Our reply is, that both the premises of the objection are absolutely false. Polygamy and capricious divorce never were authorized by Old Testament law, in the sense in which domestic slavery was; and, second, the latter was never prohibited in the New Testament, as polygamy and such divorces expressly are. Either of these facts, without the other, makes the objection invalid, as we shall show; but we shall establish both. Before doing this, however, we would ask: Suppose these assertions of Drs. Wayland and Channing proved that God expressly permitted polygamy and causeless divorce to his own chosen and holy people, and that Jesus Christ yet denounced these things as sins; what is gained? Not only is this part of our defence of slavery overthrown, but the holiness of God is also overthrown; or else the inspiration of the Scriptures. (The latter would be a result evidently not very repugnant to Socinians and their sympathizers.) For then these Scriptures would make Him the teacher of sin to the very persons whom he was setting apart to peculiar holiness. If God did indeed authorize polygamy and causeless divorce in the Old Testament law, then the only inference for the devout mind is, that those things were then innocent, and would still be so, had not Christ afterwards forbidden them. Now, when we pass into the New Testament, and find that domestic slavery (which these objectors would make the parallel of polygamy and divorce without just cause) is not forbidden there, as the latter two were, but is again permitted, authorized and regulated, we must conclude that it is still innocent, as it must have been when a holy God allowed it to his holy people. But the first part of the objectors' premise is also false; polygamy and causeless divorce never were sanctioned by Moses as domestic slavery was. Even admitting the more ignorant rendering of the matter, how wide is the difference in God's treatment of the two subjects! Slaves are mentioned as lawful property, not only in the biographies of God's erring and fallible servants, but in his own legislation; the acquisition of them is a blessing from him; their connexion with their masters is made the basis of religious sacraments; property in slaves is protected by laws of divine enactment; and the rights and duties of them and their masters defined. But when we pass to the subjects of plurality and change of wives, while we see the lives of imperfect, though good men, candidly disclosing these abuses, no legislative act recognizes them, except in the single case of divorce. In all God's laws and precepts, He always says _wife_, not _wives_, so carefully does He avoid a seeming allowance of a plurality. The Decalogue throws no protection around concubines, against the coveting of others. The rights and duties of polygamists are never defined by divine law, save in seeming exceptions which will be explained. How unlike is all this to the legislation upon slavery!