The Sun.
London, England, 1863-01-19 00:00:00

in lies, however convenient they may temporarily
appear to be. No abjurgatory piety—no clerical
excommuincation—no threats of popular proscrip-
tion will awe us from the maintenance of plain facts
because they appear to be inconvenient. " Magna
est veritas et prevalebit." Those who believe in the
plenary inspiration of the Old Testament—that is
the word of God—that the words Moses put into
the mouth of God were his words—how can they
dare to deny that the Pentateuch expressly sanc•
tions slavery P Why, every one of the Patriarchs
was a slaveholder—one of them sold himself for 14
years to buy his wife. Joseph was sold by his own
brothers, and was the slave of Pharaoh. All the
Patriarchs—those through whose seed the whole
earth was to be blessed—had bond-slaves to minis-
ter to :their appetites ; some, women slaves, pre-
sented to them by their wives. Sarah gave Hagar
to Abraham. " And Abraham took Ishmael (Gen.
xvii., 23) his son, all that were born in his house,
and all that were bought with his money." And
the Lord spake unto Moses (Numb. xxxi„ 25
et seq.), saying, Take the sum of the prey that
was taken, both man and beast . . . and divide the
prey into two parts between them that took the war
upon them . . . and all the congregation, and levy
a tribute unto the Lord." Then follow minute in-
structions by " the Lord" for dividing the siaves—
the prize-money of the battle among the Israelites
—not forgetting a certain number for Eleazar, the
priest, " and thirty and two thousand persons in
all of women . . ." " And God spake these words
(Exod. xx., 1), That if a known furious ox killed a
free man, the owner was to suffer death ;" but if it
gored only (xxi., 32) his slave, " he shall give unto
their master thirty shekels of silver" (xxi., 4). "If
his master have given him a wife, . . . the wife
and children shall be the mastec's, and he shall go
out by himself ? (Verse 7.) If a man sell his daugh-
ter to be a maid-servant, she shall not go out as the
man-servants," &c. A Hebrew might be a slave on
being brought before the Judge, his ear bored with
an awl by his master, " and he shall serve him for
ever." Now, these and others are not mere Hebrew
customs, but declared to be express commandments
of Jehovah; and they receive their crowning eluci-
dation when it is provided that the stealing of an
other man's slave is a capital offence; and iu the
Tenth Commandment, which enjoins us not to covet
our neighbour's slave, nor concubine," nor anything
that is his." Nay, there is a direct after-injunction,
that while all prisoners are to be slain, twenty
thousand virgins are to be reserved for the con-
querors.

Now, for our part, with honest and brave Bishop
Colenso, we don't believe that God ever said, or did,
or ordained anything of the sort; but Mrs. Stow e,
and the Leeds Mercury, and the Daily News, the
Birmingham Post, and Newman Hall, and all the
" isms" and " ites" profess they do ; and as they
also assert that Christ sanctioned and adopted
Moses and the Prophets," and therefore believed
that these passages were inspired, and that God did
say what is there set down for Him—although,
in our apprehension, Christ's very mission was to
explode the whole Mosaic economy, as opposed to
His own '• grace and truth," we cannot see how those
who call themselves Bible Christians can, without a
lie, dispute the assertion that slavery is a Christian
Institution. Mind, we do nothing of the sort. But
all this just shows what an incubus it is that Dr.
Colenso. labours to throw off religion. Here are the
Southerns inexpugnably entrenched behind the
sanctions of the Pentateuch in defending slavery ;
and here are Mrs. Stowe, and Parson Beecher, and
Newman Hall, and the rabble rout of recruiting
Republican priests, betaking themselves to the Bible
to hound on, with texts, the dogs of war to exter-
minate their fellow-beings and make a fertile coun-
try into a howling wilderness.
The attempt to introduce the religious element
into the bare controversy of man holding property in
man is hypocritical and disingenuous. Servant and
slave are convertible terms in Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin. Slavery was the normal condition of the
great mass of every civilised people in ancient times;
and we should just as soon expect that domestic ser-
vice or skilled labour for our employed should be
condemned, if the Apostles had lived now, as that
they should have denounced the ordinary condition
of service which was slavery then. Christianity,
which refuses to deal with human government so as
to impeach it by implication, recognises slavery as
the ordinary domestic arrangement of the com-
munity. What the Gospel really says is, that,
slavery existieg, masters shall be kind, forgiving,
gentle, considerate, and pure, and that slaves shall be
faithful, true, honest, and submissive—which is, we
fairly confess it, more than we do. But the ques-
tion is not whether man should have property in
man, or whether the slave should submit to his
chains, but what the Scriptures say ; and pulpiteers
may preach a donkey's hind leg off, and utterly fail
to disturb the position that neither the Old Testa-
ment nor the New says a word that could be tor-
tured into even an apology for devastating an unof-
fending country and exterminating an unaggressive
people to liberate negroes or to instigate a servilE
war; and that Christ never imagined that His reli-
gion could be pleaded as a sanction for the perpe-
tration of wholesale rapine and murder out of pure
motives of humanity.—Dispatch.