your land_ [descendants of Africans?] 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 BOND-MEN FOREVER."

What human legislature could make a decree more full and explicit than
this? What court of law or chancery could defeat a title to a slave
couched in terms so clear and complete as these? And this is the _law of
God_, whom you pretend to worship, while you denounce and traduce us for
respecting it.

It seems scarcely credible, but the fact is so, that you deny this law
so plainly written, and in the face of it have the hardihood to declare
that "though slavery is not _specifically_, yet it is _virtually_,
_forbidden_ in the Scriptures, because all the crimes which necessarily
arises out of slavery, and which can arise from no other source, are
reprobated there and threatened with divine vengeance." Such an unworthy
subterfuge is scarcely entitled to consideration. But its gross
absurdity may be exposed in few words. I do not know what crimes you
particularly allude to as arising from slavery. But you will perhaps
admit--not because they are denounced in the decalogue, which the
abolitionists respect only so far as they choose, but because it is the
_immediate interest_ of most men to admit--that disobedience to parents,
adultery, and stealing, are crimes. Yet these crimes "necessarily arise
from" the relations of parent and child, marriage, and the possession of
private property; at least they "can arise from no other sources." Then,
according to your argument, it is "virtually forbidden" to marry, to
beget children, and to hold private property! Nay, it is forbidden to
live, since murder can only be perpetrated on living subjects. You add
that "in the same way the gladiatorial shows of old, and other barbarous
customs, were not specifically forbidden in the New Testament, and yet
Christianity was the sole means of their suppression." This is very
true. But these shows and barbarous customs thus suppressed were not
_authorised by God_. They were not ordained and commanded by God for the
benefit of his chosen people and mankind, as the purchase and holding of
bond-men and bond-maids were. Had they been they would never have been
"suppressed by Christianity" any more than slavery can be by your party.
Although Christ came "not to destroy but fulfill the law," he
nevertheless did formally abrogate some o