tenfold more grinding than that, for which he
had just hurled Pharaoh headlong, and cloven down his princes, and
overwhelmed his hosts, and blasted them with His thunder, till "hell was
moved to meet them at their coming?"

Having touched upon the general topics which we design to include in
this inquiry, we proceed to examine various Scripture facts and
passages, which will doubtless be set in array against the foregoing
conclusions.

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.

The advocates of slavery are always at their wits end when they try to
press the Bible into their service. Every movement shows that they are
hard-pushed. Their odd conceits and ever varying shifts, their forced
constructions, lacking even plausibility, their bold assumptions, and
blind guesswork, not only proclaim their _cause_ desperate, but
themselves. Some of the Bible defences thrown around slavery by
ministers of the Gospel, do so torture common sense, Scripture, and
historical fact, that it were hard to tell whether absurdity, fatuity,
ignorance, or blasphemy, predominates, in compound. Each strives so
lustily for the mastery, it may be set down a drawn battle.

How often has it been set up in type, that the color of the negro is the
_Cain-mark_, propagated downward. Doubtless Cain's posterity started an
opposition to the ark, and rode out the flood with flying streamers! Why
should not a miracle be wrought to point such an argument, and fill out
for slaveholders a Divine title-deed, vindicating the ways of God to
men?

OBJECTION 1. "_Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto
his brethren_." Gen. i. 25.

This prophecy of Noah is the _vade mecum_ of slaveholders, and they
never venture abroad without it. It is a pocket-piece for sudden
occasion--a keepsake to dote over--a charm to spell-bind opposition, and
a magnet to attract "whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie."
But closely as they cling to it, "cursed be Canaan" is a poor drug to
stupify a throbbing conscience--a mocking lullaby, vainly wooing slumber
to unquiet tossings, and crying "Peace, be still," where God wakes war,
and breaks his thunders.

Those who plead the curse on Canaan to justify negro slavery, _assume_
all the points in debate.

1. That the condition prophesied was _slavery_, rather than the mere
_rendering of service_ to others, and that it was the bondage of
_individuals_ rather than the condition of a _nation tributary_ to
another, and in _t