Third. It is objected from these very injunctions, that the examples of the commands given to the Israelites are no rules for us; that God commanded them to exterminate the seven nations of Canaan; but if we should therefore proceed to attack and destroy a neighbouring nation which had not assailed us, it would be a horrible wickedness. It is asked: Were the fanatics of the English Commonwealth in the 17th century correct when they justified their barbarities upon royalists by the examples of Joshua's slaughter of the Amorites, and Samuel's of Amalek? And we are told that our argument from Hebrew slavery is of the same absurd kind. We reply: We willingly accept the instances. God's command to Joshua and Samuel to exterminate the Canaanites and Amalek, does prove that killing is not necessarily murder. This very instance gives us an unanswerable argument against those who oppose all capital punishments as wrong. And just so we employ the other instance, which our assailants say is parallel--Hebrew slavery--to prove that slaveholding is not necessarily sinful. But the instances are not parallel. The sanction of domestic slavery was a statute law for all generations of Hebrews; the command to exterminate the seven tribes imposed a specific task on certain individuals. It is absurd to confound an executive command, given to particular men for the once, under particular circumstances, with the sanctions of a permanent institution, designed to descend from generation to generation. The command to exterminate the seven guilty tribes was the former, the permission to hold slaves the latter. True, the example of Joshua in blotting these tribes from existence, is no authority for us to do likewise, unless we also can show a direct divine commission authorizing us for a special case. But neither was that example authority to any subsequent generation of Hebrews, after Joshua, to exterminate any other pagan tribe. Will any one say that the authority given by Moses to his fellow-citizens to hold slaves was not just as good to enable subsequent generations of Hebrews to hold slaves? Prejudice cannot carry sophistry so far. There is, therefore, no analogy between the two cases, in the point necessary for grounding the objection to our argument.