Page:Bible Defence of Slavery.djvu/305

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FORTUNES, OF THE NEGRO RACE.
291

ing before the public) the facts belonging to this trial, not the facts of a cause that was tried, and decided and awarded, two or three thousand years ago." From the above quotation of abolitionist effusions, is it not certain that the writer of the above remarks, in order to turn aside the force of the Bible, on the subject of negro slavery therein recognized, has aimed a deadly shaft from the quiver of his reckless imagination, at the sacred and venerated institutions of Moses, by the insidious words "two or three thousand years ago; and another at the decree of God, set forth by Noah, in the phrase "dim antiquity." The whole of the article, as above, was intended as a slur upon such as resort to the Scripture to prove that the servitude of the negro race is therein allowed and justified.

To the perception of the writer of this work, the author of the "dim antiquity" idea might as well have written, that "although Noah did pronounce the will and decree of God, in placing the race of his son Ham under the ban of servitude to the races of both his other sons, Shem and Japheth, that it is now, in these enlightened times, entirely antiquated; as that was but a transaction of 'dim antiquity.'" Suppose we were to apply this mode of comment to some other subjects of Scripture — say, for instance, to the promise of the Messiah made to Eve at the time when she had fallen from her innocence, by tampering with the devil in the disguise of a serpent, Gen. iii, 15, called, in that place, the seed of the woman, which is the first and eldest promise, as well as prophecy, relative to that character, which is found in the Bible,