"This system licenses and produces _great cruelty_. Mangling, imprisonment, starvation, every species of torture, may be inflicted upon him, [the slave,] and he has no redress. There are now in our whole land two millions of human beings, exposed, defenseless, to every insult, and every injury short of maiming or death, which their fellow-men may choose to inflict. They suffer all that can be inflicted by wanton caprice, by grasping avarice, by brutal lust, by malignant spite, and by insane anger. Their happiness is the sport of every whim, and the prey of every passion that may, occasionally or habitually, infest the master's bosom. If we could calculate the amount of woe endured by ill-treated slaves, it would overwhelm every compassionate heart--it would move even the obdurate to sympathy. There is also a vast sum of suffering inflicted upon the slave by humane masters, as a punishment for that idleness and misconduct which slavery naturally produces. BRUTAL STRIPES and all the varied kinds of personal indignities, are not the only species of cruelty which slavery licenses." CHAPTER VII. Slavery and Religion. "CURSED BE CANAAN." Many slaveholders and their apologists have sought to find authority for the "enormity and crime" of slavery, in the Holy Bible. And we are not surprised that the vile oppressor, smarting under the lashings of a guilty conscience, and condemned by the united voice of reason and humanity, should fly for refuge from public scorn and condemnation, to a shelter, however insecure, erected by a perversion of the writings and example of those remarkable men, who fill a prominent place in sacred history. How consoling it must be to the slaveholder, while standing upon the neck of an unresisting brother, and crushing his humanity into the dust with heartless cruelty, to hear from a doctor of divinity that Noah countenanced the enslavement of a part of his posterity, that Abraham was an extensive slaveholder, that Moses incorporated the system into the only government ever instituted by direct authority from Heaven, and that it received, in its very worst form, under the Roman government, the tacit, if not positive sanction of Jesus and the apostles.