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 encouragement 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. [Signature: Joseph Sturge] SLAVERY AND POLYGAMY: DOCTORS OF DIVINITY IN A DILEMMA. An argument is derived from the Jewish Scriptures in favour 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, recognised 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?”