DOES THE BIBLE SANCTION AMERICAN SLAVERY?
When a New World was peopled, strange things were sure to be seen. And strange things are seen in America. By the side of the Great Salt Lake is a community basing itself upon Polygamy. In the Southern States is a community basing itself upon Slavery. Each of these communities confidently appeals to the Bible as its sanction; and each of them, in virtue of that warrant, declares its peculiar institution to be universal and divine. The plea of the slave-owner is accepted. Perhaps if the Mormonite were equally an object of political interest to a large party, his plea might be accepted also.[1]
It is important in more ways than one to determine whether the slave-owner’s plea is true. The character of the Bible is threatened; and so is the character of the English law and nation. The Times says that slavery is only wrong as luxury is wrong, and that the Bible
- ↑ No less a person than Luther was in fact led, by his irrational treatment of the Bible, into both errors. He preached the doctrine that a slave had no right to escape even from a heathen master, (see his Heer-Predigt wider die Türken,) and he brought an eternal scandal on Protestantism by sanctioning the double marriage of the Elector of Hesse.
