Year: 1865

'.Surely your blood of your lives will require


at the hand of every beast will require it, and a
the hand of man; at the hand OF every man
brother will require the life of man. Whose
sheddeth mans blood, BY man shall his blood b,
Gen. TX D, g..


Noah stood by his altar on the summit
of Ararat Before and beneath him lay
the saved world into which, with his little
family, he was to 90 forth to found the
kingdoms and give paternity to the tribe.
of men. Around him lay the wrecks o.
the judgement from which he alone ha,
been preserved. What should betide him
in his new commission to replenish the
earth. God drew near to instruct him
and reassure his heart. He set his bow
on the dark retiring storm, that hencefortl
when the clouds We're marshalled he should
fear no food. He gave him lordshiE
over the beasts Of the field that he might
dismiss the fear so natural-that in bis
teebeness lie should fall prey to brute
tcrocity. To tighten the curse which con-
demned him to win his bread from the re-
luctant earth by the sweat of his brow, he
assigned him the flesh Of every moving
thing for food. But there was yet anoth-
er anxious thought in the breast of the
second grand parent of the race For six
hundred years he had looked upon the
history of man. 1t had been a history OF
violence and outrage. The guilty earth
had staggered under her burden of crime.
The spirit of the first murderer had breath
ed upon his multitudinous offspring
Many hand had been red with brothers
blood The crimson sod had cried and
cried again to the ear of God. And still
the homicide had gone free-branded per-
haps with the red sign of Cain, but not
cut off by the axe of justice Was
this history to be renewed among his de-
scendants, asked the patriarch as he look
ed out into the future. Was there to be
in the ages to come, when the tact of a
common ancestry should have become OBJ
scured or forgotten in a remote antiquity,
no sterner guard for the sanctity of life
Was the life of the innocent to be the sport
Of mad passion, and the life of the mur-
! dcrer forever inviolate? Gods statute re-
piled to these fears of Noah and asserted a
new and terrible retribution for the crime
Of shedding blood. From that hour the
voice Of sovereign Justice doomed the
murderer to death. first by the hand Of the
next of kin, who was constituted the
avenger of blood. then, and later by the
sword Of the public magistrate.


Ii Is said now that this statute was not
Il positive ordinance, imperative in its ma
ture, but only a permission-or perhaps
a prediction of what would fail out in the
tragedies Of a mere human revenge. To
show how idle such an evasion is, we need
only to turn to the subsequent legislation
OF God explaining and confirming the orig
inal law. "Whoso killeth any person, y
(Num. XIV, 30) "the murderer shall be
put to death by the mouth of witnesses :
but one witness shall not testify against
any person to cause him to die More
over We shall take no satisfaction for the
life Of murderer, which is guilty OF
death but he shall surely be put to
death So We shall not pollute the land
wherein We are for blood it detileth the
land, and the land can not be cIeansed OF
the blood that is shed therein, but by the
blood of him that she'd it." Again, i'm
mediatcly after the PRONUNCIATION of til,
code given from Sinai, as if expressly tc
teach that the sixth command could moi
abrogate the statute pronounced to Noah
God ins:ructs the tribes. ''IIe that smit
eth man so that he die, shall be surely
put to death, and if a man lie not in wait
but God deliver him into his hand, thcl
will appoint thee place whittier he shall
flee. But If a man come presumptuously
upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile


thou shalt take him from mine altar tha
he may die" Do these passages read a
if God were toretelling like prophet o
enacting like a lawglver? Is there not il


them all the absoluteness of comman,


which la1.glage can express


1t is argued again for the nullificatiol


of this statute, that it was ordained fo


the Jews alone, and was not intended t,


be binding upon any other people. Blu


who were the Jews of Noah's time W
might us well call Adam and Eve Jew


as to apply the term to the family G


Noah. The germ of the Jewish natio


had not yet come to light. The statut
was given to Noah As the father of all Nd
tions. He stood before God as the repre-
D sentative Of the wide populations to sprin
y from his loins What is there to sho,
: that the statute was to descend in one lin
4 of his posterity and in another not at all
Why should we presume that God legisla
Y ted for Shem and not for liam and J;
: pheth 1t was an ordinance for IL
/, Greeks and Romans though children
: Japheth, and for the dark hued dwellel
: in Ethiopia, the children of Ham as we
e as the sons of Jacob who called Shem the
/ primal father Had it been given am
= the marches of the ISraelites, then indee


there had been some plausibility in CLAIM
ing it as an exclusively Jewish provision


But II was altered over the second Grad
of humankind, and of course for all II


streams OF human population that shou
r flow from that original fountain. VIII
T. a breadth and comprehensiveness too, a
: there in the language employed ''Who:
% sheddeth mans blood" Whose. ma,
- - blood !" what can exclude any portion