Slavery Ordained of God | Page 9

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, sir, I will be the fool to say there is no God. This is the result of the notion that right and wrong exist in the nature of things.
The other theory is, that right and wrong are results brought into being, mere contingencies, means to good, made to exist solely by the will of God, expressed through his word; or, when his will is not thus known, he shows it in the human reason by which he rules the natural heart. This is so; because