“And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession, they shall be your bondmen for ever; but over your brethren, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule over one another with rigour.” Here is direct revelation, and faith gives us evidence of the truth of its being of Divine origin. Mr. Barnes proposes, by human reason, without the aid of revelation and faith, to determine what is the will of God on the subject of slavery; and it suggests the inquiry, How extensive must be the intellectual power of him who can reason with God? “For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment; neither is any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both.” _Job_ ix. 32, 33. We frankly acknowledge, that, in the investigation of this subject, we shall consider the Divine authority of those writings, which are received by Christians as a revelation of infallible truth, as so established; and, with all simplicity of mind, examine their contents, and collect from them the information they profess to contain, and concerning which information it had become necessary that the world should be experimentally instructed. But the passage quoted from Mr. Barnes gives us a stronger suspicion of his want of orthodoxy and Christian principle from its connection with what he says, page 310: “If the religion of Christ allows such a license” (to hold slaves) “from such precepts as these, the New Testament would be the greatest curse ever inflicted on our race.” The fact is, little can be known of God or his law except by faith and revelation. Beings whose mental powers are not infinite can never arrive at a knowledge of all things, nor can we know any thing fully, only in proportion as we comprehend the laws influencing it. In conformity to the present limited state of our knowledge, we can only say, that we arrive at some little, by three distinct means: the senses open the door to a superficial perception of things; the mental powers to their further examination; while faith gives us a view of the superintending control of One Almighty God. In the proportion our senses are defective, our mental powers deficient, and our faith inactive or awry,—our knowledge will be scanty. The result of all knowledge is the perception of truth. Under the head of the mental powers, philosophers tell us our knowledge is acquired by three methods: intuition, demonstration, and analogy. By intuition they mean when the mind perceives a _certainty_ in a proposition where the relation is obvious, as it is obvious that the whole is greater than a part; and such propositions they call axioms.