THE BIBLE ARGUMENT

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 13, 1859

THE BIBLE ARGUMENT

From the Congregational Herald.

THE BIBLE ARGUMENT.

WE sometimes meet, in a secular paper, with some theological or Biblical comment, so clear, free, terse, and racy as to be better worth transferring to our pages than long arguments on the same point, from professedly religious publications. Thus a correspondent of the N. Y. Tribune recently reviews a speech of Gov. Brown, now U. S. Senator from Mississippi, made at Jackson, in that State, after the following pithy and conclusive fashion.

"The divine origin of slavery, continues the learned Senator, "is proven by the Bible. In no line of that blessed book is Slavery reprobated; in many places it is directly sanctioned. The angel of the Lord, we are told, captured Hagar, and took her home to her mistress." This attempt to convert the angel of the Lord into a slave-catcher will excite in some readers a smile,

and in others a shudder. I shall only say of it that so far as the slave catchers of our day have come under my observation they have not by any means resembled angels of the Lord. But I regret the learned senator did not see fit to pursue a little further the history of Hagar, the Egyptian concubine of Abraham. He would have found in succeeding chapters of the same book of Genesis from which he quotes that Hagar and her son were set free; that they were succored by the angel of the Lord, who did not send him back to bondage; that "unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward unto the east country"—unlike some of our modern patriarchs, who continue such offspring in bondage. He would find also that Ishmael and his descendants—the descendants of the Egyptian bondmaid Hagar—continued free from that time to this, while within a few succeeding generations all the other posterity of the patriarch was reduced to Slavery in Egypt, out of which they escaped with divine aid and encouragement, while their masters, so far from receiving assistance from the angel of the Lord in recapturing their runaway property, had in each household the first born son slain by the angel of the Lord as a punishment for trying to prevent that property from getting away, and finally, while pursuing the fugitives for the purpose of recapturing them, were overwhelmed by the Lord and drowned in the Red Sea.

The Scriptural advocates for Slavery, somehow, strangely overlook the history of the Israelites in Egypt. They maintain a rigid silence about Moses, who (led) "away three million pieces of property" (?) including six hundred thousand field hands, the whole worth, if prices at that day bore any comparison to prices now, not less than a thousand millions of our money. They do not stand up, as they should do, for the Egyptians thus outrageously despoiled of their property and deprived of the blessings of the divinely ordained institution. It is to be hoped that governor Brown, when next he airs his ideas on slavery, will favor the world with that rectification of their place in history which is due to Pharaoh and the Egyptians from the enlightened pro-slavery theology of our day."