11 those for whom our Saviour died might claim His death as their release ? Again we may ask, what are the commandments ? They are the same which God spake in the 20th chapter of Exodus, saying, “ I am the Lord thy God that brought thee out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage : Thou shalt ” &c. If we hold to the literal interpretation, then “thee” and “thou” must refer to the same person, and the commandments must be restricted to those who came out of the land of Egypt. Our Saviour, who was the fulfilment of the law, omitted the “man-servant”' and the “maid-servant” in his summary, and substituted the universal brotherhood of man. Will any one quote God’s express command to his chosen people, to Exterminate the heathen around them, to leave nothing alive that breatheth, as authority for similar acts at the present day ? Can any people in the present age of the world stand in a similar relation to the Almighty with that of the Israelites of old, whose deliverance and settlement in their appointed land were a succession of miracles? But having shown, as we trust, the fallacy of the argument which deduces negro slavery from Noah’s curse upon Canaan, it is hardly necessary to dwell upon the other arguments from the Old Testament, for they do not touch the case. Let us now turn to the second main head, or the arguments in defence of negro slavery from the New Testament. The writer enters upon this portion of his subject with the remark : “ I grant, of course, that we, as Christians, are bound by the precepts and example of the Saviour and his Apostles while at the same time he quietly ignores the influence of their personal example altogether, since neither our Saviour nor his Apostles ever held slaves. But we will quote the writer’s statement on this head of his subject in full: “ Eirst, then, we ask what the divine Redeemer said in reference to slavery. And the answer is perfectly undeniable. He did not allude to it at all. Not one word upon the subject is recorded by any of the four Evangelists who gave his life and doctrines to the world. Yet slavery was in full existence at the time, throughout Judea ; and the Roman empire, according to Gibbon, contained sixty millions of
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