ery is not sin.

It probably has not occurred to you, how fairly and fully you might have
been stopped, upon the very threshold of your defence of slavery. The
only witness you have called to the stand to sustain your sinking cause,
is the Bible. But this is a witness, which slavery has itself impeached,
and of which, therefore, it is not entitled to avail itself. It is a
good rule in our civil courts, that a party is not permitted to impeach
his own witness; and it is but an inconsiderable variation of the letter
of this rule, and obviously no violation of its spirit and policy to
say, that no party is permitted to attempt to benefit his cause by a
witness whom he has himself impeached. Now, the slaveholder palpably
violates this rule, when he presumes to offer the Bible as a witness for
his cause:--for he has previously impeached it, by declaring, in his
slave system, that it is not to be believed--that its requirements are
not to be obeyed--that they are not even to be read (though the Bible
expressly directs that they shall be)--that concubinage shall be
substituted for the marriage it enjoins--and that its other provisions
for the happiness, and even the existence, of the social relations,
shall be trampled under foot. The scene, in which a lawyer should ask
the jury to believe what his witness is saying at one moment, and to
reject what he is saying at another, would be ludicrous enough. But what
more absurdity is there in it than that which the pro-slavery party are
guilty of, when they would have us deaf, whilst their witness is
testifying in favor of marriage and searching the Scriptures; and, all
ears, whilst that same witness is testifying, as they construe it, in
favor of slavery! No--before it will be competent for the American
slaveholder to appeal to the Bible for justification of his system, that
system must be so modified, as no longer to make open, shameless war
upon the Bible. I would recommend to slaveholders, that, rather than
make so unhallowed a use of the Bible as to attempt to bolster up their
hard beset cause with it, they should take the ground, which a very
distinguished slaveholding gentleman of the city of Washington took, in
a conversation with myself on the subject of slavery. Feeling himself
uncomfortably plied by quotations from the word of God, he said with
much emphasis, "Stop, Sir, with that, if you please--SLAVERY IS A
SUBJECT, WHICH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BIBLE."

This practic