The same gentleman defends slavery by an appeal to the Bible. But if the Bible be authority for the principal, is it not authority for the incidents also? If an authority for the cruelties of bondage, is it not an equal authority for its mitigations? Is not the command to “hallow the fiftieth year,” as a year of jubilee, and to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” contained in the same code, and in the same chapter of the same code, with that oft-cited authority to buy bondmen and bondmaids of the heathen? If the Bible is your commission, why do you not follow the terms of the commission, observing its limitations as well as its powers? This is the fiftieth year of the century,--the very year of jubilee itself; and yet, instead of “returning every man unto his possession, and every man unto his family,” this is the chosen year for subjugating new realms to bondage. It is not to be “hallowed,” as a year of jubilee, but to be profaned as a year of captivity and mourning. Sir, I must express the most energetic dissent from those who would justify modern slavery from the Levitical law. My reason and conscience revolt from those interpretations which “Torture the hallowed pages of the Bible, To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood, And, in oppression’s hateful service, libel Both man and God.” Priests appealed to the Bible in Galileo’s time, to refute the truths of astronomy. For more than two hundred years, the same class of men appealed to the same authority to disprove the science of geology. And now, this authority is cited, not to disprove a law of physical nature merely, but to deny a great law of the human soul,--a law of human consciousness,--a law of God, written upon the tablet of every man’s heart, authenticating and attesting his title to freedom. Sir, let those who reverence the Bible beware how they suborn it to commit this treason and perjury against the sacred rights of man and the holy law of God. Whatever they gain for the support of their doctrine, will be so much subtracted from the authority of the Scriptures. If the Bible has crossed the Atlantic to spread slavery over a continent where it was unknown before, then the Bible is a book of death, and not a book of life.