Some have been weak enough to draw a justification of slavery from the fact, that the bondage of Canaan's posterity is predicted. This logic the Abolitionists have, of course, delighted to expose; it was easy to show, by sundry biblical instances, like that of the Assyrian employed to chastise Israel, and then punished by God for his own rapacity, that it is no justification of one's acts to find that God, in his inscrutable and holy workings, has overruled them to the effectuation of his own righteous, secret purposes. And our opponents, with a treachery fully equal to the folly of our unwise advocates, usually represent this as nearly the whole amount, and the fair exemplar, of our biblical argument. Such is not the use we design to make of this important piece of history. It does in the first place, what all secular history and speculations fail to do: it gives us the origin of domestic slavery. And we find that it was appointed by God as the punishment of, and remedy for (nearly all God's providential chastisements are also remedial) the peculiar moral degradation of a part of the race. God here ordains that this depravity shall find its necessary restraints, and the welfare of the more virtuous its safeguard against the depraved, by the bondage of the latter. He introduces that feature of political society, for the justice of which we shall have occasion to contend; that although men have all this trait of natural equality that they are children of a common father, and sharers of a common humanity, and subjects of the same law of love; yet, in practice, they shall be subject to social inequalities determined by their own characters, and their fitness or unfitness to use privileges for their own and their neighbours' good. But second: this narrative gives us more than a prediction. The words of Noah are not a mere prophecy; they are a verdict, a moral sentence pronounced upon conduct, by competent authority; that verdict sanctioned by God. Now if the verdict is righteous, and the execution blessed by God, it can hardly be, that the executioners of it are guilty for putting it in effect. Can one believe that the descendants of Shem and Japhet, with this sentence in their hands, and the divine commendation just bestowed on them for acting unlike Ham, could have reasonably felt guilty for accepting that control over their guilty fellow-men which God himself had assigned? For the vital difference between the case of the Assyrians, when their guilty ambition was permissively employed by God to punish the back-slidings of his own people, and the case of Shem and Japhet, is this: The Assyrians were cursed by God for doing their predicted work, in the very sentence; Shem and Japhet were blessed by Him in the very verdict which assigns Canaan as their servant.