
+and expand,--like the flow and swell of the current of our streams.
+(Applause.)</p>
+
+<p>These two theories of Right and Wrong,--these two ideas of human
+liberty,--the right, in the nature of things, or the right as made by
+God,--the liberty of the individual man, of Atheism, of Red Republicanism,
+of the devil,--or the liberty of man, in the family, in the State, the
+liberty from God,--these two theories now make the conflict of the world.
+This anti-slavery battle is only part of the great struggle: God will be
+victorious,--and we, in his might.</p>
+
+<p>I now come to particular illustrations of the world-wide law that service
+shall be rendered by the inferior to the superior. The relations in which
+such service obtains are very many. Some of them are these:--husband and
+wife; parent and child; teacher and scholar; commander and
+soldier,--sailor; master and apprentice; master and hireling; master and
+slave. Now, sir, all these relations are ordained of God. They are all
+directly commanded, or they are the irresistible law of his providence, in
+conditions which must come up in the progress of depraved nature. The
+relations themselves are all good in certain conditions. And there may be
+no more of evil in the lowest than in the highest. And there may be in the
+lowest, as really as in the highest, the fulfilment of the commandment to
+love thy neighbor as thyself, and of doing unto him whatsoever thou
+wouldst have him to do unto thee.</p>
+
+<p>Why, sir, the wife everywhere, except where Christianity has given her
+elevation, is <i>the slave</i>. And, sir, I say, without fear of saying too
+strongly, that for every sigh, every groan, every tear, every agony of
+stripe or death, which has gone up to God from the relation of master and
+slave, there have been more sighs, more groans, more tears, and more agony
+in the rule of the husband over the wife. Sir, I have admitted, and do
+again admit, without qualification, that every fact in Uncle Tom's Cabin
+has occurred in the South. But, in reply, I say deliberately, what one of
+your first men told me, that he who will make the horrid examination will
+discover in New York City, in any number of years past, more cruelty from
+husband to wife, parent to child, <i>than in all the South from master to
+slave</i> in the same time. I dare the investigation. And you may extend it
+further, if you choose,--to all the results of honor and purity. I fear
+nothing on this subject. I stand on rock,--the Bible,--and therefore, just
+before I bring the Bible, to which all I have said is introductory, I will
+run a parallel between the relation of master and slave and that of
+husband and wife. I will say nothing of the grinding oppression of capital
+upon labor, in the power of the master over the hireling--the crushed
+peasant--the chain-harnessed coal-pit woman, a thousand feet under ground,
+working in darkness, her child toiling by her side, and another child not
+born; I will say nothing of the press-gang which fills the navy of
+Britain--the conscription which makes the army of France--the terrible
+floggings--the awful court-martial--the quick sentence--the
+lightning-shot--the chain, and ball, and every-day lash--the punishment of
+the soldier, sailor, slave, who had run away. I pass all this by: I will
+run the parallel between the slave and wife.</p>
+
+<p>Do you say, The slave is held to <i>involuntary service?</i> So is the wife.
+Her relation to her husband, in the immense majority of cases, is made for
+her, and not by her. And when she makes it for herself, how often, and how
+soon, does it become involuntary! How often, and how soon, would she
+throw off the yoke if she could! O ye wives, I know how superior you are
+to your husbands in many respects,--not only in personal attraction,
+(although in that particular, comparison is out of place,) in grace, in
+refined thought, in passive fortitude, in enduring love, and in a heart to
+be filled with the spirit of heaven. Oh, I know all this. Nay, I know you
+may surpass him in his own sphere of boasted prudence and worldly wisdom
+about dollars and cents. Nevertheless, he has authority, from God, to rule
+over you. You are under service to him. You are bound to obey him <i>in all
+things</i>. Your service is very, very, very often involuntary from the
+first, and, if voluntary at first, becomes hopeless necessity afterwards.
+I know God has laid upon the husband to love you as Christ loved the
+church, and in that sublime obligation has placed you in the light and
+under the shadow of a love infinitely higher, and purer, and holier than
+all talked about in the romances of chivalry. But the husband may not so
+love you. He may rule you with the rod of iron. What can you do? Be
+divorced? God forbids it, save for crime. Will you say that you are
+free,--that you will go where you please, do as you please? Why, ye dear
+wives, your husbands may forbid. And listen, you cannot leave New York,
+nor your palaces, any more than your shanties. No; you cannot leave your
+parlor, nor your bedchamber, nor your couch, if your husband commands you
+to stay there! What can you do? Will you run away, with your stick and
+your bundle? He can advertise you!! What can you do? You can, and I fear
+some of you do, wish him, from the bottom of your hearts, at the bottom of
+the Hudson. Or, in your self-will, you will do just as you please. (Great
+laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>[A word on the subject of divorce. One of your standing denunciations on
+the South is the terrible laxity of the marriage vow among the slaves.
+Well, sir, what does your Boston Dr. Nehemiah Adams say? He says, after
+giving eighty, sixty, and the like number of applications for divorce, and
+nearly all granted at individual quarterly courts in New England,--he says
+he is not sure but that the marriage relation is as enduring among <i>the
+slaves in the South</i> as it is among white people in New England. I only
+give what Dr. Adams says. I would fain vindicate the marriage relation
+from this rebuke. But one thing I will say: you seldom hear of a divorce
+in Virginia or South Carolina.]</p>
+
+<p>But to proceed:--</p>
+
+<p>Do you say the slave is <i>sold and bought?</i> So is the wife the world over.
+Everywhere, always, and now as the general fact, however done away or
+modified by Christianity. The savage buys her. The barbarian buys her. The
+Turk buys her. The Jew buys her. The Christian buys her,--Greek, Armenian,
+Nestorian, Roman Catholic, Protestant. The Portuguese, the Spaniard, the
+Italian, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the New
+England man, the New Yorker,--especially the upper ten,--<i>buy the
+wife</i>--in many, very many cases. She is seldom bought in the South, and
+never among the slaves themselves; for they always marry for love.
+(Continued laughter.) Sir, I say the wife is bought in the highest
+circles, too often, as really as the slave is bought. Oh, she is not sold
+and purchased in the public market. But come, sir, with me, and let us
+take the privilege of spirits out of the body to glide into that gilded
+saloon, or into that richly comfortable family room, of cabinets, and
+pictures, and statuary: see the parties, there, to sell and buy that human
+body and soul, and make her a chattel! See how they sit, and bend towards
+each other, in earnest colloquy, on sofa of rosewood and satin,--<i>Turkey</i>
+carpet (how befitting!) under feet, sunlight over head, softened through
+stained windows: or it is night, and the gas is turned nearly off, and the
+burners gleam like stars through the shadow from which the whisper is
+heard, in which that old ugly brute, with gray goatee--how fragrant!--bids
+one, two, five, ten hundred thousand dollars, and <i>she</i> is knocked off to
+him,--that beautiful young girl asleep up there, amid flowers, and
+innocent that she is sold and bought. Sir, that young girl would as soon
+permit a baboon to embrace her, as that old, ignorant, gross, disgusting
+wretch to approach her. Ah, has she not been sold and bought for money?
+But--But what? But, you say, she freely, and without parental authority,
+accepted him. Then she sold herself for money, and was guilty of <i>that</i>
+which is nothing better than legal prostitution. I know what I say; you
+know what I say. Up there in the gallery you know: you nod to one another.
+Ah! you know the parties. Yes, you say: All true, true, true. (Laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>Now, Mr. Moderator, I will clinch all I have said by nails sure, and
+fastened from the word of God.</p>
+
+<p>There is King James's English Bible, with its magnificent dedication. I
+bring the English acknowledged translation. And just one word more to
+push gently aside--for I am a kind man to those poor, deluded anti-slavery
+people--their last argument. It is <i>that</i> this English Bible, in those
+parts which treat of slavery, don't give the ideas which are found in the
+original Hebrew and Greek. Alas for the common people!--alas for this good
+old translation! Are its days numbered? No, sir; no, sir. The Unitarian,
+the Universalist, the Arminian, the Baptist, when pressed by this
+translation, have tried to find shelter for their false isms by making or
+asking for a new rendering. And now the anti-slavery men are driving hard
+at the same thing. (Laughter.) Sir, shall we permit our people everywhere
+to have their confidence in this noble translation undermined and
+destroyed by the isms and whims of every or any man in our pulpits? I
+affirm, whatever be our perfect liberty of examination into God's meaning
+in all the light of the original languages, that there is a respect due to
+this received version, and that great caution should be used, lest we
+teach the people to doubt its true rendering from the original word of
+God. I protest, sir, against having a Doctor-of-Divinity <i>priest</i>, Hebrew
+or Greek, to tell the people what God has spoken on the subject of
+slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin
+priest,--I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,--I would as soon go to
+Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,--I would as soon have the Pope at once in
+his fallible infallibility,--as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery
+Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible
+rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet
+produced this Bible, in its plain unanswerable authority, for the relation
+of master and slave, but the anti-slavery man ran away into the fog of
+<i>his</i> Hebrew or Greek, (laughter,) or he jabbered the nonsense that God
+permitted the <i>sin</i> of slaveholding among the Jews, but that he don't do
+it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it
+right, they know, then and now. Having thus taken the last puff of wind
+out of the sails of the anti-slavery phantom ship, turn to the
+twenty-first chapter of Exodus, vs. 2-5. God, in these verses, gave the
+Israelites his command how they should buy and hold the Hebrew
+servant,--how, under certain conditions, he went free,--how, under other
+circumstances, he might be held to service forever, with his wife and her
+children. There it is. Don't run into the Hebrew. (Laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>But what have we here?--vs. 7-11:--"And if a man sell his daughter to be a
+maid-servant, she shall not go out as the men-servants do. If she please
+not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her
+be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power,
+seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he hath betrothed her
+unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he
+take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage
+shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall
+she go out free without money." Now, sir, the wit of man can't dodge that
+passage, unless he runs away into the Hebrew. (Great laughter.) For what
+does God say? Why, this:--that an Israelite might sell his own daughter,
+not only into servitude, but into polygamy,--that the buyer might, if he
+pleased, give her to his son for a wife, or take her to himself. If he
+took her to himself, and she did not please him, he should not sell her
+unto a strange nation, but should allow her to be redeemed by her family.
+But, if he took him another wife before he allowed the first one to be
+redeemed, he should continue to give the first one <i>food</i>, her <i>raiment</i>,
+and her <i>duty of marriage</i>; that is to say, <i>her right to his bed</i>. If he
+did not do <i>these three things</i>, she should go out free; <i>i.e.</i> cease to
+be his slave, without his receiving any money for her. There, sir, God
+sanctioned the Israelite father in selling his daughter, and the Israelite
+man to buy her, into slavery and into polygamy. And it was then right,
+because God made it right. In verses 20 and 21, you have these
+words:--"And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die
+under his hand, he shall be surely punished; notwithstanding, if he
+continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."
+What does this passage mean? Surely this:--if the master gave his slave a
+hasty blow with a rod, and he died under his hand, he should be punished.
+But, if the slave lived a day or two, it would so extenuate the act of the
+master he should not be punished, inasmuch as he would be in that case
+sufficiently punished in losing his money in his slave. Now, sir, I affirm
+that God was more lenient to the degraded Hebrew master than Southern laws
+are to the higher Southern master in like cases. But there you have what
+was the divine will. Find fault with God, ye anti-slavery men, if you
+dare. In Leviticus, xxv. 44-46, "Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which
+thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them
+shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the
+strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their
+families that are with you, which they beget in your land: and they shall
+be your 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."</p>
+
+<p>Sir, I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command
+his people to buy slaves from the heathen round about them, and from the
+stranger, and of their families sojourning among them. The passage has no
+other meaning. Did God merely permit sin?--did he merely tolerate a
+dreadful evil? God does not say so anywhere. He gives his people law to
+buy and hold slaves of the heathen forever, on certain conditions, and to
+buy and hold Hebrew slaves in variously-modified particulars. Well, how
+did the heathen, then, get slaves to sell? Did they capture them in
+war?--did they sell their own children? Wherever they got them, they sold
+them; and God's law gave his people the right to buy them.</p>
+
+<p>God in the New Testament made no law prohibiting the relation of master
+and slave. But he made law regulating the relation under Greek and Roman
+slavery, which was the most oppressive in the world.</p>
+
+<p>God saw that these regulations would ultimately remove the evils in the
+Greek and Roman systems, and do it away entirely from the fitness of
+things, as there existing; for Greek and Roman slaves, for the most part,
+were the equals in all respects of their masters. &AElig;sop was a slave;
+Terence was a slave. The precepts in Colossians iv. 18, 23, 1 Tim. vi.
+1-6, and other places, show, unanswerably, that God as really sanctioned
+the relation of master and slave as those of husband and wife, and parent
+and child; and that all the obligations of the moral law, and Christ's law
+of love, might and must be as truly fulfilled in the one relation as in
+the other. The fact that he has made the one set of relations permanent,
+and the other more or less dependent on conditions of mankind, or to pass
+away in the advancement of human progress, does not touch the question. He
+sanctioned it under the Old Testament and the New, and ordains it now
+while he sees it best to continue it, and he now, as heretofore, proclaims
+the duty of the master and the slave. Dr. Parker's admirable explanation
+of Colossians, and other New Testament passages, saves me the necessity of
+saying any thing more on the Scripture argument.</p>
+
+<p>One word on the Detroit resolutions, and I conclude. Those resolutions of
+the Assembly of 1850 decide that slavery is sin, unless the master holds
+his slave as a guardian, or under the claims of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Moderator, I think we had on this floor, yesterday, proof conclusive
+that those resolutions mean any thing or nothing; that they are a fine
+specimen of Northern skill in platform-making; that it put in a plank
+here, to please this man,--a plank there, to please that man,--a plank for
+the North, a broad board for the South. It is Jackson's judicious tariff.
+It is a gum-elastic conscience, stretched now to a charity covering all
+the multitude of our Southern sins, contracted now, giving us hardly a
+fig-leaf of righteousness. It is a bowl of punch,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>  A little sugar to make it sweet,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A little lemon to make it sour,<br />
+A little water to make it weak,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A little brandy to give it power. (Laughter.)</blockquote>
+
+<p>As a Northern argument against us, it is a mass of lead so heavy that it
+weighed down even the strong shoulders of Judge Jessup. For, sir, when he
+closed his speech, I asked him a single question I had made ready for him.
+It was this:--"Do you allow that Mr. Aiken, of South Carolina, may, under
+the claims of humanity, hold three thousand slaves, or must he emancipate
+them?" The Judge staggered, and stammered, and said, "No man could rightly
+hold so many." I then asked, "How many may he hold, in humanity?" The
+Judge saw his fatal dilemma. He recovered himself handsomely, and fairly
+said, "Mr. Aiken might hold three thousand slaves, in harmony with the
+Detroit action." I replied, "Then, sir, you have surrendered the whole
+question of Southern slavery." And, sir, the Judge looked as if he felt he
+had surrendered it. And every man in this house, capable of understanding
+the force of that question, felt it had shivered the whole anti-slavery
+argument, on those resolutions, to atoms. Why, sir, if a man can hold
+three slaves, with a right heart and the approbation of God, he may hold
+thirty, three hundred, three thousand, or thirty thousand. It is a mere
+question of heart, and capacity to govern. The Emperor of Russia holds
+sixty millions of slaves: and is there a man in this house so much of a
+fool as to say that God regards the Emperor of Russia a sinner because he
+is the master of sixty millions of slaves? Sir, that Emperor has certainly
+a high and awful responsibility upon him. But, if he is good as he is
+great, he is a god of benevolence on earth. And so is every Southern
+master. His obligation is high, and great, and glorious. It is the same
+obligation, in kind, he is under to his wife and children, and in some
+respects immensely higher, by reason of the number and the tremendous
+interests involved for time and eternity in connection with this great
+country, Africa, and the world. Yes, sir, <i>I know</i>, whether Southern
+masters fully know it or not, that <i>they hold from God</i>, individually and
+collectively, <i>the highest and the noblest responsibility ever given by
+Him to individual private men on all the face of the earth.</i> For God has
+intrusted to them to train millions of the most degraded in form and
+intellect, but, at the same time, the most gentle, the most amiable, the
+most affectionate, the most imitative, the most susceptible of social and
+religious love, of all the races of mankind,--to train them, and to give
+them civilization, and the light and the life of the gospel of Jesus
+Christ. And I thank God he has given this great work to that type of the
+noble family of Japheth best qualified to do it,--to the Cavalier
+stock,--the gentleman and the lady of England and France, born to command,
+and softened and refined under our Southern sky. May they know and feel
+and fulfil their destiny! Oh, may they "know that they also have a Master
+in heaven."</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="02"></a>Letter from Dr. Ross.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>I need only say, in reference to this letter, that my friends
+having questioned my position as to the good of the agitation, I
+wrote the following letter to vindicate that point, as given, in
+the New York speech:--</p>
+
+<p>HUNTSVILLE, ALA., July 14, 1856.</p>
+
+<p><i>Brother Blackburn</i>:--I affirmed, in my New York speech, that the Slavery
+agitation has done, and will accomplish, good.</p>
+
+<p>Your very kind and courteous disagreement on that point I will make the
+occasion to say something more thereon, without wishing you, my dear
+friend, to regard what I write as inviting any discussion.</p>
+
+<p>I said <i>that</i> agitation has brought out, and would reveal still more
+fully, the Bible, in its relation to slavery and liberty,--also the
+infidelity which long has been, and is now, leavening with death the whole
+Northern mind. And that it would result in the triumph of the <i>true</i>
+Southern interpretation of the Bible; to the honor of God, and to the
+good of the master, the slave, the stability of the Union, and be a
+blessing to the world. To accomplish this, the sin <i>per se</i> doctrine will
+be utterly demolished. That doctrine is the difficulty in every <i>Northern
+mind,</i> (where there is any difficulty about slavery,) whether they confess
+it or not. Yes, the difficulty with every Northern man is, that <i>the
+relation of</i> master and slave is felt <i>to be</i> sin. I know that to be the
+fact. I have talked with all grades of Northern men, and come in contact
+with all varieties of Northern mind on this subject. And I know that the
+man who says and tries to believe, and does, partially in sober judgment,
+believe, that slavery is not sin, yet, <i>in his feelings, in his educated
+prejudices</i>, he feels that slavery is sin.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, <i>that</i> is the difficulty, and <i>that</i> is the whole of the difficulty,
+<i>between the North and the South</i>, so far as the question is one of the
+Bible and morals. Now, I again say, that that <i>sin per se</i> doctrine will,
+in this agitation, be utterly demolished. And when that is done,--when the
+North will know and feel fully, perfectly, that the relation of master and
+slave is not sin, but sanctioned of God,--then, and not till then, the
+North and South can and will, without anger, consider the following
+questions:--Whether slavery, as it exists in the United States, all
+things considered, be or be not a great good, and the greatest good for a
+time, notwithstanding its admitted evils? Again, whether these evils can
+or cannot be modified and removed? Lastly, whether slavery itself can or
+cannot pass away from this land and the world? Now, sir, the moment the
+sin question is settled, then all is peace. For these other questions
+belong entirely to another category of morals. They belong entirely to the
+category of <i>what is</i> wise <i>to realize</i> good. This agitation will bring
+this great result. And therefore I affirm the agitation to be good.</p>
+
+<p>There is another fact also, the result, in great measure, of this
+agitation, which in my view proves it to have been and to be of great
+good. I mean the astonishing rise and present stability of the slave-power
+of the United States. This fact, when examined, is undeniable. And it is
+equally undeniable that it has been caused, in great part, by the slavery
+question in all its bearings. It is a wonderful development made by God.
+And I must believe he intends thereby either to destroy or bless this
+great Union. But, as I believe he intends to bless, therefore I am
+fortified in affirming the good there has been and is in this agitation.
+Let me bring out to view this astonishing fact.</p>
+
+<p>1. Twenty-five years ago, and previously, the whole slave-holding South
+and West had a strong tendency to emancipation, in some form. But the
+abolition movement then began, and arrested that Southern and Western
+leaning to emancipation. Many people have said, and do say, that that
+<i>arrest</i> was and is a great evil. I say it was and is a great good. Why?
+Answer: It was and would now be premature. Had it been carried out, it
+would have been and would now be evil, immense, inconceivable,--to master,
+slave, America, Africa, and the world; because neither master, slave,
+America, Africa, the world, were, or are, ready for emancipation. God has
+a great deal to do before he is ready for emancipation. He tells us so by
+this <i>arrest</i> put upon that tendency to emancipation years ago. For He put
+it into the hearts of abolitionists <i>to make the arrest</i>. And He stopped
+the Southern movement all the more perfectly by permitting Great Britain
+to emancipate Jamaica, and letting that experiment prove, as it has, a
+perfect failure and a terrible warning. JAMAICA IS DESTROYED. And now,
+whatever be done for its negroes must be done with the full admission that
+what has been attempted was in violation of the duty Britain owed to
+those negroes. But her failure in seeing and doing her duty, God has given
+to us to teach us knowledge; and, through us, to instruct the world in the
+demonstration of the problem of slavery.</p>
+
+<p>2. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to give Texas to the South. Texas, a territory so vast that
+a bird, as Webster said, can't fly over it in a week. Many in the South
+did not want Texas. But many longer-headed ones did want it. And Northern
+men voted and gave to the South exactly what these longer-headed Southern
+statesmen wanted. This, I grant, was Northern anti-slavery fatuity,
+utterly unaccountable but that God made them do it.</p>
+
+<p>3. God put it into the hearts of Northern men--especially
+abolitionists--to vote for Polk, Dallas, and Texas. This gave us the
+Mexican War; and that immense territory, its spoil,--a territory which,
+although it may not be favorable for slave-labor, has increased, and will,
+in many ways, extend the slave-power.</p>
+
+<p>4. This leads me to say that God put it into the hearts of many Northern
+men--especially abolitionists--to believe what Great Britain
+said,--namely, that <i>free trade</i> would result in slave-emancipation. <i>But
+lo! the slave-holder wanted free trade</i>. So Northern abolitionists helped
+to destroy the <i>tariff policy</i>, and thus to expand the demand for, and the
+culture of, cotton. Now, see, the gold of California has <i>perpetuated free
+trade</i> by enabling our merchants to meet the enormous demand for specie
+created by free trade. So California helps the slave-power. But the
+abolitionists gave us Polk, the Mexican War, and California.</p>
+
+<p>5. God put it into the hearts of the North, and especially abolitionists,
+to stimulate the settlement of new free States, and to be the ardent
+friends of an immense foreign emigration. The result has been to send down
+to the South, with railroad speed and certainty, corn, wheat, flour, meal,
+bacon, pork, beef, and every other imaginable form of food, in quantity
+amazing, and so cheap that the planter can spread wider and wider the
+culture of cotton.</p>
+
+<p>6. God has, by this growth of the Northwest, made the demand for cotton
+enormous in the North and Northwest. Again, he has made English and French
+experiments to procure cotton somewhere else than from the United States
+<i>dead failures</i>,--in the East Indies, Egypt, Algeria, Brazil. God has
+thus given to the Southern planter an absolute monopoly. A monopoly so
+great that he, the Southern planter, sits now upon his throne of cotton
+and wields the commercial sceptre of the world. Yes, it is the Southern
+planter who says to-day to haughty England, Go to war, if you dare;
+dismiss Dallas, if you dare. Yes, he who sits on the throne of the
+cotton-bag has triumphed at last over him who sits on the throne of the
+wool-sack. England is prostrate at his feet, as well as the abolitionists.</p>
+
+<p>7. God has put it into the hearts of abolitionists to prevent half a
+million of free negroes from going to Liberia; and thereby the
+abolitionists have made them consumers of slave-products to the extension
+of the slave-power. And, by thus keeping them in America, the
+abolitionists have so increased their degradation as to prove all the more
+the utter folly of emancipation in the United States.</p>
+
+<p>8. God has permitted the anti-slavery men in the North, in England, in
+France, and everywhere, so to blind themselves in hypocrisy as to give the
+Southern slave-holder his last perfect triumph over them; for God tells
+the planter to say to the North, to England, to France, to all who buy
+cotton, "Ye men of Boston, New York, London, Paris,--ye hypocrites,--ye
+brand me as a pirate, a kidnapper, a murderer, a demon, fit only for hell,
+and yet ye buy my blood-stained cotton. O ye hypocrites!--ye Boston
+hypocrites! why don't ye throw the cotton in the sea, as your fathers did
+the tea? Ye Boston hypocrites! ye say, <i>if we had been in the days of our
+fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the
+slave-trade!</i> Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the
+children of them who, in fact, kidnapped and bought in blood, and sold the
+slave in America! for now, ye hypocrites, ye buy the blood-stained cotton
+in quantity so immense, that <i>ye</i> have run up the price of slaves to
+be more than a thousand dollars,--the average of old and young! O ye
+hypocrites! ye denounce slavery; then ye bid it live, and not die,--in
+that ye buy sugar, rice, tobacco, and, above all, cotton! Ye hypocrites!
+ye abuse the devil, and then fall down and worship him!--ye
+hypocrites,--ye New England hypocrites,--ye Old England hypocrites,--ye
+French hypocrites,--ye Uncle Tom's Cabin hypocrites,--ye Beecher
+hypocrites,--ye Rhode Island Consociation hypocrites! Oh, your holy
+twaddle stinks in the nostrils of God, and he commands me to lash you
+with my scorn, and his scorn, so long as ye gabble about the sin of
+slavery, and then bow down to me, and buy and spin cotton, and thus work
+for me as truly as my slaves! O ye fools and blind, fill ye up the measure
+of your folly, and blindness, and shame! And this ye are doing. Ye have,
+like the French infidels, made <i>reason</i> your goddess, and are exalting her
+above the Bible; and, in your unitarianism and neology and all modes of
+infidelity, ye are rejecting and crucifying the Son of God."</p>
+
+<p>Now, my brother, this controlling slave-power is a world-wide fact. Its
+statistics of bales count by millions; its tonnage counts by hundreds of
+thousands; its manufacture is reckoned by the workshops of America and
+Europe; its supporters are numbered by all who must thus be clothed in the
+world. This tremendous power has been developed in great measure by the
+abolition agitation, controlled by God. I believe, then, as I have already
+said, that God intends one of two things. He either intends to destroy the
+United States by this slave-power, or he intends to bless my country and
+the world by the unfoldings of his wisdom in this matter. I believe he
+will bless the world in the working out of this slavery. I rejoice, then,
+in the agitation which has so resulted, and will so terminate, to reveal
+the Bible, and bless mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Your affectionate friend,</p>
+
+<p>F.A. Ross.</p>
+
+<p>REV. A. BLACKBURN.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="03"></a>What Is the Foundation of Moral Obligation?</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>My position as to this all-important question, in my New York speech, was
+made subject of remark in the "Presbyterian Herald," Louisville, Kentucky,
+to which I replied at length in the "Presbyterian Witness," Knoxville,
+Tennessee. No rejoinder was ever made to that reply. But, recently, an
+extract from the younger Edwards was submitted to me. To that I gave the
+following letter. The subject is of the first and the last importance, and
+bears directly, as set forth in my New York speech, on infidelity, and, of
+course, the slavery question:--</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Editor:--In your paper of Tuesday, 24th ult., there is an article,
+under this head, giving the argument of Edwards (the son) against my views
+as to <i>the foundation of moral obligation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I thank the writer for his argument, and his courteous manner of
+presenting it. In my third letter to Mr. Barnes, I express my preparation
+to meet "<i>all comers</i>" on this question; and I am pleased to see this
+"<i>comer</i>". If my views cannot be refuted by Edwards, I may wait long
+for an "<i>uglier customer</i>."</p>
+
+<p>A word, introductory, to your correspondent. He says, "His [Dr. Ross's]
+theory was advanced and argued against in a former age." By this, I
+understand him to express his belief that my theory has been rejected
+heretofore. Well. It may, nevertheless, be the true theory. The Copernican
+astronomy was argued against in a former age and rejected; yet it has
+prevailed. Newton's law of gravitation was argued against and rejected by
+a whole generation of philosophers on the continent of Europe; yet it has
+prevailed. And now all school-boys and girls would call anybody a fool who
+should deny it. Steam, in all its applications, was argued against and
+rejected; yet it has prevailed. So the electric telegraph; and, to go back
+a little, the theory of vaccination,--the circulation of the blood,--a
+thousand things; yea, Edwards's (the father) theory of virtue, although
+received by many, has been argued against, and by many rejected; yet it
+will prevail. Yea, his idea of the unity of the race in Adam was and is
+argued against and rejected; yet it will prevail. I feel, therefore, no
+fear that my theory of moral obligation will not be acknowledged because
+it was argued against and rejected by many in a former age, and may be
+now. Nay; facts to prove it are accumulating,--facts which were not
+developed in Edwards's day,--facts showing, irresistibly, that Edwards's
+theory, which is <i>that</i> most usually now held, is what I say it is,--<i>the
+rejection of revelation, infidelity, and atheism</i>. The evidence amounts to
+demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>The question is in a nutshell; it is this:--<i>Shall man submit to the
+revealed will of God</i>, or <i>to his own will?</i> That is the naked question
+when the fog of confused ideas and unmeaning words is lifted and
+dispersed.</p>
+
+<p>My position, expressed in the speech delivered in the General Assembly,
+New York, May, 1856, is this:--"God, in making all things, saw that, in
+the relations he would constitute between himself and intelligent
+creatures, and among themselves, NATURAL GOOD AND EVIL would come to pass.
+In his benevolent wisdom, he then <i>willed</i> LAW to control this <i>good</i> and
+<i>evil</i>; and he thereby made <i>conformity</i> to that law to be <i>right</i>, and
+<i>non-conformity</i> to be <i>wrong</i>. Why? Simply because he saw it to be
+<i>good</i>, and <i>made it to be</i> RIGHT; not because <i>he saw it to be right</i>,
+but because <i>he made it to be right</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Your correspondent replies to this theory in the following words of
+Edwards:--"Some hold that the foundation of moral obligation is
+primarily in the will of God. But the will of God is either benevolent
+or not. If it be benevolent, and on that account the foundation of moral
+obligation, it is not the source of obligation merely because it is the
+will of God, but because it is benevolent, and is of a tendency to
+promote happiness; and this places the foundation of obligation in a
+tendency to happiness, and not primarily in the will of God. But if the
+will of God, and that which is the expression of it, the divine law, be
+allowed to be not benevolent, and are foundation of obligation, we are
+obliged to conform to them, whatever they be, however malevolent and
+opposite to holiness and goodness the requirements be. But this, I
+presume, none will pretend." Very fairly and strongly put; that's to say,
+if I understand Edwards, he supposes, if God was the devil and man what
+he is, then man would not be under obligation to obey the devil's will!
+That's it! Well, I suppose so too; and I reckon most <i>Christians</i> would
+agree to that statement, Nay, more: I presume nobody ever taught that the
+mere naked <i>will</i>, abstractly considered, if it could be, from the
+<i>character</i> of God, was the ground of moral obligation? Nay, I think
+nobody ever imagined that the notion of an infinite Creator presupposes
+or includes the idea that he is a malevolent Being! I agree, then, with
+Edwards, that the ultimate ground of obligation <i>is</i> in the <i>fact</i> that
+God is benevolent, or is a good God. I said <i>that</i> in my speech quoted
+above. I formally stated that "<i>God, in his benevolent wisdom, willed law
+to control the natural good and evil</i>," &amp;c. What, then, is the point of
+disagreement between my view and Edwards's? It is in <i>the different ways
+by which we</i> GET AT <i>the</i> FACT <i>of divine benevolence</i>. I hold that the
+REVEALED WORD <i>tells us who God is and what he does</i>, and is, therefore,
+the ULTIMATE GROUND OF OBLIGATION. But Edwards holds that HUMAN REASON
+<i>must tell us who God is and what he does</i>, and IS, therefore, the
+PRIMARY GROUND OF OBEDIENCE. <i>That</i> is my issue with Edwards and others;
+and it is as broad an issue as <i>faith in revelation</i>, or the REJECTION OF
+IT. I do not charge that Edwards did, or that all who hold with him do,
+deny the word of God; but I do affirm that their argument does. The
+matter is plain. For what is revelation? It is that God has appeared in
+person, and <i>told</i> man in WORD that he is GOD; and <i>told</i> him first in
+WORD (to be expanded in studying <i>creation</i> and <i>providence</i>) that God is
+a Spirit, eternal, infinite in power, wisdom, goodness, holiness,--the
+Creator, Preserver, Benefactor. That WORD, moreover, he proved by
+highest evidence--namely, supernatural evidence--to be <i>absolute,
+perfect</i> TRUTH as to all FACT affirmed <i>of him</i> and <i>what</i> he <i>does</i>.
+REVELATION, as claimed in the Bible, was and is THAT THING.</p>
+
+<p>Man, then, having this revelation; is under obligation ever to believe
+every jot and tittle of that WORD. He at first, no doubt, knew little of
+the meaning of some <i>facts</i> declared; nay, he may have comprehended
+nothing of the sense or scope of many <i>facts</i> affirmed. Nay, he may now,
+after thousands of years, know most imperfectly the meaning of that WORD.
+But he was and he is, notwithstanding, to believe with absolute faith the
+WORD,--that God <i>is</i> all he says he is, and <i>does</i> all he says he
+does,--however that WORD may <i>go beyond</i> his reason, or <i>surprise</i> his
+feelings, or <i>alarm</i> his conscience, or <i>command</i> his will.</p>
+
+<p>This statement of what revelation is, settles the whole question as
+presented by Edwards. For REVELATION, as explained, does FIX <i>forever the
+foundation of man's moral obligation in the benevolence of God</i>,
+PRIMARILY, as it is <i>expressed</i> in the word of God. REVELATION does then,
+in that sense, FIX <i>obligation in the</i> MERE WILL OF GOD; for, the moment
+you attempt to establish the foundation <i>somewhere else</i>, you have
+abandoned the ground of revelation. You have left the WILL OF GOD <i>in his
+word</i>, and you have made your rule of right to be the WILL OF MAN <i>in the</i>
+SELF <i>of the</i> HEART. The proof of what I here say is so plain, even as the
+writing on the tables of Habakkuk's vision, that he may run that readeth
+it. Read, then, even as on the <i>tables</i>.</p>
+
+<p>God <i>says</i> in his WORD, "I am all-powerful, all-wise, the Creator." "You
+may be," says Edwards, "but I want <i>primary foundation</i> for my faith; and
+I can't take your <i>word</i> for it. I must look first into <i>nature</i> to see if
+evidence of infinite power and wisdom is there,--to see if evidence of a
+Creator is there,--and if thou art he!"</p>
+
+<p>Again, God <i>says</i> in his word, "I am benevolent, and <i>my will</i> in my law
+is expression of that benevolence." "You may tell the truth," Edwards
+replies, "but I want <i>primary ground</i> for my belief, and I must hold your
+word suspended until I examine into my reason, my feelings, my conscience,
+my will,--to see if your WORD <i>harmonizes</i> with my HEART,--to see if what
+you reveal tends to <i>happiness</i> IN MY NOTION OF HAPPINESS; <i>or tends to
+right</i> IN MY NOTION OF RIGHT!" That's it. That's the theory of Edwards,
+Barnes, and others.</p>
+
+<p>And what is this but the attempt to know the divine attributes and
+character in <i>some other way</i> than through the divine WORD? And what is
+this but the denial of the divine WORD, except so far as it agrees with
+the knowledge of the attributes and character of God, obtained in THAT
+<i>some other way?</i> And what is this but to make the word of God
+<i>subordinate</i> to the teaching of the HUMAN HEART? And what is this but to
+make the WILL <i>of God</i> give place to the WILL <i>of man?</i> And what is this
+but the REJECTION OF REVELATION? Yet this is the result (though not
+intended by him) of the whole scheme of obligation, maintained by Edwards
+and by all who agree with him.</p>
+
+<p>Carry it out, and what is the progress and the end of it? This. Human
+reason--the human heart--will be supreme. Some, I grant, will hold to a
+revelation of some sort. A thing more and more transcendental,--a thing
+more and more of fog and moonshine,--fog floating in German cellars from
+fumes of lager-beer, and moonshine gleaming from the imaginations of the
+drinkers. Some, like Socrates and Plato, will have a God supreme,
+personal, glorious, somewhat like the true; and with him many inferior
+deities,--animating the stars, the earth, mountains, valleys, plains, the
+sea, rivers, fountains, the air, trees, flowers, and all living things.
+Some will deny a personal God, and conceive, instead, the intelligent mind
+of the universe, without love. Some will contend for mere law,--of
+gravitation and attraction; and some will suggest that all is the result
+of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Here, having passed through the
+shadows and the darkness, we have reached the blackness of
+infidelity,--blank atheism. No God--yea, all the way the "<i>fools</i>" were
+saying in their hearts, no God. What now is man? Alas! some, the Notts and
+Gliddons, tell us, man was indeed <i>created</i> millions of ages ago, the Lord
+only knows when, in swarms like bees to suit the zones of the
+earth,--while other some, the believers in the <i>vestiges of creation</i>, say
+man is the result of development,--from fire, dust, granite, grass, the
+creeping thing, bird, fish, four-footed beast, monkey. Yea, and some of
+these last philosophers are even now going to Africa to try to find men
+they have heard tell of, who still have tails and are jumping and climbing
+somewhere in the regions around the undiscovered sources of the Nile.</p>
+
+<p>This is the progress and the result of the Edwards theory; because, deny
+or hesitate about revelation, and man cannot prove, <i>absolutely</i>, any of
+the things we are considering. Let us see if he can. Edwards writes, "On
+the supposition that the will or law of God is the primary foundation,
+reason, and standard of right and virtue, every attempt <i>to prove the
+moral perfection or attributes of God is absurd</i>." Here, then, Edwards
+believes, that, to reach the primary foundation of right and virtue, he
+must not take God's word as to his perfection or attributes, no matter how
+fully <i>God</i> may have <i>proved</i> his word: no; but he, Edwards, he, man, must
+first <i>prove</i> them in <i>some other way</i>. And, of course, he believes he can
+reach such primary foundation by such other proof. Well, let us see how he
+goes about it. I give him, to try his hand, the easiest
+attribute,--"POWER." I give him, then, all creation, and providence
+besides, as his <i>black-board</i>, on which to work his demonstration. I give
+him, then, the lifetime of Methuselah, in which to reach his conclusion of
+proof.--Well, I will now suppose we have all lived and waited that long
+time: what is his <i>proof</i> OF INFINITE POWER? Has he found the EXHIBITION
+of <i>infinite power?</i> No. He has found <i>proof</i> of GREAT POWER; but he has
+not reached the DISPLAY of <i>infinite power</i>. What then is his <i>faith</i> in
+infinite power after such <i>proof?</i> Why, just this: he INFERS <i>only</i>, that
+THE POWER, <i>which did the things he sees, can go on, and on, and on, to
+give greater, and greater, and greater manifestations of itself!</i> VERY
+GOOD: <i>if so be, we can have no better proof</i>. But <i>that</i> PROOF is
+infinitely below ABSOLUTE PROOF <i>of infinite power</i>. And all
+manifestations of power to a <i>finite creature</i>, even to the archangel
+Michael, during countless millions of ages, never gives, because it never
+can give to him, ABSOLUTE PROOF <i>of infinite power</i>. But the word of GOD
+gives the PROOF ABSOLUTE, <i>and in a moment of time!</i> "I AM THE ALMIGHTY!"
+The <i>perfect proof</i> is in THAT WORD OF GOD.
+
+I might set Edwards to work to prove the <i>infinite wisdom</i>, the <i>infinite
+benevolence</i>, the <i>infinite holiness</i>--yea, the EXISTENCE--of God. And he,
+finite man, in any examination of creation or providence, must fall
+infinitely below the PERFECT PROOF.</p>
+
+<p>So then I tell Edwards, and all agreeing with him, that <i>it is absurd</i> to
+attempt to <i>prove</i> the moral perfection and attributes of God, if he
+thereby seeks to reach the HIGHEST EVIDENCE, <i>or if he thereby means to
+find the</i> PRIMARY GROUND <i>of moral obligation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Do I then teach that man should not seek the <i>proof</i> there is, of the
+perfection and attributes of God, in <i>nature and providence</i>? No. I hold
+that such proof unfolds the <i>meaning</i> of the FACTS declared in the WORD of
+God, and is all-important, as such expansion of meaning. But I say, by
+authority of the Master, that <i>the highest proof, the absolute proof, the
+perfect proof</i>, of the FACTS as to <i>who God is, and what he does</i>, and the
+PRIMARY OBLIGATION <i>thereupon, is in the</i> REVEALED WORD.</p>
+
+<p>FRED. A. ROSS.</p>
+
+<p>Huntsville, Ala., April 3, 1857.</p>
+
+<p>N.B.--In notice of last Witness's extract from Erskine, I remark that
+Thomas Erskine was, and may yet be, a lawyer of Edinburgh. He wrote
+<i>three works</i>:--<i>one</i> on the <i>Internal Evidences</i>, the <i>next</i> on
+<i>Faith</i>, the <i>last</i> on the <i>Freeness of the Gospel</i>. They are all
+written with great ability, and contain much truth. But all have in them
+fundamental <i>untruths</i>. There is least in the Evidences; more in the
+essay on Faith; most in the tract on the Freeness of the Gospel,--which
+last has been utterly refuted, and has passed away. His <i>Faith</i> is,
+also, not republished. The Evidences is good, like good men,
+notwithstanding the evil.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="letters"></a>Letters to Rev. A. Barnes.</h1>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Introduction.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>As part of the great slavery discussion, Rev. A. Barnes, of Philadelphia,
+published, in October, 1856, a pamphlet, entitled, "The CHURCH and
+SLAVERY." In this tract he invites every man to utter his views on the
+subject. And, setting the example, he speaks his own with the greatest
+freedom and honesty.</p>
+
+<p>In the same freedom of speech, I have considered his views unscriptural,
+false, fanatical, and infidel. Therefore, while I hold him in the highest
+respect, esteem, and affection, as a divine and Christian gentleman, and
+cherish his past relations to me, yet I have in these letters written to
+him, and of him, just as I would have done had he lived in France or
+Germany, a stranger to me, and given to the world the refined scoff of the
+one, or the muddy transcendentalism of the other.</p>
+
+<p>My first letter is merely a glance at some things in his pamphlet, in
+which I show wherein I agree and disagree with him,--<i>i.e.</i> in our
+estimate of the results of the agitation; in our views of the Declaration
+of Independence; in our belief of the way men are made infidels; and in
+our appreciation of the testimonies of past General Assemblies.</p>
+
+<p>The other letters I will notice in similar introductions.</p>
+
+<p>These letters first appeared as original contributions to the Christian
+Observer, published and edited by Dr. A. Converse, Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>I take this occasion to express my regard for him, and my sense of the
+ability with which he has long maintained the rights and interests of the
+Presbyterian body, to which we both belong; and the wise and masterly way
+in which he has vindicated, from the Bible, the truth on the slavery
+question. To him, too, the public is indebted for the first exhibition of
+Mr. Barnes's errors in his recent tract which has called forth my reply.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="05"></a>No. I.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>Rev. A. Barnes:--
+
+<i>Dear Sir</i>:--You have recently published a tract:--"The Church and
+Slavery."
+
+"The opinion of each individual," you remark, "contributes to form public
+sentiment, as the labor of the animalcule in the ocean contributes to the
+coral reefs that rise above the waves."
+
+True, sir, and beautifully expressed. But while, in harmony with your
+intimation, I must regard you one of the animalcules, rearing the coral
+reef of public opinion, I cannot admit your disclaimer of "special
+influence" among them in their work. Doubtless, sir, you have "special
+influence,"--and deserve to have. I make no apology for addressing you. I
+am one of the animalcules.
+
+I agree, and I disagree, with you. I harmonize in your words,--"The
+present is eminently a time when the views of every man on the subject of
+slavery should be uttered in unambiguous tones." I agree with you in this
+affirmation; because the subject has yet to be fully understood; because,
+when understood, if THE BIBLE does <i>not</i> sanction the system, the MASTER
+must cease to be the master. The SLAVE must cease to be the slave. He must
+be <i>free</i>, AND EQUAL IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE. <i>That</i> is your
+"<i>unambiguous tone</i>". Let it be heard, if <i>that</i> is the word of God.
+
+But if THE BIBLE <i>does</i> sanction the system, then <i>that</i> "unambiguous
+tone" will silence abolitionists who admit the Scriptures; it will satisfy
+all good men, and give peace to the country. That is the "<i>tone</i>" I want
+men to hear. Listen to it in the past and present speech of providence.
+The time was when <i>you</i> had the very <i>public sentiment</i> you are now trying
+to form. From Maine to Louisiana, the American mind was softly yielding to
+the impress of emancipation, in some hope, however vague and imaginary.
+Southern as well as Northern men, in the church and out of it, not having
+sufficiently studied the word of God, and, under our own and French
+revolutionary excitement, looking only at the evils of slavery, wished it
+away from the land. It was a <i>mistaken</i> public sentiment. Yet, such as it
+was, you had it, and it was doing your work. It was Quaker-like, mild and
+affectionate. It did not, however, work fast enough for you. You thought
+that the negro, with his superior attributes of body and mind and higher
+advantages of the nineteenth century, might reach, in a day, the liberty
+and equality which the Anglo-American had attained after the struggle of
+his ancestors during a thousand years! You got up the agitation. You got
+it up in the Church and State. You got it up over the length and breadth
+of this whole land. Let me show you some things you have secured, as the
+results of your work.
+
+
+
+<i>First Result of Agitation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+1. The most consistent abolitionists, affirming the sin of slavery, on the
+maxim of created equality and unalienable right, after torturing the Bible
+for a while, to make it give the same testimony, felt they could get
+nothing from the book. They felt that the God of the Bible disregarded the
+thumb-screw, the boot, and the wheel; that he would not speak for them,
+but against them. These consistent men have now turned away from the
+word, in despondency; and are seeking, somewhere, an abolition Bible, an
+abolition Constitution for the United States, and an abolition God.</p>
+
+<p>This, sir, is the <i>first result</i> of your agitation:--the very van of your
+attack repulsed, and driven into infidelity.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>A Second Result of Agitation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+2. Many others, and you among them, are trying in exactly the same way
+just mentioned to make the Bible speak against slave-holding. You get
+nothing by torturing the English version. People understand English. Nay,
+you get little by applying the rack to the Hebrew and Greek; even before a
+tribunal of men like you, who proclaim beforehand that Moses, in Hebrew,
+and Paul, in Greek, <i>must</i> condemn slavery because "<i>it is a violation of
+the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence</i>." You find it
+difficult to persuade men that Moses and Paul were moved by the Holy Ghost
+to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson! You find it hard to make
+men believe that Moses saw in the mount, and Paul had vision in heaven,
+that this future <i>apostle of Liberty</i> was inspired by Jesus Christ.</p>
+
+<p>You torture very severely. But the muscles and bones of those old men are
+tough and strong. They won't yield under your terrible wrenchings. You get
+only groans and mutterings. You claim these voices, I know, as testimony
+against slavery. But you cannot torture in secret as in olden times. When
+putting the question, you have to let men be present,--who tell us that
+Moses and Paul won't speak for you,--that they are silent, like Christ
+before Pilate's scourging-men; or, in groans and mutterings,--the voices
+of their sorrow and the tones of their indignation,--they rebuke your
+pre-judgment of the Almighty when you say if the Bible sanctions slavery,
+"it neither ought to be nor could be received by mankind as a divine
+revelation."</p>
+
+<p>This, sir, is the <i>second result</i> you have gained by your agitation. You
+have brought a thousand Northern ministers of the gospel, with yourself,
+to the verge of the same denial of the word of God which they have made,
+who are only a little ahead of you in the road you are travelling.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>A Third Result of Agitation.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>3. Meanwhile, many of your most pious men, soundest scholars, and
+sagacious observers of providence, have been led to study the Bible more
+faithfully in the light of the times. And they are reading it more and
+more in harmony with the views which have been reached by the highest
+Southern minds, to wit:--That the relation of master and slave is
+sanctioned by the Bible;--that it is a relation belonging to the same
+category as those of husband and wife, parent and child, master and
+apprentice, master and hireling;--that the relations of husband and wife,
+parent and child, <i>were ordained in Eden for man, as man</i>, and <i>modified
+after the fall</i>, while the relation of slavery, as a system of labor, is
+<i>only one form of the government ordained of God over fallen and degraded
+man</i>;--that the <i>evils</i> in the system are <i>the same evils</i> of OPPRESSION
+we see in the relation of husband and wife, and all other forms of
+government;--that slavery, as a relation, suited to the more degraded or
+the more ignorant and helpless types of a sunken humanity, is, like all
+government, intended <i>as the proof of the curse of such degradation, and
+at the same time to elevate and bless</i>;--that the relation of husband and
+wife, being for man, as man, <i>will ever be over him</i>, while slavery will
+remain so long as God sees it best, as a controlling power over the
+ignorant, the more degraded and helpless;--and that, when he sees it for
+the good of the country, he will cause it to pass away, if the slave can
+be elevated to liberty and equality, political and social, with his
+master, <i>in</i> that country; or <i>out of</i> that country, if such elevation
+cannot be given therein, but may be realized in some other land: all which
+result must be left to the unfoldings of the divine will, <i>in harmony with
+the Bible</i>, and not to a newly-discovered dispensation. These facts are
+vindicated in the Bible and Providence. In the Old Testament, they stare
+you in the face:--in the family of Abraham,--in his slaves, bought with
+his money and born in his house,--in Hagar, running away under her
+mistress's hard dealing with her, and yet sent back, as a fugitive slave,
+by the angel,--in the law which authorized the Hebrews to hold their
+brethren as slaves for a time,--in which parents might sell their children
+into bondage,--in which the heathen were given to the Hebrews as their
+slaves forever,--in which slaves were considered so much the money of
+their master, that the master who killed one by an unguarded blow was,
+under certain circumstances, sufficiently punished in his slave's death,
+because he thereby lost his money,--in which the difference between
+<i>man-stealing</i> and <i>slave-holding</i> is, by law, set forth,--in which the
+runaway from heathen masters may not be restored, because God gave him
+the benefits of an adopted Hebrew. In the New Testament:--wherein the
+slavery of Greece and Rome was recognised,--in the obligations laid on
+master and slave,--in the close connection of this obligation with the
+duties of husband and wife, parent and child,--in the obligation to return
+the fugitive slave to his master,--and <i>in the condemnation of every
+abolition principle</i>, "AS DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH." (1 Tim. vi. 1-5.)</p>
+
+<p>This view of slavery is becoming more and more, not only the settled
+decision of the Southern but of the best Northern mind, with a movement so
+strong that you have been startled by it to write the pamphlet now lying
+before me.</p>
+
+<p>This is the <i>third result</i> you have secured:--to make many of the best men
+in the North see the infidelity of your philosophy, falsely so called, on
+the subject of slavery, in the clearer and clearer light of the
+Scriptures.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Another Result of Agitation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+4. The Southern slave-holder is now satisfied, as never before, that the
+relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible; and he feels, as
+never before, the obligations of the word of God. He no longer, in his
+ignorance of the Scriptures, and afraid of its teachings, will seek to
+defend his common-sense opinions of slavery by arguments drawn from "Types
+of Mankind," and other infidel theories; but he will look, in the light of
+the Bible, on all the good and evil in the system. And when the North, as
+it will, shall regard him holding from God this high power for great
+good,--when the North shall no more curse, but bid him God-speed,--then he
+will bless himself and his slave, in nobler benevolence. With no false
+ideas of created equality and unalienable right, but with the Bible in his
+heart and hand, he will do justice and love mercy in higher and higher
+rule. Every evil will be removed, and the negro will be elevated to the
+highest attainments he can make, and be prepared for whatever destiny God
+intends. This, sir, is the <i>fourth result</i> of your agitation:--to make the
+Southern master <i>know</i>, from the Bible, his right to be a master, and his
+duty to his slave.</p>
+
+<p>These <i>four results</i> are so fully before you, that I think you must see
+and feel them. You have brought out, besides, tremendous political
+consequences, giving astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on
+these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of
+the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep
+of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I
+rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly
+purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long
+latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and
+South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of
+God and to speak it to the land. I rejoice that all the South now know
+that God gives the right to hold slaves, and, with that right,
+obligations they must fulfil. I rejoice that the day has dawned in which
+the North and South will think and feel and act together on the subject
+of slavery. I thank God for the agitation. May he forgive the folly and
+wickedness of many who have gotten it up! May he reveal more and more,
+that surely the wrath of man shall praise him, while the remainder of
+wrath he will restrain!</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Declaration of Independence</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+I agree with you, sir, that <i>the second paragraph</i> of the Declaration of
+Independence contains <i>five affirmations</i>, declared to be self-evident
+truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every
+thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to
+liberty,--to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to
+their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident
+truth, or a truth at all. On the contrary, that each one is contrary to
+the Bible; that each one, separately, is denied; and that all five,
+collectively, are denied and upset by the Bible, by the natural history of
+man, and by providence, in every age of the world. I say this now. In a
+subsequent communication, I will prove what I affirm. For the present I
+merely add, that the Declaration of Independence stands in no need of
+these false affirmations. It was, and is, a beautiful whole without them.
+It was, and is, without these imaginary maxims, the simple statement of
+the grievances the colonies had borne from the mother-country, and their
+right <i>as colonies</i>, when thus oppressed, to declare themselves
+independent. That is to say, the right given of God to oppressed children
+to seek protection in another family, or to set up for themselves somewhat
+before <i>twenty-one</i> or natural maturity; right belonging to them <i>in the
+British family;</i> right sanctioned of God; right blessed of God, in the
+resistance of the colonies <i>as colonies</i>--not as individual men--to the
+attempt of the mother-country to consummate her tyranny. But God gives no
+sanction to the affirmation that he has <i>created all men equal</i>; that this
+is <i>self-evident,</i> and that he has given them <i>unalienable rights;</i> that
+he has made government to <i>derive its power solely from their consent</i>,
+and that he has given them <i>the right to change that government in their
+mere pleasure</i>. All this--every word of it, every jot and tittle--is the
+liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times
+in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if
+Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed
+it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as
+time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru
+Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, Garrison, or Barnes.</p>
+
+<p>Sir, that paragraph is an <i>excrescence</i> on the tree of our liberty. I pray
+you take it away. Worship it if you will, and in a manner imitate the
+Druid. He gave reverence to the <i>mistletoe</i>, but first he removed the
+<i>parasite</i> from the noble tree. Do you the same. Cut away <i>this mistletoe</i>
+with golden knife, as did the Druid; enshrine its imaginary divinity in a
+grove or cave; then retire there, and leave our oak to stand in its glory
+in the light of heaven. Men have been afraid to say all this for years,
+just as they have been timid to assert that God has placed master and
+slave in the same relation as husband and wife. Public sentiment, which
+you once had and have lost, suppressed this utterance as the other. But
+now, men speak out; and I, for one, will tell you what the Bible reveals
+as to that part of the Declaration of Independence, as fearlessly as I
+tell you what it says of the system of slavery.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>How Men are made Infidels</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+I agree with you that some men have been, are, and will be, made infidels
+by hearing that God has ordained slavery as one form of his government
+over depraved mankind. But how does this fact prove that the Bible does
+not sanction slavery? Why, sir, you have been all your life teaching that
+some men are made infidels by hearing any truth of the Bible;--that some
+men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement,
+Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. True: and these men
+find "<i>great laws of their nature,--instinctive feelings</i>"--just such as
+you find against slavery, and not more perverted in them than in you,
+condemning all this Bible. And they hold now, with your sanction, that a
+book affirming such facts "<i>cannot be from God</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Sir, some men are made infidels by hearing the Ten Commandments, and they
+find "<i>great laws of their nature</i>," as strong in them as yours in you
+against slavery, warring against every one of these commandments. And
+they declare now, with your authority, that a book imposing such
+restraints upon human nature, "<i>cannot be from God</i>" Sir, what is it
+makes infidels? You have been wont to answer, "They <i>will not</i> have God
+<i>to rule over them</i>. They <i>will not</i> have the BIBLE <i>to control the great
+laws of their nature."</i> Sir, that is the true answer. And you know that
+<i>the great instinct of liberty</i> is only one of <i>three great laws</i>,
+needing special teaching and government:--that is to say, <i>the instinct
+to rule; the instinct to submit to be ruled; and the instinct for
+liberty.</i> You know, too, that the instinct <i>to submit</i> is the strongest,
+the instinct <i>to rule</i> is next, and that the <i>aspiration for liberty</i> is
+the weakest. Hence you know the overwhelming majority of men have ever
+been willing to be slaves; masters have been next in number; while the
+few have struggled for freedom.</p>
+
+<p>The Bible, then, in proclaiming God's will <i>as to these three great
+impulses</i>, will be rejected by men, exactly as they have yielded forbidden
+control to the one or the other of them. The Bible will make infidels of
+<i>masters</i>, when God calls to them to rule right, or to give up rule, if
+they have allowed <i>the instinct of power</i> to make them hate God's
+authority. Pharaoh spoke for all infidel rulers when he said, "<i>Who is the
+Lord that I should obey his voice?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The Bible will make infidels of <i>slaves</i>, when God calls to them to aspire
+to be free, if they have permitted <i>the instinct of submission to</i> make
+them hate his commands. The Israelites in the wilderness revealed ten
+times, in their murmuring, <i>the slave-instinct</i> in all ages:--"<i>Would to
+God we had died in the wilderness!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>You know all this, and you condemn these infidels. Good.</p>
+
+<p>But, sir, you know equally well that the Bible will make infidels of men
+<i>affirming the instinct of liberty,</i> when God calls them to learn of him
+how <i>much liberty</i> he gives, and <i>how</i> he gives it, and <i>when</i> he gives
+it, if they have so yielded to this law of their nature as to make them
+despise the word of the Lord. Sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram spoke out
+just what the liberty-and-equality men have said in all time:--"<i>Ye, Moses
+and Aaron, take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy,
+every one of them: wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the
+congregation?"</i> Verily, sir, these men were intensely excited by "<i>the
+great law of our nature,--the great instinct of freedom."</i> Yea, they told
+God to his face they had looked within, and found the <i>higher law of
+liberty and equality--the eternal right--in their intuitional
+consciousness</i>; and that they would not submit to his will in the
+elevation of Moses and Aaron <i>above them</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Verily, sir, you, in the spirit of Korah, now proclaim and say, "Ye
+masters, and ye white men who are not masters, North and South, ye take
+too much upon you, seeing the negro is created your equal, and, by
+unalienable right, is as free as you, and entitled to all your political
+and social life. Ye take, then, too much upon you in excluding him from
+your positions of wealth and honor, from your halls of legislation, and
+from your palace of the nation, and from your splendid couch, and from
+your fair women with long hair on that couch and in that gilded chariot:
+wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the negro?"</p>
+
+<p>Verily, sir, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram said all we have ever heard from
+abolition-platforms or now listen to from you. But the Lord made the
+earth swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram!</p>
+
+<p>I agree with you then, sir, fully, that some men have been, are, and will
+be, made infidels by hearing that God, in the Bible, has ordained slavery.
+But I hold this to be no argument against the fact that the Bible does so
+teach, because men are made infidels by any other doctrine or precept they
+hate to believe.</p>
+
+<p>Sir, no man has said all this better than you. And I cannot express my
+grief that you--in the principle now avowed, <i>that every man must
+interpret the Bible as he chooses to reason and feel</i>--sanction all the
+infidelity in the world, obliterate your "<i>Notes</i>" on the Bible, and deny
+the preaching of your whole life, so far as God may, in his wrath, permit
+you to expunge or recall the words of the wisdom of your better day.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Testimonies of General Assemblies</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+I agree with you that the Presbyterian Church, both before and since its
+division, has testified, after a fashion, against slavery. But some of its
+action has been very curious testimony. I know not how the anti-slavery
+resolutions of 1818 were gotten up; nor how in some Assemblies since. I
+can guess, however, from what I do know, as to how such resolutions passed
+in Buffalo in 1853, and in New York in 1856. I know that in Buffalo they
+were at first voted down by a large majority. Then they were reconsidered
+in mere courtesy to men who said they wanted to speak. So the resolutions
+were passed after some days, in which the <i>screws</i> were applied and
+turned, in part, <i>by female hands</i>, to save the chairman of the committee
+from <i>the effects</i> of the resolutions being finally voted down!</p>
+
+<p>I know that, in New York, the decision of the Assembly to spread the
+minority report on the minutes was considered, in the body and out of it,
+as a Southern victory; for it revealed, however glossed over, that many in
+the house, who could not vote directly for the minority report, did in
+fact prefer it to the other.</p>
+
+<p>I was not in Detroit in 1850; but I think it was established in New York
+last May that that Detroit testimony was so admirably worded that both
+Southern and Northern men might vote for it with clear consciences!</p>
+
+<p>I need not pursue the investigation. I admit that, after this sort, you
+have the stultified abstractions of the New School Presbyterian
+Church,--while I have its common sense; you have its Delphic words,--I
+have its actions; you have the traditions of the elders making void the
+word of God,--I have the providence of God restraining the church from
+destroying itself and our social organization under folly, fanaticism, and
+infidelity.
+
+You, sir, seem to acknowledge this; for, while you appear pleased with the
+testimony of the New School Presbyterian Church, such as it is, you lament
+that the Old School have not been true to the resolutions of 1818,--that,
+in that branch of the church, it is questionable whether those resolutions
+could now be adopted. You lament the silence of the Episcopal, the
+Southern Methodist, and the Baptist denominations; you might add the
+Cumberland Presbyterian Church. And you know that in New England, in New
+York, and in the Northwest, many testify against <i>us</i> as a pro-slavery
+body. You lament that so many members of the church, ministers of the
+gospel, and editors of religious papers, defend the system; you lament
+that so large a part of the religious literature of the land, though
+having its seat North and sustained chiefly by Northern funds, shows a
+perpetual deference to the slave-holder; you lament that, after fifty
+years, nothing has been done to arrest slavery; you lament and ask, "Why
+should this be so?" In saying this, you acknowledge that, while you have
+been laboring to get and have reached the abstract testimony of the
+church, all diluted as it is, the common-sense fact has been and is more
+and more brought out, in the providence of God, that <i>the slave-power has
+been and is gaining ground in the United States</i>. In one word, you have
+contrived to get, in confused utterance, the voice of the Sanhedrim; while
+Christ himself has been preaching in the streets of our Jerusalem the true
+meaning of slavery as one form of his government over fallen men.</p>
+
+<p>These, then, are some of the things I promised to show as the results of
+your agitation. This is the "<i>tone</i>" of the past and present speech of
+Providence on the subject of slavery. You seem disturbed. I feel sure
+things are going on well as to that subject. Speak on, then, "in
+unambiguous tones." But, sir, when you desire to go from words to
+actions,--when you intimate that the constitution of the Presbyterian
+Church may be altered to permit such action, or that, without its
+alteration, the church can detach itself from slavery by its existing laws
+or the modification of them,--then I understand you to mean that you
+desire to deal, in fact, with slave-holders as <i>offenders</i>. Then, sir,
+<i>you mean to exscind the South</i>; for it is absurd to imagine that you
+suppose the South will submit to such action. You mean, then, to <i>exscind
+the South, or to exscind yourself and others</i>, or to <i>compel the South to
+withdraw</i>. Your tract, just published, is, I suppose, intended by you to
+prepare the next General Assembly for such movement? What then? Will you
+make your "American Presbyterian," and your Presbyterian House, effect
+that great change in the religious literature of the land whereby the
+subject of slave-holding shall be approached <i>precisely</i> as you deal with
+"theft, highway-robbery, or piracy?" Will you, then, by act of Assembly,
+Synod, Presbytery, Session, deny your pulpits, and communion-bread and
+wine, to slave-holding ministers, elders, and members? Will you, then,
+tell New England, and especially little Rhoda, We have purified our skirts
+from the blood: forgive us, and take us again to your love? What then?
+Will you then ostracize the South and compel the abolition of slavery?
+Sir, do you bid us fear these coming events, thus casting their shadow
+before from the leaves of your book?</p>
+
+<p>Sir, you may destroy the integrity of the New School Presbyterian Church.
+So much evil you may do; but you will hereby only add immensely to the
+great power and good of the Old School; and you will make disclosures of
+Providence, unfolding a consummation of things very different from the end
+you wish to accomplish for your country and the world.</p>
+
+<p>I write as one of the animalcules contributing to the coral reef of
+public opinion.</p>
+
+<p>F. A. Ross.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="06"></a>No. II.</h1>
+
+<h2>Government Over Man a Divine Institute.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>This letter is the examination and refutation of the infidel theory of
+human government foisted into the Declaration of Independence.</p>
+
+<p>I had written this criticism in different form for publication, before Mr.
+Barnes's had appeared. I wrote it to vindicate my affirmation in the
+General Assembly which met in New York, May last, on this part of the
+Declaration. My views were maturely formed, after years of reflection, and
+weeks--nay months--of carefully-penned writing.</p>
+
+<p>And thus these truths, from the Bible, Providence, and common sense, were
+like rich freight, in goodly ship, waiting for the wind to sail; when lo,
+Mr. Barnes's abolition-breath filled the canvas, and carried it out of
+port into the wide, the free, the open sea of American public thought.
+There it sails. If pirate or other hostile craft comes alongside, the good
+ship has guns.</p>
+
+<p>I ask that this paper be carefully read more than once, twice, or three
+times. Mr. Barnes, I presume, will not so read it. He is committed.
+Greeley may notice it with his sparkling wit, albeit he has too much sense
+to grapple with its argument. The Evangelist-man will say of it, what he
+would say if Christ were casting out devils in New York,--"He casteth
+out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils." Yea, this
+Evangelist-man says that my version of the golden rule is "diabolical;"
+when truly that version is the <i>word</i> of the Spirit, as Christ's casting
+out devils was the <i>work</i> of the Holy Ghost.</p>
+
+<p>Gerrett Smith, Garrison, Giddings, do already agree with me, that they are
+right if Jefferson spoke the truth. Yea, whether the Bible be true, is no
+question with them no more than with him. Yea, they hold, as he did, that
+whether there be one God or twenty, it matters not: the fact either way,
+in men's minds, neither breaks the leg nor picks the pocket. (See
+Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.) Messrs. Beecher and Cheever will find
+nothing in me to aid them in speaking to the mobs of Ephesus and Antioch.
+They are making shrines, and crying, Great is Diana. Mrs. Stowe is on the
+Dismal Swamp, with Dred for her Charon, to paddle her light canoe, by the
+fire-fly lamps, to the Limbo of Vanity, of which she is the queen. None of
+these will read with attention or honesty, if at all, this examination of
+what Randolph long ago said was a <i>fanfaronade of nonsense</i>. These are all
+wiser "than seven men that can render a reason."</p>
+
+<p>But there are thousands, North and South, who will read this refutation,
+and will feel and acknowledge that in the light of God's truth the notion
+of created equality and unalienable right is falsehood and infidelity.</p>
+
+<p></p>
+
+<p>Rev. A. Barnes:--</p>
+
+<p>Dear Sir:--In my first letter I promised to prove that the paragraph in
+the Declaration of Independence, which contains the affirmation of
+created equality and unalienable rights, has no sanction from the word of
+God. I now meet my obligation.</p>
+
+<p>The time has come when civil liberty, as revealed in the Bible and in
+Providence, must be re-examined, understood, and defended against infidel
+theories of human rights. The slavery question has brought on this
+conflict; and, strange as it may seem, the South, the land of the slave,
+is summoned by God to defend the liberty he gives; while the North, the
+clime of the free, misunderstands and changes the truth of God into a
+lie,--claiming a liberty he does not give. Wherefore is this? I reply:---</p>
+
+<p>God, when he ordained government over men, gave to the individual man
+RIGHTS, <i>only</i> as he is under government. He first established the family;
+hence all other rule is merely the family expanded. The <i>good</i> of the
+family limited the <i>rights</i> of every member. God required the family, and
+then the state, so to rule as to give to every member the <i>good</i> which is
+his, in harmony with the welfare of the whole; and he commanded the
+individual to seek <i>that good</i>, and NO MORE.</p>
+
+<p>Now, mankind being depraved, government has ever violated its obligation
+to rule for the benefit of the entire community, and has wielded its
+power in oppression. Consequently, the governed have ever struggled to
+secure the good which was their right. But, in this struggle, they have
+ever been tempted to go beyond the limitation God had made, and to seek
+supposed good, not given, in rights, prompted by <i>self-will</i>, destructive
+of the state.</p>
+
+<p>Government thus ever existing in oppression, and people thus ever rising
+up against despotism, have been the history of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>The Reformation was one of the many convulsions in this long-continued
+conflict. In its first movements, men claimed the liberty the Bible
+grants. Soon they ran into licentiousness. God then stayed the further
+progress of emancipation in Europe, because the spread of the asserted
+liberty would have made infidelity prevail over that part of the
+continent where the Reformation was arrested. God preferred Romanism,
+and other despotisms, modified as they were by the struggle, to rule for
+a time, than have those countries destroyed under the sway of a
+licentious freedom.</p>
+
+<p>In this contest the North American colonies had their rise, and they
+continued the strife with England until they declared themselves
+independent.</p>
+
+<p>That "Declaration" affirmed not only the liberty sanctioned of the Bible,
+but also the liberty constituting infidelity. Its first paragraph, to the
+word "<i>separation</i>," is a noble introduction. Omit, then, what follows,
+to the sentence beginning "<i>Prudence will dictate</i>," and the paper, thus
+expurgated, is complete, and is then simply the complaint of the colonies
+against the government of England, which had oppressed them beyond
+further submission, and the assertion of their right to be free and
+independent States.</p>
+
+<p>This declaration was, in that form, nothing more than the affirmation of
+the right God gives to children, in a family, applied to the colonies, in
+regard to their mother-country. That is to say, children have, from God,
+RIGHT, AS CHILDREN, when cruelly treated, to secure the good to which they
+are entitled, as children, IN THE FAMILY. They may secure <i>this</i> good by
+becoming part of another family, or by setting up for themselves, if old
+enough. So the colonies had, from God, <i>right</i> as colonies, when oppressed
+beyond endurance, to exchange the British family for another, or, if of
+sufficient age, to establish their own household. The Declaration, then,
+in that complaint of oppression and affirmation of right, in the colonies,
+to be independent, asserts liberty sanctioned by the word of God. And
+therefore the pledge to <i>that</i> Declaration, of "lives, fortune, and sacred
+honor," was blessed of Heaven, in the triumph of their cause.</p>
+
+<p>But the Declaration, in the part I have omitted, affirms other things, and
+very different. It asserts facts and rights as appertaining to man, not in
+the Scriptures, but contrary thereto. Here is the passage:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>  "We hold these truths to be self-evident,--that all men are created
+  equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
+  unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
+  pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are
+  instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
+  the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
+  destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
+  abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation
+  on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to
+  them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."</blockquote>
+
+<p><i>This is the affirmation of the liberty claimed by infidelity.</i> It teaches
+as a fact <i>that</i> which is not true; and it claims as right <i>that</i> which
+God has not given. It asserts nothing new, however. It lays claim to that
+individual right beyond the limitation God has put, which man has ever
+asserted when in his struggle for liberty he has refused to be guided and
+controlled by the word and providence of his Creator.</p>
+
+<p>The paragraph is a chain of four links, each of which is claimed to be a
+self-evident truth.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>first</i> and controlling assertion is, "that ALL MEN ARE CREATED
+EQUAL;" which proposition, as I understand it, is, that <i>every man and
+woman on earth is created with equal attributes of body and mind</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Secondly</i>, and consequently, that every individual has, by virtue of his
+or her being created the equal of each and every other individual, the
+right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, <i>so in his or her
+own keeping that that right is unalienable without his or her consent</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thirdly</i>, it follows, that government among men must derive its just
+powers only from the <i>consent</i> of the governed; and, as the governed are
+the aggregate of individuals, <i>then each person must consent to be thus
+controlled before he or she can be rightfully under such authority</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fourthly</i>, and finally, that whenever any form of government becomes
+destructive of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+<i>as each such individual man or woman may think</i>, then each such person
+may rightly set to work to alter or abolish such form, and institute a new
+government, on such principles and in such form as to them shall seem most
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.</p>
+
+<p>This is the celebrated averment of created equality, and unalienable right
+to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, with the necessary
+consequences. I have fairly expanded its meaning. It is the old infidel
+averment. It is not true in any one of its assertions.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>All Men not created equal</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not a truth, <i>self-evident,</i> that all men are created equal.
+Webster, in his dictionary, defines "Self-evident--Evident without proof
+or reason: clear conviction upon a bare presentation to the mind, as that
+two and three make five."</p>
+
+<p>Now, I affirm, and you, I think, will not contradict me, that the
+position, "<i>all men are created equal"</i> is <i>not</i> self-evident; that the
+nature of the case makes it impossible for it to be self-evident. For the
+created nature of man is not in the class of things of which such
+self-evident propositions can by possibility be predicated. It is equally
+clear and beyond debate, that it is not <i>self-evident</i> that all men have
+<i>unalienable rights</i>, that governments derive their just powers from the
+<i>consent</i> of the governed, and may be altered or abolished whenever <i>to
+them</i> such rights may be better secured. All these assertions can be known
+to be true or false only from revelation of the Creator, or from
+examination and induction of reasoning, covering the nature and the
+obligations of the race on the whole face of the earth. What revelation
+and examination of facts do teach, I will now show. The whole
+battle-ground, as to the truth of this series of averments, is on the
+first affirmation, "<i>that all men are created equal</i>." Or, to keep up my
+first figure, the strength of the chain of asserted truths depend on
+<i>that</i> first link. It must then stand the following perfect trial.</p>
+
+<p>God reveals to us that he created man in his image, <i>i.e.</i> a spirit
+endowed with attributes resembling his own,--to reason, to form rule of
+right, to manifest various emotions, to will, to act,--and that he gave
+him a body suited to such a spirit, (Gen. i. 26, 27, 28;) that he created
+MAN "<i>male and female</i>," (Gen. i. 27;) that he made the woman "<i>out of the
+man</i>," (Gen. ii. 23;) that he made "<i>the man the image and glory of God</i>,
+but the woman <i>the glory of the man</i>. For the man is not of the woman, but
+the woman of the man. Neither was the man <i>created for the woman</i>, but the
+woman <i>for the man</i>," (1 Cor. xi.;) that he made the woman to be the
+weaker vessel, (1 Pet. iii. 7.) Here, then, God created <i>the race</i> to be
+in the beginning TWO,--a male and a female MAN; one of them <i>not equal</i> to
+the other <i>in attributes of body and mind</i>, and, as we shall see
+presently, not equal in rights as to government. Observe, this inequality
+was fact as to the TWO, in the perfect state wherein they were <i>created</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But these two fell from that perfect state, became depraved, and began to
+be degraded in body and mind. This statement of the original inequality in
+which man was created controls all that comes after, in God's providence
+and in the natural history of the race.</p>
+
+<p><i>Providence</i>, in its comprehensive teaching, "says that God, soon after
+the flood, subjected the races to all the influences of the different
+zones of the earth;"--"That he hath made of one blood all nations of men
+for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times
+before appointed and the bounds of their habitation; that they should
+seek the Lord if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he
+be not far from every one of us." (Acts xvii. 26, 27.)</p>
+
+<p>These "bounds of their habitation" have had much to do in the natural
+history of man; for "<i>all men</i>" have been "<i>created</i>," or, more
+correctly, <i>born</i>, (since the race was "created" once only at the first,)
+with attributes of body and mind derived from the TWO unequal parents,
+and these attributes, in every individual, the combined result of the
+parental natures. "<i>All men</i>," then, come into the world under influences
+upon the amalgamated and transmitted body and mind, from depravity and
+degradation, sent down during all the generations past; and, therefore,
+under causes of inequality, acting on each individual from climate, from
+scenery, from food, from health, from sickness, from love, from hatred,
+from government, inconceivable in variety and power. Under such causes,
+to produce infinite shades of inequality, physical and mental, in
+birth--if "all men" were created equal (<i>i.e.</i> born equal) in attributes
+of body and mind--such "creation" would be a violation of all the known
+analogies in the world of life.</p>
+
+<p>Do, then, the facts in man's natural history exhibit this departure from
+the laws of life and spirit? Do they prove that "all men are created
+equal"? Do they show that every man and every woman of Africa, Asia,
+Europe, America, and the islands of the seas, is created each one equal in
+body and mind to each other man or woman on the face of the earth, and
+that this has always been?</p>
+
+<p>Need I extend these questions? Methinks, sir, I hear you say, what others
+have told me, that the "Declaration" is not to be understood as affirming
+what is so clearly false, but merely asserts that all men are "created
+equal" in <i>natural rights.</i></p>
+
+<p>I reply that <i>that</i> is <i>not</i> the meaning of the clause before us; for
+<i>that</i> is the meaning of the next sentence,--the <i>second</i> in the series we
+are considering.</p>
+
+<p>There are, as I have said, four links to the chain of thought in this
+passage:--1. That all men are created equal. 2. That they are endowed by
+the Creator with certain unalienable rights. 3. That government derives
+its just powers from the consent of the governed. 4. That the people may
+alter and abolish it, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>These links are logical sequences. All men--man and woman--are created
+equal,--equal in <i>attributes of body and mind</i>; (for <i>that</i> is the only
+sense in which they could be <i>created</i> equal;) <i>therefore</i> they are
+endowed with right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,
+unalienable, except in their consent; <i>consequently</i> such consent is
+essential to all rightful government; and, <i>finally</i> and <i>irresistibly</i>,
+the people have supreme right to alter or abolish it, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>The meaning, then, I give to that first link, and to the chain following,
+<i>is</i> the sense, because, if you deny that meaning to the <i>first link</i>,
+then the others have no logical truth whatever. Thus:--</p>
+
+<p>If all men are <i>not</i> created equal in attributes of body and mind, then
+the <i>inequality</i> may be <i>so great</i> that such men cannot be endowed with
+right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, unalienable save in
+their <i>consent</i>; then government over such men cannot rightfully rest upon
+their <i>consent</i>; nor can they have right to alter or abolish government in
+their mere determination.</p>
+
+<p>Yea, sir, you concede every thing if you admit that the "Declaration"
+does <i>not</i> mean to affirm that all men are "<i>created</i>" <i>equal in body
+and mind</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I will suppose in the Alps a community of Cretins,--<i>i.e.</i> deformed and
+helpless idiots,--but among them many from the same parents, who, in body
+and mind, by birth are comparatively <i>Napoleons</i>. Now, this <i>inequality</i>,
+physical and mental, by birth, makes it impossible that the government
+over these Cretins can be in their "<i>consent</i>." <i>The Napoleons must rule</i>.
+The Napoleons must absolutely control their "life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness," for the good of the community. Do you reply that I have taken
+an extreme case? that everybody admits sensible people must govern natural
+fools? Ay, sir, there is the rub. <i>Natural fools</i>! Are some men, then,
+"<i>created</i>" natural fools? Very well. Then you also admit that some men
+are <i>created</i> just a degree above natural fools!--and, consequently, that
+men are "<i>created</i>" in all degrees, gradually rising in the scale of
+intelligence. Are they not "<i>created</i>" just above the brute, with savage
+natures along with mental imbecility and physical degradation? Must the
+Napoleons govern the Cretins without their "consent"? Must they not also
+govern without their "consent" these types of mankind, whether one, two,
+three, thirty, or three hundred degrees above the Cretins, if they are
+still greatly inferior by nature? Suppose the Cretins removed from the
+imagined community, and a colony of Australian ant-catchers or California
+lizard-eaters be in their stead: must not the Napoleons govern these? And,
+if you admit inequality to be in birth, then that inequality is the very
+ground of the reason why the Napoleons must govern the ant-catchers and
+lizard-eaters. Remove these, and put in their place an importation of
+African negroes. Do you admit <i>their inferiority by</i> "CREATION?" Then the
+same control over them must be the irresistible fact in common sense and
+Scripture of God. <i>The Napoleons must govern</i>. They must govern without
+asking "consent,"--if the inequality be such that "<i>consent</i>" would be
+evil, and not good, in the family--the state.</p>
+
+<p>Yea, sir, if you deny that the "Declaration" asserts "all men are created
+equal" in body and mind, then you admit the inequality may be such as to
+make it impossible that in such cases men have rights unalienable save in
+their "consent;" and you admit it to be impossible that government in such
+circumstances can exist in such "<i>consent</i>" But, if you affirm the
+"Declaration" <i>does</i> mean that men are "<i>created</i> equal" in attributes of
+body and mind, then you hold to an equality which God, in his word, and
+providence, and the natural history of man, denies to be truth.</p>
+
+<p>I think I have fairly shown, from Scripture and facts, that the first
+averment is not the truth; and have reduced it to an absurdity. I will now
+regard the second, third, and fourth links of the chain.</p>
+
+<p>I know they are already broken; for, the whole chain being but an electric
+current from a vicious imagination, I have destroyed the whole by breaking
+the first link. Or was it but a cluster from a poisonous vine, then I have
+killed the branches by cutting the vine. I will, however, expose the other
+three sequences by a distinct argument covering them all.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Authority Delegated to Adam</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+God gave to Adam sovereignty over the human race, in his first
+decree:--"<i>He shall rule over thee</i>." <i>That</i> was THE INSTITUTION OF
+GOVERNMENT. It was not based on the "<i>consent</i>" of Eve, the governed. It
+was from God. He gave to Adam like authority to rule his children. It was
+not derived from their "<i>consent</i>". It was from God. He gave Noah the same
+sovereignty, with express power over life, liberty, and pursuit of
+happiness. It was not founded in "<i>consent</i>" of Shem, Ham, and Japheth,
+and their wives. It was from God. He then determined the habitations of
+men on all the face of the earth, and <i>indicated</i> to them, in every clime,
+the <i>form</i> and <i>power</i> of their governments. He gave, directly, government
+to Israel. He just as truly gave it to Idumea, to Egypt, and to Babylon,
+to the Arab, to the Esquimaux, the Caffre, the Hottentot, and the negro.</p>
+
+<p>God, in the Bible, decides the matter. He says, "Let every soul be subject
+unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that
+be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
+the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
+damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.
+Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou
+shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for
+good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid, for he beareth not the
+sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath
+upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for
+wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also:
+for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
+Render, therefore, to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due;
+custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor." (Rom.
+xiii. 1-7.)</p>
+
+<p>Here God reveals to us that he has <i>delegated to government his own</i> RIGHT
+<i>over life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness</i>; and that that RIGHT is
+not, in any sense, from the "<i>consent</i>" of the governed, but is directly
+from him. Government over men, whether in the family or in the state, is,
+then, as directly from God as it would be if he, in visible person, ruled
+in the family or in the state. I speak not only of the RIGHT simply to
+govern, but the <i>mode</i> of the government, and the <i>extent</i> of the power.
+Government <i>can do</i> ALL which God <i>would do,--just</i> THAT,--<i>no more, no
+less</i>. And it is <i>bound to do just</i> THAT,--<i>no more, no less</i>. Government
+is responsible to God, if it fails to do <i>just</i> THAT which He himself
+would do. It is under responsibility, then, to rule in righteousness. It
+must not oppress. It must <i>give</i> to every individual "<i>life, liberty, and
+pursuit of happiness</i>," in harmony with the <i>good</i> of the family,--the
+state,--<i>as God himself would give it</i>,--<i>just</i> THAT, <i>no more, no less</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This passage of Scripture settles the question, From whence has
+government RIGHT to rule, and what is the <i>extent</i> of its power? The
+RIGHT is from God, and the EXTENT of the power is <i>just</i> THAT to which
+God would exercise it if he were personally on the earth. God, in this
+passage, and others, settles, with equal clearness, from whence is the
+OBLIGATION to <i>submit</i> to government, and what is the <i>extent</i> of the
+duty of obedience? The OBLIGATION to submit is not from individual RIGHT
+to consent or not to consent to government,--but the OBLIGATION <i>to
+submit</i> is directly from God.</p>
+
+<p>The EXTENT of the duty of obedience is equally revealed--in this wise: so
+long as the government rules in righteousness, the duty is perfect
+obedience. So soon, however, as government requires <i>that</i> which God, in
+his word, <i>forbids the subject to do</i>, he must obey God, and not man. He
+must refuse to obey man. But, inasmuch as the obligation to submit to
+authority of government is so great, the subject must <i>know</i> it is the
+will of God, that he shall refuse to obey, before he assumes the
+responsibility of resistance to the powers that be. His <i>conscience</i> will
+not justify him before God, if he mistakes his duty. <i>He may be all the
+more to blame for having</i> SUCH A CONSCIENCE. Let him, then, be CERTAIN he
+can say, like Peter and John, "Whether it be right, in the sight of God,
+to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."</p>
+
+<p>But, when government requires <i>that</i> which God <i>does not forbid</i> the
+subject to do, although <i>in that</i> the government may have transcended the
+line of its righteous rule, the subject must, nevertheless,
+submit,--<i>until</i> oppression has gone to <i>the point</i> at which <i>God makes</i>
+RESISTANCE <i>to be duty.</i> And <i>that point</i> is when RESISTANCE will clearly
+be <i>less of evil, and more of good</i>, TO THE COMMUNITY, than further
+submission.</p>
+
+<p><i>That</i> is the rule of <i>duty</i> God gives to the <i>whole</i> people, or to the
+<i>minority</i>, or to the <i>individual</i>, to guide them in resistance to the
+powers that be.</p>
+
+<p>It is irresistibly <i>certain</i> that <i>He who ordains</i> government <i>has, alone,
+the right to alter or abolish it</i>,--that He who institutes the powers that
+be has, alone, the right to say when and how the people, in whole or in
+part, may resist. So, then, the people, in whole, or in part, have no
+right to resist, to alter, or abolish government, simply because <i>they</i>
+may deem it destructive of the end for which it was instituted; but they
+may resist, alter, or abolish, <i>when it shall be seen that God so regards
+it</i>. This places the great fact where it must be placed,--<i>under the</i>
+CONTROL <i>of the</i> BIBLE <i>and</i> PROVIDENCE.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Illustrations</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+I will conclude with one or two illustrations. God, in his providence,
+ordains the Russian form of government,--<i>i.e.</i> He places the sovereignty
+in one man, because He sees that such government can secure, for a time,
+more good to that degraded people than any other form. Now, I ask, Has the
+emperor <i>right</i>, from God, to change at once, in his mere "<i>consent</i>," the
+<i>form</i> of his government to <i>that</i> of the United States? No. God forbids
+him. Why? Because he would thereby destroy the good, and bring immense
+evil in his empire. I ask again, Have the Russian serfs and nobles,--yea,
+all,--"consenting," the right, from God, to make that change? No. For the
+government of the United States is not suited to them. And, in such an
+attempt, they would deprive themselves of the blessings they now have, and
+bring all the horrors of anarchy.</p>
+
+<p>Do you ask if I then hold, that God ordains the Russian type of rule to be
+perpetual over that people? No. The emperor is bound to secure all of
+"<i>life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness</i>," to each individual,
+consistent with the good of the nation. And he is to learn his obligation
+from the Bible, and faithfully apply it to the condition of his subjects.
+<i>He will thus gradually elevate them</i>; while they, on their part, are
+bound to strive for this elevation, in all the ways in which God may show
+them the good, and the right, which, more and more, will belong to them in
+their upward progress. The result of such government and such obedience
+would be that of a father's faithful training, and children's
+corresponding obedience. The Russian people would thus have, gradually,
+that measure of liberty they could bear, under the one-man power,--and
+then, in other forms, as they might be qualified to realize them. This
+development would be without convulsion,--as the parent gives place, while
+the children are passing from the lower to their higher life. It would be
+the exemplification of Carlyle's illustration of the snake. He says, A
+people should change their government only as a snake sheds his skin: the
+new skin is gradually formed under the old one,--and then the snake
+wriggles out, with just a drop of blood here and there, where the old
+jacket held on rather tightly.</p>
+
+<p>God ordains the government of the United States. And <i>He places</i> the
+<i>sovereignty</i> in the <i>will</i> of the majority, because He has trained the
+people, through many generations in modes of government, to such an
+elevation in moral and religious intelligence, that such sovereignty is
+best suited to confer on them the highest right, as yet, to "life,
+liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But God requires that <i>that will
+of the majority</i> be in perfect submission to Him. Once more then I
+inquire,--Whether the people of this country, yea all of them consenting,
+have right from God, to abolish now, at this time, our free institutions,
+and set up the sway of Russia? No. But why? There is one answer only. He
+tells us that our happiness is in this form of government, and in it, its
+developed results.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>The "Social Compact" not recognised in the Divine Institute</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+Here I pause. So, then, God gives no sanction to the notion of a SOCIAL
+COMPACT. He never gave to man individual, isolated, natural rights,
+unalienably in his keeping. He never made him a Caspar Hauser, in the
+forest, without name or home,--a Melchisedek, in the wilderness, without
+father, without mother, without descent,--a Robinson Crusoe, on his
+island, in skins and barefooted, waiting, among goats and parrots, the
+coming of the canoes and the savages, to enable him to "<i>consent</i>" if he
+would, to the relations of social life.
+
+And, therefore, those five sentences in that second paragraph of the
+Declaration of Independence are not the truth; so, then, it is not
+<i>self-evident</i> truth that all men are created equal. So, then, it is not
+the truth, in fact, that they are created equal. So, then, it is not the
+truth that God has endowed all men with unalienable right to life,
+liberty, and pursuit of happiness. So, then, it is not the truth that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So,
+then, it is not the truth that the people have right to alter or abolish
+their government, and institute a new form, whenever to them it shall seem
+likely to effect their safety and happiness.</p>
+
+<p>The manner in which these unscriptural dogmas have been modified or
+developed in the United States, I will examine in another paper.</p>
+
+<p>I merely add, that the opinions of revered ancestors, on these questions
+of right and their application to American slavery, must now, as never
+before, be brought to the test of the light of the Bible. F.A. Ross.</p>
+
+<p>Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 1857.</p>
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="07"></a>Man-Stealing.</h1>
+
+
+<p>This argument on the abolition charge, against the slave-holder,--that he
+is a man-stealer,--covers the whole question of slavery, especially as it
+is seen in the Old Testament. The headings in the letter make the subject
+sufficiently clear.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>No. III.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>Rev. Albert Barnes:--</p>
+
+<p>Dear Sir:--In my first letter, I merely touched some points in your tract,
+intending to notice them more fully in subsequent communications. I have,
+in my second paper, sufficiently examined the imaginary maxims of created
+equality and unalienable rights.</p>
+
+<p>In this, I will test your views by Scripture more directly. "To the law
+and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is
+because there is no light in them." (Isaiah viii. 20).</p>
+
+<p>The abolitionist charges the slave-holder with being a <i>man-stealer</i>. He
+makes this allegation in two affirmations. First, that the slave-holder
+is thus guilty, because, the negro having been kidnapped in Africa,
+therefore those who now hold him, or his children, in bondage, lie under
+the guilt of that first act. Secondly, that the slave-holder, by the very
+fact that he is such, is guilty of stealing from the negro his unalienable
+right to freedom.</p>
+
+<p>This is the charge. It covers the whole subject. I will meet it in all
+its parts.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>The Difference between Man-Stealing and Slave-Holding, as set forth in
+the Bible</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+The Bible reads thus: (Exodus xxi. 16:)--"He that stealeth a man
+and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be
+put to death."</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is it to kidnap or steal a man? Webster informs us--To kidnap
+is "to steal a human being, a man, woman, or child; or to seize and
+forcibly carry away any person whatever, from his own country or state
+into another." The idea of "<i>seizing and forcibly carrying away"</i> enters
+into the meaning of the word in all the definitions of law.</p>
+
+<p>The crime, then, set forth in the Bible was not <i>selling</i> a man: but
+selling a <i>stolen</i> man. The crime was not having a man <i>in his hand as a
+slave</i>; but......in <i>his</i> hand, as a slave, a <i>stolen</i> man. And hence, the
+penalty of <i>death</i> was affixed, not to selling, buying, or holding man, as
+a slave, but to the specific offence of <i>stealing and selling, or holding</i>
+a man <i>thus stolen, contrary to this law</i>. Yea, it was <i>this law</i>, and
+this law <i>only</i>, which made it <i>wrong</i>. For, under some circumstances, God
+sanctioned the seizing and forcibly carrying away a man, woman, or child
+from country or state, into slavery or other condition. He sanctioned the
+utter destruction of every male and every married woman, and child, of
+Jabez-Gilead, and the seizure, and forcibly carrying away, four hundred
+virgins, unto the camp to Shiloh, and there, being given as wives to the
+remnant of the slaughtered tribe of Benjamin, in the rock Rimmon. Sir,
+how did that destruction of Jabez-Gilead, and the kidnapping of those
+young women, differ from the razing of an African village, and forcibly
+seizing, and carrying away, those not put to the sword? The difference is
+in this:--God commanded the Israelites to seize and bear off those young
+women. But he forbids the slaver to kidnap the African. Therefore, the
+Israelites did right; therefore, the trader does wrong. The Israelites,
+it seems, gave wives, in that way, to the spared Benjamites, because they
+had sworn not to give their daughters. But there were six hundred of these
+Benjamites. Two hundred were therefore still without wives. What was done
+for them? Why, God authorized the elders of the congregation to tell the
+two hundred Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of
+Shiloh, when they came out to dance, in the feast of the Lord, on the
+north side of Bethel. And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them
+wives, "whom they caught:" (Judges xxi.) God made it right for those
+Benjamites to catch every man his wife, of the daughters of Shiloh. But he
+makes it wrong for the trader to catch his slaves of the sons or daughters
+of Africa. Lest you should try to deny that God authorized this act of the
+children of Israel, although I believe he did order it, let me remind you
+of another such case, the authority for which you will not question.</p>
+
+<p>Moses, by direct command from God, destroyed the Midianites. He slew all
+the males, and carried away all the women and children. He then had all
+the married women and male children killed; but all the virgins,
+thirty-two thousand, were divided as spoil among the people. And
+<i>thirty-two</i> of these virgins, <i>the Lord's tribute</i>, were given unto
+Eleazar, the priest, "as the Lord commanded Moses." (Numbers xxxi.)</p>
+
+<p>Sir, Thomas Paine rejected the Bible on this fact among his other
+objections. Yea, <i>his</i> reason, <i>his</i> sensibilities, <i>his</i> great law of
+humanity, <i>his</i> intuitional and eternal sense of right, made it impossible
+for him to honor such a God. And, sir, on your now avowed principles of
+interpretation, which are those of Paine, you sustain him in his rejection
+of the books of Moses and all the word of God.</p>
+
+<p>God's command <i>made it right</i> for Moses to destroy the Midianites and make
+slaves of their daughters; and I have dwelt upon these facts, to reiterate
+what I hold to be THE FIRST TRUTH IN MORALS:--that a thing is right, not
+because it is ever so <i>per se</i>, but because God <i>makes it right</i>; and, of
+course, a thing is wrong, not because it is so in the nature of things,
+but because God makes it wrong. I distinctly have taken, and do take, that
+ground in its widest sense, and am prepared to maintain it against all
+comers. He made it right for the sons of Adam to marry their sisters. He
+made it right for Abraham to marry his half-sister. He made it right for
+the patriarchs, and David and Solomon, to have more wives than one. He
+made it right when he gave command to kill whole nations, sparing none. He
+made it right when he ordered that nations, or such part as he pleased,
+should be spared and enslaved. He made it right that the patriarchs and
+the Israelites should hold slaves in harmony with the system of servile
+labor which had long been in the world. He merely modified that system to
+suit his views of good among his people. So, then, when he saw fit, they
+might capture men. So, then, when he forbade the individual Israelite to
+steal a man, he made it crime, and the penalty death. So, then, that crime
+was not the mere <i>stealing</i> a man, nor the <i>selling</i> a man, nor the
+<i>holding</i> a man,--but the <i>stealing and selling</i>, or <i>holding</i>, a man
+<i>under circumstances thus forbidden of God</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Was the Israelite Master a Man-Stealer?</i></p>
+
+<p>
+I now ask, Did God intend to make man-stealing and slave-holding the same
+thing? Let us see. In that very chapter of Exodus (xxi.) which contains
+the law against man-stealing, and only four verses further on, God says,
+"If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his
+hand, he shall be surely punished: notwithstanding, if he continue a day
+or two he shall not be punished; for he is his money." (Verses 20, 21.)</p>
+
+<p>Sir, that man was not a hired servant. He was bought with money. He was
+regarded by God <i>as the money</i> of his master. He was his slave, in the
+full meaning of a slave, then, and now, bought with money. God, then, did
+not intend the Israelites to understand, and not one of them ever
+understood, from that day to this, that Jehovah in his law to Moses
+regarded the slave-holder as a man-stealer. Man-stealing was a specific
+offence, with its specific penalty. Slave-holding was one form of God's
+righteous government over men,--a government he ordained, with various
+modifications, among the Hebrews themselves, and with sterner features in
+its relation to heathen slaves.</p>
+
+<p>In Exodus xxi. and Leviticus xxv., various gradations of servitude were
+enacted, with a careful particularity which need not be misunderstood.
+Among these, a Hebrew man might be a slave for six years, and then go free
+with his wife, if he were married when he came into the relation; but if
+his master had given him a wife, and she had borne him sons or daughters,
+the wife and her children should be her master's, and he should go out by
+himself. That is, the man by the law became free, while his wife and
+children remained slaves. If the servant, however, plainly said, "I love
+my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his
+master brought him unto the judges, also unto the doorpost, and his master
+bored his ear through with an awl, and he served him forever." (Ex. xxi.
+1-6.) Sir, you have urged discussion:--give us then your views of that
+passage. Tell us how that man was separated from his wife and children
+according to <i>the eternal right</i>. Tell us what was the condition of the
+woman in case the man chose to "go out" without her? Tell us if the Hebrew
+who thus had his ear bored by his master with an awl was not a slave for
+life? Tell us, lastly, whether those children were not slaves? And, while
+on that chapter, tell us whether in the next verses, 7-11, God did not
+allow the Israelite father to sell his own daughter into bondage and into
+polygamy by the same act of sale?</p>
+
+<p>I will not dwell longer on these milder forms of slavery, but read to you
+the clear and unmistakable command of the Lord in Leviticus xxv. 44,
+46:--"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be
+of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and
+bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn
+among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you,
+which they beget in your land: and they shall be your possession: and ye
+shall take them for an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit
+them for a possession; and they shall be your bondmen forever."</p>
+
+<p>Sir, the sun will grow dim with age before that Scripture can be tortured
+to mean any thing else than just what it says; that God commanded the
+Israelites to be slave-holders in the strict and true sense over the
+heathen, in manner and form therein set forth. Do you tell the world that
+this cannot be the sense of the Bible, because it is "a violation of the
+first principles of the American Declaration of Independence;" because it
+grates upon your "instinct of liberty;" because it reveals God in
+opposition to the "spirit of the age;" because, if it be the sense of the
+passage, then "the Bible neither ought to be, nor can be, received by
+mankind as a divine revelation"? <i>That</i> is what you say: <i>that</i> is what
+Albert Barnes affirms in his philosophy. But what if God in his word says,
+"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have shall be of the
+heathen that are round about you"? What if we may then choose between
+Albert Barnes's philosophy and God's truth?</p>
+
+<p>Or will you say, God, under the circumstances, <i>permitted</i> the Israelites
+<i>to sin</i> in the matter of slave-holding, just as he permitted them <i>to
+sin</i> by living in polygamy. <i>Permitted</i> them <i>to sin!</i> No, sir; God
+<i>commanded</i> them to be slave-holders. He <i>made it</i> the law of their social
+state. He <i>made it</i> one form of his ordained government among them.
+Moreover, you take it for granted all too soon, that the Israelites
+committed sin in their polygamy. God sanctioned their polygamy. It was
+therefore not sin in them. It was right. But God now forbids polygamy,
+under the gospel; and now it is sin.</p>
+
+<p>Or will you tell us the iniquity of the Canaanites was then full, and
+God's time to punish them had come? True; but the same question comes
+up:--Did God punish the Canaanites by placing them in the relation of
+slaves to his people, by express command, which compelled them to sin?
+That's the point. I will not permit you to evade it. In plainer
+words:--Did God command the Hebrews to make slaves of their fellow-men, to
+buy them and sell them, to regard them as their money? He did. Then, did
+the Hebrews sin when they obeyed God's command? No. Then they did what was
+right, and it was right because God made it so. Then <i>the Hebrew
+slave-holder was not a man-stealer</i>. But, you say, the Southern
+slave-holder is. Well, we shall see presently.</p>
+
+<p>Just here, the abolitionist who professes to respect the Scriptures is
+wont to tell us that the whole subject of bondage among the Israelites was
+so peculiar to God's ancient dispensation, that no analogy between that
+bondage and Southern slavery can be brought up. Thus he attempts to raise
+a dust out of the Jewish institutions, to prevent people from seeing that
+slaveholding then was the same thing that it is now. But, to sustain my
+interpretation of the plain Scriptures given, I will go back five hundred
+years before the existence of the Hebrew nation.</p>
+
+<p>I read at that time, (Gen. xiv. 14:)--"And when Abraham heard that his
+brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own
+house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them even unto Damascus,"
+&amp;c. (Gen. xvii. 27:)--"And all the men of his house, born, in the house,
+and bought with the money of the stranger, were circumcised." (Gen. xx.
+14:)--"And Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and men-servants and
+women-servants, and gave them unto Abraham." (Gen. xxiv. 34, 35:)--"And he
+said, I am Abraham's servant; and the Lord hath blessed my master greatly,
+and he is become great; and he hath given him flocks and herds, and silver
+and gold, and men-servants and maid-servants, and camels and asses."</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Was Abraham a Man-Stealer?</i></p>
+
+<p>
+Sir, what is the common sense of these Scriptures? Why, that the
+slave-trade existed in Abraham's day, as it had long before, and has ever
+since, in all the regions of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, in which
+criminals and prisoners of war were sold,--in which parents sold their
+children. Abraham, then, it is plain, bought, of the sellers in this
+traffic, men-servants and maid-servants; he had them born in his house; he
+received them as presents.</p>
+
+<p>Do you tell me that Abraham, by divine authority, made these servants part
+of his family, social and religious? Very good. But still he regarded them
+as his slaves. He took Hagar as a wife, but he treated her as his
+slave,--yea, as Sarah's slave; and as such he gave her to be chastised,
+for misconduct, by her mistress. Yea, he never placed Ishmael, the son of
+the bondwoman, on a level with Isaac, the son of the freewoman. If, then,
+he so regarded Hagar and Ishmael, of course he never considered his other
+slaves on an equality with himself. True, had he been childless, he would
+have given his estate to Eliezer: but he would have given it to his slave.
+True, had Isaac not been born, he would have given his wealth to Ishmael;
+but he would nave given it to the son of his bondwoman. Sir, every
+Southern planter is not more truly a slave-holder than Abraham. And the
+Southern master, by divine authority, may, to-day, consider his slaves
+part of his social and religious family, just as Abraham did. His relation
+is just that of Abraham. He has slaves of an inferior type of mankind from
+Abraham's bondmen; and he therefore, for that reason, as well as from the
+fact that they are his slaves, holds them lower than himself. But,
+nevertheless, he is a slave-holder in no other sense than was Abraham. Did
+Abraham have his slave-household circumcised? Every Southern planter may
+have his slave-household baptized. I baptized, not long since, a
+slave-child,--the master and mistress offering it to God. What was done
+in the parlor might be done with divine approbation on every plantation.</p>
+
+<p>So, then, Abraham lived in the midst of a system of slave-holding exactly
+the same in nature with that in the South,--a system ordained of God as
+really as the other forms of government round about him. He, then, with
+the divine blessing, made himself the master of slaves, men, women, and
+children, by buying them,--by receiving them in gifts,--by having them
+born in his house; and he controlled them as property, just as really as
+the Southern master in the present day. I ask now, <i>was Abraham a
+man-stealer?</i> Oh, no, you reiterate: but the Southern master is. Why?</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Is the Southern Master a Man-Stealer</i>?</p>
+
+<p>
+Do you, sir, or anybody, contend that the Southern master seized his slave
+in Africa, and forcibly brought him away to America, contrary to law?
+That, and that alone, was and is kidnapping in divine and human statute.
+No. What then? Why, the abolitionist responds, The African man-stealer
+sold his victim to the slave-holder; he, to the planter; and the negro has
+been ever since in bondage: therefore <i>the guilt</i> of the man-stealer has
+cleaved to sellers, buyers, and inheritors, to this time, and will
+through all generations to come. That is the charge.</p>
+
+<p>And it brings up the question so often and triumphantly asked by the
+abolitionist; <i>i.e.</i> "You," he says to the slave-holder,--"you admit it
+was wrong to steal the negro in Africa. Can the slave-holder, then, throw
+off wrong so long as he holds the slave at any time or anywhere
+thereafter?" I answer, yes; and my reply shall be short, yet conclusive. It
+is this:--<i>Guilt</i>, or criminality, is that state of a moral agent which
+results from <i>his</i> actual commission of a crime or offence knowing it to
+be crime or violation of law. <i>That</i> is the received definition of
+<i>guilt</i>, and <i>you</i>, I know, do accept it. The <i>guilt</i>, then, of kidnapping
+<i>terminated</i> with the man-stealer, the seller, the buyer, and holders,
+who, knowingly and intentionally, carried on the traffic contrary to the
+divine law. THAT GUILT attaches in no sense whatever, as a personal, moral
+responsibility, to the present slave-holder. Observe, I am here
+discussing, <i>not the question of mere slave-holding,</i> but whether the
+master, who has had nothing to do with the slave-trade, can <i>now</i> hold the
+slave without the moral guilt of the man-stealer? I have said that <i>that</i>
+guilt, in no sense whatever, rests upon him; for he neither stole the
+man, nor bought him from the kidnapper, nor had any <i>complicity</i> in the
+traffic. Here, I know, the abolitionist insists that the master <i>is</i>
+guilty of this <i>complicity</i>, unless he will at once emancipate the slave;
+because, so long as he holds him, he thereby, personally and <i>voluntarily,
+assumes the same relation which the original kidnapper or buyer held to
+the African</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This is Dr. Cheever's argument in a recent popular sermon. He thinks it
+unanswerable; but it has no weight whatever. It is met perfectly by adding
+<i>one</i> word to his proposition. Thus:--<i>The master does</i> NOT <i>assume the
+same relation which the original man-stealer or buyer held to the
+African</i>. The master's <i>relation</i> to God and to his slave is now <i>wholly
+changed</i> from that of the man-stealer, and those engaged in the trade; and
+his obligation is wholly different. What is his relation? and what is his
+obligation? They are as follows:----</p>
+
+<p>The master finds himself, with no taint of personal concern in the African
+trade, in a Christian community of white Anglo-Americans, holding control
+over his black fellow-man, who is so unlike himself in complexion, in
+form, in other peculiarities, and so unequal to himself in attributes of
+body and mind, that it is <i>impossible, in every sense</i>, to place him on a
+level with himself in the community. <i>This is his relation to the negro</i>.
+What, then, does God command him to do? Does God require him to send the
+negro back to his heathen home from whence he was stolen? That home no
+longer exists. But, if it did remain, does God command the master to send
+his Christianized slave into the horrors of his former African heathenism?
+No. God has placed the master under law entirely different from his
+command to the slave-trader. God said to the trader, <i>Let the negro
+alone</i>. But he says to the present master, <i>Do unto the negro all the good
+you can; make him a civilized man; make him a Christian man; lift him up
+and give him all he has a right to claim in the good of the whole
+community</i>. This the master can do; this he must do, and then leave the
+result with the Almighty.</p>
+
+<p>We reach the same conclusion by asking, What does God say to the
+negro-slave?</p>
+
+<p>Does he tell him to ask to be sent back to heathen Africa? No. Does he
+give him authority to claim a created equality and unalienable right to
+be on a level with the white man in civil and social relations? No. To
+ask the first would be to ask a great evil; to claim the second is to
+demand a natural and moral impossibility. No. God tells him to seek none
+of these things. But he commands him to know the facts in his case as
+they are in the Bible, and have ever been, and ever will be in
+Providence:--that he is not the white man's equal,--that he can never
+have his level--that he must not claim it; but that he can have, and
+ought to have, and must have, all of good, in his condition as a slave,
+until God may reveal a higher happiness for him in some other relation
+than that <i>he must ever</i> have to the Anglo-American. The present
+slave-holder, then, by declining to emancipate his bondman, does not
+place himself in <i>the guilt</i> of the man-stealer or of those who had
+complicity with him; but he stands <i>exactly</i> in that NICK <i>of time and
+place</i>, in the course of Providence, where <i>wrong</i>, in the transmission
+of African slavery, <i>ends</i>, and <i>right begins</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I have, sir, fairly stated this, your strongest argument, and fully met
+it. <i>The Southern master is not a man-stealer.</i> The abolitionist--repulsed
+in his charge that the slave-owner is a kidnapper, either in fact or by
+voluntarily assuming any of the relations of the traffic--then makes his
+impeachment on his second affirmation, mentioned at the opening of this
+letter. That the slave-holder is, nevertheless, thus <i>guilty</i>, because,
+in the simple fact of being a master, he <i>steals</i> from the negro his
+unalienable right to freedom.</p>
+
+<p>This, sir, looks like a new view of the subject. The crime forbidden in
+the Bible was stealing and selling a man; <i>i.e.</i> seizing and forcibly
+carrying away, from country or State, a human being--man, woman, or
+child--contrary to law, and selling or holding the same. But the
+abolitionist gives us to understand this crime rests on the slave-holder
+in another sense:--namely, that he steals from the negro a metaphysical
+attribute,--his unalienable right to liberty!</p>
+
+<p>This is a new sort of kidnapping. This is, I suppose, <i>stealing the man
+from himself</i>, as it is sometimes elegantly expressed,--<i>robbing him of
+his body and his soul</i>. Sir, I admit this is a strong figure of speech, a
+beautiful personification, a sonorous rhetorical flourish, which must make
+a deep impression on Dr. Cheever's people, Broadway, New York, and on your
+congregation, Washington Square, Philadelphia; but it is certainly not the
+Bible crime of man-stealing. And whether the Southern master is <i>guilty</i>
+of this sublimated thing will be understood by us when you prove that the
+negro, or anybody else, has such metaphysical right to be stolen,--such
+transcendental liberty not in subordination to the good of the whole
+people. In a word, sir, this refined expression is, after all, just the
+old averment that the slave-holder is guilty of <i>sin per se!</i> That's it.</p>
+
+<p>I have given you, in reply, the Old Testament. In my next, I propose to
+inquire what the New Testament says in the light of the <i>Golden Rule</i>.</p>
+
+<p>F.A. Ross.</p>
+
+<p>Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 31, 1857.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a name="08"></a>The Golden Rule.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>This view of the Golden Rule is the only exposition of that great text
+which has ever been given in words sufficiently clear, and, with practical
+illustrations, to make the subject intelligible to every capacity. The
+explanation is the truth of God, and it settles forever the slavery
+question, so far as it rests on this precept of Jesus Christ.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>No. IV.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>Rev. Albert Barnes:--
+
+Dear Sir:--The argument against slave-holding, founded on the Golden Rule,
+is the strongest which can be presented, and I admit that, if it cannot be
+perfectly met, the master must give the slave liberty and equality. But if
+it can be absolutely refuted, then the slave-holder in this regard may
+have a good conscience; and the abolitionist has nothing more to say. Here
+is the rule.
+
+"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to
+you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets."
+(Matt. vii. 12.)
+
+In your "<i>Notes</i>," on this passage you thus write:--"This command has been
+usually called the Savior's <i>Golden Rule</i>; a name given to it on account
+of its great value.--<i>All that you</i> EXPECT or DESIRE <i>of others, in
+similar circumstances</i>, DO TO THEM."
+
+This, sir, is your exposition of the Savior's rule of right. With all due
+respect, I decline your interpretation. You have missed the meaning by
+leaving out ONE word. Observe,--you do not say, All that you OUGHT to
+<i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i>, &amp;c., THAT <i>do to them</i>. No. But you make the
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE, <i>which every man</i> ACTUALLY HAS <i>in similar
+circumstances</i>, THE MEASURE <i>of his</i> DUTY <i>to every other man</i>. Or, in
+different words, you make, without qualification or explanation, the MERE
+EXPECTATION or DESIRE which every man,--with no instruction, or any sort
+of training,--wise or simple, good or bad, heathen, Mohammedan, nominal
+Christian,--WOULD HAVE <i>in similar circumstances</i>, THE LAW OF OBLIGATION,
+<i>always binding</i> upon him TO DO THAT SAME THING <i>unto his neighbor!</i>
+
+Sir, you have left out <i>the very idea</i> which contains the sense of that
+Scripture. It is this: Christ, in his rule, <i>presupposes</i> that the man to
+whom he gives it <i>knows</i>, and from the Bible, (or providence, or natural
+conscience, <i>so far as in harmony</i> with the Bible,) the <i>various
+relations</i> in which God has placed him; and the <i>respective duties</i> in
+those relations; <i>i.e.</i> The rule <i>assumes</i> that he KNOWS what he OUGHT to
+<i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> in similar circumstances.
+
+I will test this affirmation by several and varied illustrations. I will
+show how Christ, according to your exposition of his rule, speaks on the
+subject,--of <i>revenge, marriage, emancipation</i>,--<i>the fugitive from
+bondage</i>. And how he truly speaks on these subjects.
+
+
+
+<i>Revenge--Right according to your view of the Golden Rule</i>.
+
+
+Indian and Missionary--Prisoner tied to a tree, stuck over with burning
+splinters.
+
+Here is an Indian torturing his prisoner. The missionary approaches and
+beseeches him to regard <i>the Golden Rule</i>. "Humph!" utters the savage:
+"Golden Rule! what's that?" "Why" says the good man, "all that you
+<i>expect</i> or <i>desired</i> other Indians, in similar circumstances, do you
+even so to them." "Humph!" growls the warrior, with a fierce
+smile,--"Missionary--good: that's what I do now. If I was tied to that
+tree, I would <i>expect</i> and <i>desire him</i> to have <i>his</i> revenge,--to do to
+me as I do to him; and I would sing my death-song, as he sings his.
+Missionary, your rule is Indian rule,--good rule, missionary. Humph!"
+And he sticks more splinters into his victim, brandishes his tomahawk,
+and yells.
+
+Sir, what has the missionary to say, after this perfect proof that you
+have mistaken the great law of right? Verily, he finds that the rule,
+with your explanation, tells the Indian to torture his prisoner. Verily,
+he finds that the wild man has the best of the argument. He finds he had
+left out the word OUGHT; and that he can't put it in, until he teaches
+the Indian things which as yet he don't know. Yea, he finds he gave the
+commandment too soon; for that he must begin back of that commandment,
+and teach the savage God's ordination of the relations in which he is to
+his fellow-men, before he can make him comprehend or apply the rule as
+Christ gives it.
+
+
+
+<i>Marriage--Void under your Interpretation of the Golden Rule</i>.
+
+
+Lucy Stone, and Moses--Lady on sofa, having just divorced herself--Moses,
+with the Tables of the Law, appears: she falls at his feet, and covers her
+face with her hands.
+
+This woman, everybody knows, was married some time since, after a fashion;
+that is to say, protesting publicly against all laws of wedlock, and
+entering into the relation so long only as she, or her husband, might
+continue pleased therewith.
+
+Very well. Then I, without insult to her or offense to my readers, suppose
+that about this time she has shown her unalienable right to liberty and
+equality by giving her husband a bill of divorcement. Free again, she
+reclines on her couch, and is reading the Tribune. It is mid-day. But
+there is a light, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about
+her. And <i>he</i>, who saw God on Sinai, stands before her, the glory on his
+face, and the tables of stone in his hands. The woman falls before him,
+veils her eyes with her trembling fingers, and cries out, "Moses, oh, I
+believed till now that thou practised deception, in claiming to be sent of
+God to Israel. But now, I know thou didst see God in the burning bush,
+and heard him speak that law from the holy mountain. Moses, I know ... I
+confess.".... And Moses answers, and says unto her, "Woman, thou art one
+of a great class in this land, who claim to be more just than God, more
+pure than their Maker, who have made their inward light their God. Woman,
+thou in '<i>convention</i>' hast uttered <i>Declaration of Independence</i> from
+man. And, verily, thou hast asserted this claim to equality and
+unalienable right, even now, by giving thy husband his bill of
+divorcement, in thy sense of the Golden Rule. Yea, verily, thou hast done
+unto him all that thou <i>expectedst</i> or <i>desiredst</i> of him, in similar
+circumstances. And now thou thinkest thyself free again. Woman, thou art a
+sinner. Verily, thine inward light, and declaration of independence, and
+Golden Rule, do well agree the one with the other. Verily, thou hast
+learned of Jefferson, and Channing, and Barnes. But, woman,
+notwithstanding thou hast sat at the feet of these wise men, I, Moses, say
+thou art a sinner before the law, and the prophets, and the gospel. Woman,
+thy light is darkness; thy declaration of equality and right is vanity and
+folly; and thy Golden Rule is license to wickedness.
+
+"Woman, hast thou ears? Hear: I, by authority of God, ordained that the
+man should rule over thee. I placed thee, and children, and men-servants,
+and maid-servants, under the same law of subjection to the government
+ordained of God in the family,--the state. I for a time sanctioned
+polygamy, and made it right. I, for the hardness of men's hearts, allowed
+them, and made it right, to give their wives a bill of divorcement.
+Woman, hear. Paul, having the same Spirit of God, confirms my word. He
+commands <i>wives</i>, and children, and servants, after this manner:--'Wives,
+submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord;
+children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto
+the Lord; servants, obey in all things your masters according to the
+flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but in singleness of heart,
+fearing God.' Woman, Paul makes <i>that rule</i> the same, and <i>that
+submission</i>, the same. The <i>manner</i> of the rule he varies with the
+relations. He requires it to be, in the <i>love</i> of the husband, even as
+Christ loved the church,--in the <i>mildness</i> of the father, not provoking
+the children to anger, lest they be discouraged,--in <i>the justice and
+equity</i> of the master, knowing that he also has a master in heaven:
+(Colossians.) Woman, hear. Paul says to thee, the man <i>now</i> shall have
+one wife, and he <i>now</i> shall not give her a bill of divorcement, save for
+crime. Woman, thou art not free from thy husband. Christ's Golden Rule
+must not be interpreted by thee as A. Barnes has rendered it; Christ
+<i>assumes</i> that thou <i>believest</i> God's truth,--that thou <i>knowest</i> the
+relation of husband and wife, and the <i>obligations and rights</i> of the
+same, <i>as in the Bible; then</i>, in the light of this <i>knowledge</i>, verily,
+thou art required to do what God says thou <i>oughtest</i> to do. Woman, thou
+art a sinner. Go, sin no more. Go, find thy husband; see to it that he
+takes thee back. Go, submit to him, and honor him, and obey him."
+
+
+
+<i>Emancipation--Ruin--Golden Rule, in your meaning, carried out</i>.
+
+
+Island in the Tropics--Elegant houses falling to decay--Broad fields
+abandoned to the forest--Wharves grass-grown--Negroes relapsing into the
+savage state--A dark cloud over the island, through which the lightning
+glares, revealing, in red writing, these words:--"<i>Redeemed, regenerated,
+and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal
+emancipation"</i>.--[Gospel--according to Curran--and the British
+Parliament.]
+
+Jamaica, sir, to say nothing of St. Domingo, is illustration of your
+theory of the Golden Rule, in negro emancipation. You tell the Southern
+master that all he would <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i>, if he were a slave, he must
+do unto his bondman; that he must not pause to ask whether the relation of
+master and slave be ordained of God or not. No. You tell him, <i>if</i> he
+would <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> liberty were he a slave, <i>that</i> settles the
+question as to what he is to do! He must let his bondman go free. Yea,
+<i>that</i> is what you teach: because the moment you put in the word OUGHT,
+and say, all that you OUGHT to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i>,--<i>i.e.</i> all that you
+<i>know</i> God commands you to <i>expect </i> or <i>desire</i> in your relations to men,
+<i>as established by him,</i>--THAT <i>do to them</i>. Sir, when you thus explain
+the Golden Rule, then your argument against slave-holding, so far as
+founded on this rule, is at once arrested; it is stopped short, in full
+career; it has to wait for reinforcement of FACT, which may never come up.
+For, suppose the FACT to be, that the relation of master and slave is one
+mode of the government ordained of God. Then, sir, the master, <i>knowing
+that</i> FACT, and <i>knowing</i> what the slave, <i>as a slave</i>, OUGHT to <i>expect</i>
+or <i>desire</i>, he, the master, then FULFILS THE GOLDEN RULE when he does
+that unto his slave which, in similar circumstances, he OUGHT to expect
+<i>to be done unto himself</i>. Now comes the question, OUGHT he then to
+<i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> liberty and equality? THAT is the question of
+questions on this subject. And without hesitation I reply, The Golden Rule
+DECIDES <i>that question</i> YEA or NAY, <i>absolutely</i> and <i>perfectly</i>, as God's
+word or providence shows that the GOOD <i>of the family, the community, the
+state</i>, REQUIRES that the slave IS or IS NOT <i>to be set free and made
+equal</i>. THAT GOOD, <i>as God reveals it</i>, SETTLES THE QUESTION.
+
+Let the master then see to it, how he hears God's word as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, how he understands God's providence as to THAT GOOD.
+Let him see to it, that he makes no mistake as to THAT GOOD. For God will
+not hold him guiltless, if he will not hear what he tells him as to THAT
+GOOD. God will not justify him, if he has a bad conscience or blunders in
+his philosophy. God will punish him, if he fails to bless his land by
+letting the bond go free when, he OUGHT to emancipate. And God will punish
+him, if he brings a curse upon his country by freeing his slave when he
+OUGHT NOT to give him liberty.
+
+So, then, <i>the Golden Rule does not</i>, OF ITSELF, <i>reveal to man at all
+what are his</i> RELATIONS <i>to his fellow-men; but it tells him what he is
+to</i> DO, <i>when he</i> ALREADY KNOWS THEM.
+
+So, then, you, sir, cannot be permitted to tell the world that this rule
+must emancipate all the negro slaves in the United States,--no matter how
+unprepared they may be,--no matter how degraded,--no matter how unlike and
+unequal to the white man by creation,--no matter if it be a natural and
+moral impossibility,--no matter: the Golden Rule must emancipate by
+authority of the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, and
+by obligation of the great law of liberty,--the intuitional consciousness
+of the eternal right!
+
+No. The Rule, as said, <i>presupposes</i> that he who is required to obey it
+does already <i>know</i> the relations in which God has placed him, and the
+respective duties in those conditions. Has God, then, established the
+relations of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave? Yes.
+Then the command comes. It says to the husband, To aid you in your known
+obligations to your wife,--to give you a lively sense of it,--suppose
+yourself to be the wife: whatsoever, therefore, you OUGHT, in that
+condition, to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i>, that, as husband, do unto your wife.
+It says to the parent, Imagine yourself the child; and whatsoever, as
+such, you OUGHT to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire, that</i>, as parent, do unto your
+child. It says to the master, Put yourself in the place of your slave;
+and whatsoever you OUGHT, in that condition, to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire,
+that</i>, as master, do unto your slave. Let husband, parent, master, <i>know</i>
+his obligations from God, and obey the Rule.
+
+
+
+<i>Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule under your version</i>.</p>
+
+<p>
+Honorable Joshua R. Giddings and the Angel of the Lord--Hon. Gentleman at
+table--Nine runaway negroes dining with him--The Angel, uninvited, comes
+in and disturbs the feast.</p>
+
+<p>Giddings has boasted in Congress of having had nine fugitive slaves to
+break bread with him at one time. I choose, then, to imagine that, during
+the dinner, the angel who found Hagar by the fountain stands suddenly in
+the midst, and says to the negroes, "Ye slaves, whence came ye, and
+whither will ye go?" And they answer and say, "We flee from the face of
+our masters. This abolitionist told us to kill, and steal, and run away
+from bondage; and we have murdered and stolen and escaped. He, thou seest,
+welcomes us to liberty and equality. We <i>expect</i> and <i>desire</i> to be
+members of Congress, Governors of States, to marry among the great, and
+one of us to be President. Giddings, and all abolitionists, tell us that
+these honors belong to us equally as to white people, and will be given
+under the Golden Rule." And the angel of the Lord says to them, "Ye
+slaves, return unto your masters, and submit yourselves under their hands.
+I sent your fathers, and I send you, into bondage. I mean it unto good,
+and I will bring it to pass to save much people alive." Then, turning to
+the tempter, he says, "Thou, a statesman! thou, a reader of my word and
+providence! why hast thou not understood my speech to Hagar? I gave her, a
+slave, to Sarah. She fled from her mistress. I sent her back. Why hast
+thou not understood my word four thousand years ago,--that <i>the slave
+shall not flee from his master?</i> Why hast thou also perverted my law in
+Deuteronomy, (xxiii. 15, 16?) I say therein, 'Thou shalt not deliver unto
+his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he
+shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall
+choose, in one of thy gates where it liketh him best: thou shalt not
+oppress him.' Why hast thou not known that I meant the <i>heathen slave</i> who
+escaped from his <i>heathen master?</i> I commanded, Israel, in such case, not
+to hold <i>him</i> in bondage. I made this specific law for this specific fact.
+Why hast thou taught that, in this commandment, I gave license to all
+men-servants and maid-servants in the whole land of Israel to run away
+from their masters? Why hast thou thus made me, in one saying, contradict
+and make void all my laws wherein I ordained that the Hebrews should be
+slave-owners over their brethren during years, and over the heathen
+forever? Why hast thou in all this changed my Golden Rule? I, in that
+rule, <i>assume</i> that men <i>know</i> from revelation and providence the
+relations in which I have placed them, and their duties therein. I then
+command them to do unto others what they thus <i>know</i> they <i>ought</i> to do
+unto them in these relations; and I make the obligation quick and
+powerful, by telling every man to imagine himself in such conditions, and
+then he will <i>the better</i> KNOW '<i>whatsoever</i>' he should do unto his
+neighbor. Why hast thou made void my law, by making me say, 'All that thou
+<i>expectest</i> or <i>desirest</i> of others, in similar circumstances, do to
+them'? I never imagined to give such license to folly and sin. Why hast
+thou imagined such license to iniquity? Verily, thou tempter, thou hast in
+thy Golden Rule made these slaves thieves and murderers, and art now
+eating with them the bread of sin and death.</p>
+
+<p>"Why hast thou tortured my speech wherein I say that I have made of <i>one
+blood</i> all nations of men, to mean that I have created all men equal and
+endowed them with rights unalienable save in their consent? I never said
+that thing! I said that I made all men to descend from <i>one parentage!</i>
+That is what I say in that place! Why hast thou tortured that plain truth?
+Thou mightest as well teach that all 'the moving creatures that have life,
+and fowl that fly above the earth, in the open firmament of heaven,' are
+<i>created equal</i>, because I said I brought them forth <i>of the water</i>. Thou
+mightest as well say that 'all cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the
+earth, <i>are created equal</i>, because I said I brought them forth <i>of the
+earth</i>, as to affirm the <i>equality of men</i> because I say they are <i>of one
+blood</i>. Nay, I have made men unequal as the leaves of the trees, the sands
+of the sea, the stars of heaven. I have made them so, in harmony with the
+infinite variety and inequality in every thing in my creation. And I have
+made them unequal in my <i>mercy</i>. Had I made all men equal in attributes of
+body and mind, then <i>unfallen man</i> would never have realized the varied
+glories of his destiny. And had I given <i>fallen man</i> equality of nature
+and unalienable rights, then I had made the earth an Aceldama and Valley
+of Gehenna. For what would be the <i>strife</i> in all the earth among men
+equal in body and mind, equal in power, equal in depravity, equal in will,
+each one maintaining rights unalienable? When would the war end? Who would
+be the victors where all are giants? Who would sue for peace where none
+will submit? What would be <i>human social life?</i> Who would be the weak, the
+loving? Who would seek or need forbearance, compassion, self-denying
+benevolence? Who would be the grateful? Who would be the humble, the meek?
+What would be <i>human</i> virtue, what <i>human</i> vice, what <i>human</i> joy or
+sorrow? Nay, I have made men <i>unequal</i> and given them <i>alienable rights</i>,
+that I might INSTITUTE HUMAN GOVERNMENT and reveal HUMAN CHARACTER.</p>
+
+<p>"Why hast thou been willingly ignorant of these first principles of the
+oracles of God, which would have made thee truly a Christian philosopher
+and statesman?"</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center"><i>Fugitive Slave--Obeying the Golden Rule as Christ gave it</i></p>
+
+<p>
+Rev. A. Barnes and the Apostle Paul--Minister of the gospel in his
+study--Fugitive slave, converted under his preaching, inquiring whether it
+is not his duty to return to his master--Paul appears and rebukes the
+minister for wresting his Gospel.</p>
+
+<p>With all respect and affection for you, sir, I imagine a slave, having run
+away from his master and become a Christian under your preaching, might,
+with the Bible in his hands and the Holy Spirit in his heart, have,
+despite your training, question of conscience, whether he did right to
+leave his master, and ought not to go back. And I think how Paul would
+listen, and what he would say, to your interpretation of his Epistle to
+Philemon. I think he would say,--</p>
+
+<p>"I withstand thee to thy face, because thou art to be blamed. Why hast
+thou written, in thy '<i>Notes</i>,' that the word I apply to Onesimus may
+mean, not <i>slave</i>, but <i>hired servant?</i> Why hast thou said this in
+unsupported assertion? Why hast thou given no respect to Robinson, and all
+thy wise men, who agree that the word wherein I express Onesimus's
+relation to Philemon never means a hired servant, but a <i>slave</i>,--the
+property of his master,--a living possession?</p>
+
+<p>"Why hast thou called in question the fact that Philemon was a
+slave-holder? Why hast thou taught that, if he was a slave-holder when he
+became a Christian, he could not <i>continue, consistently</i>, to be a
+slave-owner and a Christian,--that if he did so <i>continue</i>, he would not
+be in <i>good standing</i>, but an <i>offender</i> in the church? (See Notes.)</p>
+
+<p>"I say Philemon was the master of Onesimus, in the real sense of a
+slave-owner, under Roman law, in which he had the right of life and death
+over him,--being thereby a master in possession of power unknown in the
+United States. And yet I call Philemon 'our dearly beloved and
+fellow-laborer,' I tell him that I send to him again Onesimus, who had
+been unprofitable to him in time past; but now, being a Christian, he
+would be profitable. I tell him, I send him again, not a slave, (only,)
+but above a slave, a Christian brother, beloved, specially to me, but how
+much more unto him, both <i>in the flesh</i> and in the Lord. Dost thou know,
+Albert Barnes, what I mean by that word, <i>in the flesh?</i> Verily, I knew
+the things wherein the master and the slave are beloved, the one of the
+other, in the best affections of human nature, and in the Lord! therefore
+I say to Philemon that he, <i>as master</i>, could receive Onesimus <i>as his
+slave</i>, and yet as a <i>brother</i>, MORE <i>beloved, by reason of his relation
+to him as master</i>, than I could regard him! Yea, verily,--and I say to
+thee, Albert Barnes, thou hast never been in the South, and thou dost not
+understand, and canst not understand, the force, or even the meaning, of
+my words <i>in the flesh</i>; i.e. <i>in the love of the master and the slave to
+one another</i>. But Philemon I knew would feel its power, and so I made that
+appeal to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why hast thou said, that I did not send Onesimus back <i>by authority?</i> I
+did send him back by authority,--yea, by authority of the Lord Jesus
+Christ? For it was my duty to send him again to Philemon, whether he had
+been willing to go or not; and it was his duty to go. But he was willing.
+So we both felt our obligations; and, when I commanded, he cheerfully
+obeyed. What else was my duty and his? Had I not said, in line upon line
+and in precept upon precept, 'Servants, obey in all things your masters
+according to the flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in
+singleness of heart, pleasing God'? (Coloss. iii. 22.) Had not Peter
+written, 'Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to
+the good and gentle, but also to the froward'? (1 Pet. ii. 18.) Onesimus
+had broken these commandments when he fled from his master. Was it not
+then of my responsibility to send him again to Philemon? And was it not
+Christ's law to him to return and submit himself under his master's hand?</p>
+
+<p>"Why, then, hast thou not understood my speech? Has it been even because
+thou couldst not <i>hear</i> my word? What else has hindered? What more could I
+have said, than (in 1 Tim. vi. 1-5) I do say, to rebuke all abolitionists?
+Yea, I describe them--I show their principles--as fully as if I had called
+them by name in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, and said they would
+live in 1857.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet thou hast, in thy commentary on my letter to Timothy, utterly
+distorted, maimed, and falsified my meaning. Thou hast mingled truth and
+untruth so together as to make me say what was not and is not in my mind.
+For thou teachest the slave, while professing not so to teach him, that I
+tell him that he is <i>not</i> to count his master worthy of all honor; that he
+<i>is</i> to <i>despise</i> him; that he is <i>not</i> to do him service as to a
+Christian faithful and beloved. <i>No</i>. But thou teachest the slave, in my
+name, to regard his Christian master an <i>offender</i> in the sight of
+Christ, if he <i>continues</i> a slave-owner.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou tellest him to obey <i>only</i> in the sense in which he is to submit to
+injustice, oppression, and cruelty; and that he is ever to seek to throw
+off the yoke in his created equality and unalienable right to liberty.
+(See Notes.)</p>
+
+<p>"This is what thou hast taught as my gospel. But I commanded thee to
+teach and exhort <i>just the contrary</i>. I commanded thee to say after this
+way:--'Let as many servants as are under the yoke, count their own
+masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not
+blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise
+them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they
+are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach
+and exhort.'</p>
+
+<p>"Thou, in thy 'Notes,' art compelled, though most unwillingly, to confess
+that I do mean <i>slaves</i> in this place, in the full and proper sense; yea,
+slaves under the Roman law. Good. Then do I here tell slaves to count
+their masters, even when not Christians, worthy of all honor; and, when
+Christians, to regard them as faithful and beloved, and not to despise
+them, and to do them service? Yet, after all this, do I say to these same
+slaves that they have a created equality and unalienable right to liberty,
+under which, whenever they think fit, I command them to dishonor their
+masters, despise them, and run away! Sir, I did never so instruct slaves;
+nay, I did never command thee so to teach them. But I did and do exhort
+thee not so to train them; for I said then and say now to thee, 'If any
+man teach [slaves] otherwise, [than to honor their masters as faithful and
+beloved, and to do them service,] and consent not to wholesome words, even
+the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according
+to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and
+strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
+perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH,
+supposing that gain is godliness; from such withdraw thyself,'</p>
+
+<p>"What more could I have said to the abolitionists of my day? What more can
+I say to them in this day? <i>That</i> which was true of them two thousand
+years ago, is true now. I rebuked abolitionists then, and I rebuke them
+now. I tell them the things in their hearts,--the things on their
+tongues,--the things in their hands,--are contrary to wholesome words,
+even the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. Canst thou <i>hear</i> my words in
+this place without feeling how faithfully I have given the head, and the
+heart, and the words, and the doings of the men, from whom thou hast not
+withdrawn thyself?
+
+"Verily, thou canst not <i>hear</i> my speech, and therefore thou canst not
+interpret my gospel. Thou believest it is impossible that I sanction
+slavery! Hence it is impossible for thee to understand my words: for I do
+sanction slavery. How? Thus:--
+
+"I found slavery in Asia, in Greece, in Rome. I saw it to be one mode of
+the government ordained of God. I regarded it, in most conditions of
+fallen mankind, necessarily and irresistibly part of such government, and
+therefore as natural, as wise, as good, in such conditions, as the other
+ways men are ruled in the state or the family.</p>
+
+<p>"I took up slavery, then, as such ordained government,--wise, good, yea
+best, in certain circumstances, until, in the elevating spirit and power
+of my gospel, the slave is made fit for the liberty and equality of his
+master, if he can be so lifted up. Hence I make the RULE of magistrate,
+subject, master and servant, parent and child, husband and wife, THE SAME
+RULE; <i>i.e.</i> I make it THE SAME RIGHT in the <i>superior</i> to control the
+<i>obedience</i> and the <i>service</i> of the <i>inferior</i>, bound to obey, whatever
+the difference in the relations and service to be rendered. Yea, I give
+<i>exactly the same command</i> to all in these relations; and thus, in all my
+words, I make it plainly to be understood that I regard slavery to be as
+righteous a mode of government as that of magistrate and subject, parent
+and child, husband and wife, during the circumstances and times in which
+God is pleased to have it continue. I saw all the injustice, the
+oppression, the cruelty, masters might be guilty of, and were and are now
+guilty of; but I saw no more injustice, oppression, and cruelty, in the
+relation of master and slave, than I saw in all other forms of rule,--even
+in that of husband and wife, parent and child. In my gospel I condemn
+wrong in all these states of life, while I fully sanction and sustain the
+relations themselves. I tell the magistrate, husband, father, master, how
+to rule; I tell the subject, wife, child, servant, how to submit. Hence, I
+command the slave not to flee from bondage, just as I require the subject,
+the wife, the child, not to resist or flee from obedience. I warn the
+slave, if he leaves his master he has sinned, and must return; and I make
+it the duty of all men to see to it, that <i>he shall go back</i>. Hence, I
+myself did what I command others to do: I sent Onesimus back to his
+master.</p>
+
+<p>"Thus I sanction slavery everywhere in the New Testament. But it is
+impossible for thee, with thy principles,--thy law of reason,--thy law of
+created equality and unalienable right,--thy elevation of the Declaration
+of Independence above the ordinance of God,--to sustain slavery. Nay, it
+is impossible for thee, with thy interpretation of Christ's Golden Rule,
+to recognise the system of servile labor; nay, it is impossible for thee
+to tell <i>this</i> slave to return to his master as I sent Onesimus back;
+nay, thou art guarded by thy Golden Rule. Thou tellest him that, if thou
+hadst been in his place, thou wouldst have <i>expected, desired</i> freedom,
+that thou wouldst have run away, and that thou wouldst not now return;
+that thou wouldst have regarded thy created equality and unalienable
+right as thy supreme law, and have disregarded and scorned all other
+obligations as <i>pretended revelation from God</i>. Therefore thou now doest
+unto him '<i>whatsoever</i>' thou wouldst <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> him to do unto
+thee in similar circumstances; <i>i.e.</i> thou tellest him he did right to
+run away, and will do right not to return! This is thy Golden Rule. But
+I did not instruct thee so to learn Christ. Nay, this slave knows thou
+hast not not given him the mind of Christ; nay, he knows that Christ
+commands thee to send him to his master again. And thus do what thou
+OUGHTEST to <i>expect</i> or <i>desire</i> in similar circumstances; yea, <i>do</i> now
+<i>thy duty</i>, and this slave, like Onesimus, will bless thee for giving him
+a good conscience whenever he will return to his obedience. Thus Paul,
+the aged, speaks to thee."</p>
+
+<p>So, then, the Golden Rule is the whole Bible; yea, Christ says it is-"the
+law and the prophets;" yea, it is the Old Testament and the New condensed;
+and with ever-increasing glory of Providence in one sublime aphorism,
+which can be understood and obeyed only by those who <i>know</i> what the
+Bible, or Providence, reveals as to man's varied conditions and his
+obligations therein.</p>
+
+<p>I think, sir, I have refuted your interpretation of the Golden Rule, and
+have given its true meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The slave-holder, then, may have a good conscience under this commandment.
+Let him so exercise himself as to have a conscience void of offence
+towards God and towards men.</p>
+
+<p>Yours, &amp;c. F.A. Ross.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Conclusion.</h1>
+
+
+
+<p>I intended to, and may yet, in a subsequent edition, write two more
+letters to A. Barnes. The <i>one</i>, to show how infidelity has been passing
+off from the South to the North,--especially since the <i>Christian death</i>
+of Jackson; the other, to meet Mr. Barnes's argument founded on the spirit
+of the age.</p>
+
+
+
+<p align="center" class="smallcaps">The End.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Slavery Ordained of God
+by Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
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