Slavery Ordained of God | Page 9

in the North. On the one hand, some
anti-slavery men have left the light of the Bible, and wandered into the
darkness until they have reached the blackness of the darkness of
infidelity. Other some are following hard after, and are throwing the
Bible into the furnace,--are melting it into iron, and forging it, and
welding it, and twisting it, and grooving it into the shape and
significance and goodness and gospel of Sharpe's rifles. Sir, are you not
afraid that some of your once best men will soon have no better Bible
than that?
But, on the other hand, many of your brightest minds are looking

intensely at the subject, in the same light in which it is studied by the
highest Southern reason. Ay, sir, mother-England, old fogy as she is,
begins to open her eyes. What, then, is our gain? Sir, Uncle Tom's
Cabin, in many of its conceptions, could not have been written
twenty-five years ago. That book of genius,--over which I and hundreds
in the world have freely wept,--true in all its facts, false in all its
impressions,--yea, as false in the prejudice it creates to Southern social
life as if Webster, the murderer of Parkman, may be believed to be a
personification of the elite of honor in Cambridge, Boston, and New
England. Nevertheless, Uncle Tom's Cabin could not have been written
twenty-five years ago. Dr. Nehemiah Adams's "_South-Side View_"
could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Nor Dr. Nathan
Lord's "Letter of Inquiry." Nor Miss Murray's book. Nor "_Cotton is
King_". Nor Bledsoe's "_Liberty and Slavery"_. These books, written
in the midst of this agitation, are all of high, some the highest, reach of
talent and noblest piety; all give, with increasing confidence, the
present Southern Bible reading on Slavery. May the agitation, then, go
on! I know the New School Presbyterian church has sustained some
temporary injury. But God is honored in his word. The reaction, when
the first abolition-movement commenced, has been succeeded by the
sober second thought of the South. The sun, stayed, is again travelling
in the greatness of his strength, and will shine brighter and brighter to
the perfect day.
My only fear, Mr. Moderator, is that, as you Northern people are so
prone to go to extremes in your zeal and run every thing into the
ground, you may, perhaps, become _too pro-slavery;_ and that we may
have to take measures against your coveting, over much, our daughters,
if not our wives, our men-servants, our maid-servants, our houses, and
our lands. (Laughter.)
Sir, I come now to the Bible argument. I begin at the beginning of
eternity! (Laughter.) WHAT is RIGHT AND WRONG? _That's the
question of questions_.
Two theories have obtained in the world. The one is, that right and
wrong are eternal facts; that they exist per se in the nature of things;

that they are ultimate truths above God; that he must study, and does
study, to know them, as really as man. And that he comprehends them
more clearly than man, only because he is a better student than man.
Now, sir, this theory is atheism. For if right and wrong are like
mathematical truths--fixed facts--then I may find them out, as I find out
mathematical truths, without instruction from God. I do not ask God to
tell me that one and one make two. I do not ask him to reveal to me the
demonstrations of Euclid. I thank him for the mind to perceive. But I
perceive mathematical relations without his telling me, because they
exist independent of his will. If, then, moral truths, if right and wrong,
if rectitude and sin, are, in like manner, fixed, eternal facts,--if they are
out from and above God, like mathematical entities,--then I may find
them for myself. I may condescend, perhaps, to regard the Bible as a
hornbook, in which God, an older student than I, tells me how to begin
to learn what he had to study; or I may decline to be taught, through the
Bible, how to learn right and wrong. I may think the Bible was good
enough, may be, for the Israelite in Egypt and in Canaan; good enough
for the Christian in Jerusalem and Antioch and Rome, but not good
enough, even as a hornbook, for me,--the man of the nineteenth
century,--the man of Boston, New York, and Brooklyn! Oh, no. I may
think I need it not at all. What next? Why, sir, if I may think I need not
God to teach me moral truth, I may think I need him not to teach me
any thing. What next? The irresistible conclusion is, I may think I can
live without God; that Jehovah is a myth,--a name; I may bid him stand
aside, or die. Oh,