Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/132

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DOES THE BIBLE SANCTION

from the vigorous invective of Juvenal, that they were the most useful and capable of servants, whether as pimps or professors of rhetoric. Obsequious, dexterous, and ready, the versatile Greeks monopolized the business of teaching, publishing, and manufacturing in the Roman Empire, allowing their masters ample leisure for the service of the State, in the Senate or in the field.” In confirmation of this historical theory it may be remarked that the Romans of the Southern States, like those of the Capitol, sprang from an asylum. One who was much concerned in the foundation of Virginia said of that Colony, that “the number of felons and vagabonds transported did bring such evil characters on the place, that some did choose to be hanged ere they would go there, and were.”

It is true that the planters also claim a reputation for chivalry; and chivalry, no doubt, has its root deep in Christianity. But we must beg leave to add that a chivalry which exercises uncontrolled tyranny over defenceless victims, which flogs women naked, which buys and sells them as the wretched victims of brutal lust, which breeds human beings like cattle, which tears husbands from their wives and children from their mothers, which stands by and exults or moralizes while men are burned alive at slow fires, is a chivalry such as the Christian world has not yet seen. The type of character which it tends to produce may be higher than that of St. Louis, Edward I., and Bayard, but it certainly is not the same.

We have said that the founders of Christianity, when they preached political resignation as necessary for the