our minds may seek and desire to seek
other reasons for this order of extermination of God, yet we look in
vain, even to the Hebrews themselves, for reasons to be found, in their
superior _moral_ conduct toward God; but we look in vain. The very
people for whom they were exterminated were, in their moral conduct and
obedience to God, no better, save in that sin of amalgamation. The
exterminator and the exterminated were bad, equally alike in every moral
or religious sense--save one _thing_, and _one_ thing only--one had not
brutalized himself by amalgamating with negroes, the other had. This
logic of facts, forces our minds, compels our judgment, and presses all
our reasoning faculties back, in spite of ourselves or our wishes, to
the conclusion that it was this one crime, and _one crime only_, that
was the originating cause of this terrible and inexorable fate of the
Canaanite; being, as they were, the _corrupt_ seed of Canaan, God
destroyed them. For, if these Canaanites had been the full children of
Adam and Eve, they would have been as much entitled to the land, under
the grant by God, of the whole earth, to Adam and his posterity, with
the right of dominion, and their right to it as perfect as that of
Abraham could possibly be; but, being partly _beasts_ and partly
_human_, God not only dispossessed them of it, but also ordered their
_entire_ extermination, _for he had given no part of the earth to such
beings_. This judgment of God on these people has been harped upon by
every deistical and atheistical writer, from the days of Celsus down to
Thomas Paine of the present age, but without understanding it. This
crime must be unspeakably great, when we read, as we do in the Bible,
that it caused God to repent and to be grieved at his heart that he had
made _man_. For, the debasing idolatry of the world, the murder of the
good and noble of earth, the forswearing of the apostle Peter in denying
his Lord and Saviour--all, all the crimsoned crimes of earth, or within
the power of man's infamy and turpitude to commit and blacken his
soul--are as nothing on earth, as compared with this. Death by the
flood, death by the scorching fire of God burning alive the inhabitants
of Sodom and Gomorrah, death to man, woman and child, flocks and herds,
remorseless, relentless and exterminating death--is the _just judgment_
of an _all-merciful God, for this offense_. The seed of Adam, which is
the seed of God, must be kept pure; it _shal