17
a winding and counterwinding of designs—and, in order to allay the fears and vigilance of the south, what a shrinking from, and a denial of, the sentiments of their doctrine; so that no man in their ranks, who is in office or desires one, will avow himself an abolitionist. And as some men—their agents, and lectures are handsomely paid for, their incendiary labors, they may, and do—no uncommon mistake—“suppose that gain is godliness.” The picture is complete, and there is no mistake in finding the living portraits.
From such men Timothy was commanded to withdraw himself; and, as a minister of the Lord, he was to teach and exhort servants to be obedient to their masters—and Paul calls these instructions “wholesome words—even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The present controversy then is not between us and the abolitionists—but between them and Paul, or rather between them and Christ; in which position I leave them. Abolitionists tell us that no slave-holder can be a Christian. But here again they and Paul are at issue. Paul tells us that there are believing masters, as well as believing servants, and that both are the servants of Christ. Will the abolitionists unchristianize Paul and Peter, and Timothy? They all sanctioned the existence of slavery in the primitive church: and it devolves now upon the abolitionists to show when these precepts authorising slavery were revoked, and that too by the seme authority that first gave them.
Again: the abolitionists have declared that those churches in which slavery exists “are the synagogues of Satan.” Modest assurance truly! So then, the Corinthian, the Ephesian and the Collossian’s churches, and all the others which the apostles planted, were the synagogues of Satan! Fanaticism sometimes plays strange pranks with her votaries, and places them in awkward and ridiculous attitudes. And there is nothing like religious fanaticism to make men play the fool on the largest and broadest scale of folly and madness—where their insane words and actions are sufficient to provoke
“The loudest laugh of hell.”
And yet none talk so much about duty and the will of God as they; while they overlook the fact, that the word of is the will of God to us—and that, outside the circumference of that revelation, we are as profoundly ignorant of his will as the infant of an hour. And they overlook another fact, which is, that the positive and unequivo-
