Perhaps the bible was inspired upon the subject of human slavery. Is
there, in the civilized world, today, a clergyman who believes in the
divinity of slavery? Does the bible teach man to enslave his brother? If
it does, is it not blasphemous to say that it is inspired of God? If
you find the institution of slavery upheld in a book said to have been
written by God, what would you expect to find in a book inspired by the
devil? Would you expect to find that book in favor of liberty? Modern
christians, ashamed of the God of the Old Testament, endeavor now to
show that slavery was neither commanded nor opposed by Jehovah. Nothing
can be plainer than the following passages from the twenty-fifth chapter
of Leviticus. "Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn
among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with
you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to
inherit them for a possession, they shall be your bond-men forever. Both
thy bond-men, and thy bond-maids, which thou shalt have, shall be of
the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bond-men, and
bond-maids."
Can we believe in this, the Nineteenth Century, that these infamous
passages were inspired by God? that God approved not only of human
slavery, but instructed his chosen people to buy the women, children and
babes of the heathen round about them? If it was right for the Hebrews
to buy, it was also right for the heathen to sell. This God, by
commanding the Hebrews to buy, approved of the selling of sons and
daughters. The Canaanite who, tempted by gold, lured by avarice, sold
from the arms of his wife the dimpled babe, simply made it possible for
the Hebrews to obey the orders of their God. If God is the author of
the bible, the reading of these passages ought to cover his cheeks with
shame. I ask the christian world to-day, was it right for the heathen
to sell their children? Was it right for God not only to uphold, but to
command the infamous traffic in human flesh? Could the most revengeful
fiend, the most malicious vagrant in the gloom of hell, sink to a lower
moral depth than this?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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