Project Gutenberg's Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?, by Isaac Allen

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Title: Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?

Author: Isaac Allen

Release Date: February 13, 2008 [EBook #24600]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Transcriber's Note.--Italics in the original are rendered as
_underscores_. The letter 'a' with a macron is shown as [=a]. Greek
characters in the original have been transliterated and appear as
+word+. Transliterated Hebrew words appear as #WORD#, using the author's
own transliteration throughout. (For more on the Hebrew, and a list of
errata, see the end of this document.)]

No. 45.

IS SLAVERY SANCTIONED BY
THE BIBLE?

If there is one subject which, above all others, may be regarded as of
national interest at the present time, it is the subject of Slavery.
Wherever we go, north or south, east or west, at the fireside, in the
factory, the rail-car or the steamboat, in the state legislatures or the
national Congress, this "ghost that will not down" obtrudes itself. The
strife has involved press, pulpit, and forum alike, and in spite of all
compromises by political parties, and the desperate attempts at
non-committal by religious bodies, it only grows wider and deeper.

But the distinctive feature of this, as compared with other questions of
national import, is, that here both parties draw their principal
arguments from the Bible as a common armory of weapons for attack and
defense. On the one side, it is claimed that slavery, as it exists in
the United States, is not a moral evil; that it is an innocent and
lawful relation, as much as that of parent and child, husband and wife,
or any other in society; that the right to buy, sell, and hold men for
purposes of gain, was given by express permiss