Here, as in other instances, if we follow the strict lines of tradition, it seems to me that we shall escape all the difficulties which are usually alleged against it. It will result then that, although according to the text of Scripture, the curse of servitude was limited to the posterity of Chanaan; yet, seeing that the criminality was common to Ham and Chanaan, according to the tradition referred to, and as is, moreover, implied in the marked manner in which Scripture (Gen. xviii. 22) indicates Cham as "the father of Chanaan," it is presumable that, if blackness was the concomitant of the curse, it extended to both Ham and Chanaan, and, by implication, to their posterity, but then _after the curse_. As Chanaan, according to the tradition, was then a boy, all his children would have been affected by the curse; but does it follow that all Ham's descent was involved in the malediction? This would be to suppose a retrospective curse, for which the only analogy would be the hypothesis that if Adam had sinned after the birth of Cain and Abel, they and their posterity would also have incurred the guilt of original sin. Now the sons of Ham were (Gen. x. 6) "Chus and Mesram and Phuth and Chanaan," _i.e._, Chus and Mesram and Phuth were the elder brothers of Chanaan, and therefore not the children of Ham after the pronouncement of the curse. If, then, we find the children of Mesram dark, but without the negro features or the blackness of Canaan; if "Sesostris, his descendant, was a great conqueror;" if Nimrod, the son of Chus, was a powerful chieftain, and the founder of the Assyrian empire; if nothing is known of the posterity of Phuth beyond the conjecture that they were the Lybians--in a word, if the descent from these three sons does not bear out the evidence of the curse, can it be said to militate at all against the hypothesis of the curse of Ham as well as of Canaan? Moreover, if there are differences among the black races which may present difficulties, would not the knowledge that there may have been a posterity of Ham, born after the curse,[72] go far to remove them? Hales, indeed, assumes that "Ham himself had his full share of earthly blessings; his son Misr colonised Egypt," &c. (as _sup._); but this prosperity, as he indicates it, is only seen in the prosperity of his three sons, whom I assume to have been exempt from the curse. It must be remembered, however, that the occult science of the Cainites was said to have been preserved by the family of Ham, and, as we have seen, the taint was in the race.[73]