Antislavery movements -- United States; Slavery -- United States
In compliance with the request that I would send a few lines for
insertion in “The Anti-Slavery Autograph,” I may say that I cannot
express too strongly my conviction that, if there be truth in
Revelation, it is the duty of every Christian to promote, by all
legitimate means, not only the universal and total, but the _immediate_
abolition of any system under which man can hold property in his
fellow man. Perhaps few of those who take this view of the subject are
sufficiently careful to avoid, as far as possible, any participation
in, or encouragment of slavery, by refusing to use the produce of the
unrequited toil of the slave. Yet until we do this, I think we have
little right to expect the Divine blessing upon our efforts to promote
the abolition of slavery and of the slave trade.
Joseph Sturge
SLAVERY AND POLYGAMY: DOCTORS OF DIVINITY IN A DILEMMA.
An argument is derived from the Jewish Scriptures in favor of
slave-holding, very plausible and weighty with that large class of
persons so poorly gifted with hearts as to find it difficult to
discriminate between the letter that killeth and the spirit that maketh
alive. The Old Testament shows clearly enough, that slave-holding was
tolerated among the Jews; and it being assumed that the system of
Jewish society, or, at all events, that the Mosaic code was framed
after a Divine model, it is alleged to be at least supererogatory, if
not actually impious, to denounce as inconsistent with Christianity
that which God permitted to his chosen and selected people. Are _we_
to pretend to be better and wiser than Abraham and Moses, David and
Solomon?
A recent application of this same argument can hardly fail to operate
with many, as what the mathematicians call a _reductio ad absurdum_; a
proof, that is, of the falsity of a proposition assumed, by exhibiting
its operation in other cases.
The famous Mormon doctrine of the plurality of wives, now at length
openly avowed by the heads and apostles of that new sect, is upheld and
justified by this very same argument. It plainly appears from the Old
Testament, that polygamy equally with slavery, was one of the social
institutions of the Jews, recognized and sanctioned by their laws.
And borrowing the tone, and indeed the very words of our pro-slavery
theologians,--“Do you pretend,” asks Orson Hyde, one of the Mormon
apostles, addressing himself to those who question this new privilege
of the saints--“Do you pretend to set yourselves above the teaching of
God, and the example of his chosen people?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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