We can form some notion of their companionship, from p. 110: “It is the
custom here, when the governor dies, for two of his favourite wives to
quit the world on the same day;” but in this case they ran and hid
themselves. Also, p. 182: “This morning a young man visited us, with a
countenance so rueful, and spoke in a tone so low and melancholy, that
we were desirous to learn what evil had befallen him. The cause of it
was soon explained by his informing us that he would be doomed to die,
with two companions, as soon as the governor’s dissolution should take
place.”
There is little or no discrepancy among travellers in their descriptions
of the Africans. Their state of society must have been well known to
Paley; yet Paley gives us a picture of their state of society from
imagination, founded upon that state of society with which his pupils
were conversant: “Because the slaves were torn away from their parents,
wives, children, and friends, homes, companions, country, fields, and
flocks.”
If the picture drawn by Paley were the lone consideration addressed to
our commiseration in the argument against slavery as a Divine
institution of mercy, we should, perhaps, be at some loss to determine
what amount was due from us to the African slave, who had thus been
_torn from the danger of being put to death_!—_thus torn from his fields
of lizards and locusts, and flocks of caterpillars!_
But what shall we think of an argument, founded on relations in England,
but applied to Africa, where no such relations exist?
It is a rule to hesitate as to the truthfulness of all that is stated,
when the witness is discovered to be under the influence of a prejudice
so deeply seated as to mislead the mind, and especially when we discover
a portion of the stated facts to be either not true or misapplied.
The reasons assigned by Dr. Paley why the Christian Scriptures did not
prohibit and condemn slavery, we deem also quite erroneous:—“For
Christianity, soliciting admission into all nations of the world,
abstained, as behooved it, from intermeddling with the civil
institutions of any;” and then asks, with an air of triumph, “But does
it follow from the silence of Scripture concerning them, that all the
civil institutions that prevailed were right? or that the bad should not
be exchanged for better?”
We wish to call particular attention to this passage, for, even after
having examined the books of the Greek philosophers, we are constrained
to say we have never seen a more beautiful sophism.
Is it a fact, then, that Jesus Christ and his apostles did compromise
and compound with sin, as Dr. Paley thinks it behooved them, and with
the design to avoid opposition to the introduction of Christianity?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account