[Footnote A: I am aware that Professor Hodge asserts, that "slavery may exist without those laws which interfere with their (the slaves) marital or parental right" Now, this is a point of immense importance in the discussion of the question, whether slavery is sinful; and I, therefore, respectfully ask him either to retract the assertion, or to prove its correctness. Ten thousands of his fellow-citizens, to whom the assertion is utterly incredible, unite with me in this request. If he can show, that slavery does not "interfere with marital or parental rights," they will cease to oppose it. Their confident belief is, that slavery and marriage, whether considered in the light of a civil contract, or a scriptural institution, are entirely incompatible with each other.] 1st. Is not Southern slavery guilty of a most heaven-daring crime, in substituting concubinage for God's institution of marriage? 2d. Would not that slavery, and also every theory and modification of slavery, for which you may contend, come speedily to nought, if their subjects were allowed to marry? Slavery, being an abuse, is incapable of reformation. It dies, not only when you aim a fatal blow at its life principle--its foundation doctrine of man's right to property in man[B]--but it dies as surely, when you prune it of its manifold incidents of pollution and irreligion. [Footnote B: I mean by this phrase, "right to property in man," a right to hold man as property; and I do not see with what propriety certain writers construe it to mean, a property in the mere services of a man.] But it would be treating you indecorously to stop you at this stage of the discussion, before we are a third of the way through your book, and thus deny a hearing to the remainder of it. We will proceed to what you say of the slavery which existed in the time of the New Testament writers. Before we do so, however, let me call your attention to a few of the specimens of very careless reasoning in that part of your book, which we have now gone over. They may serve to inspire you with a modest distrust of the soundness of other parts of your argument.