But the fact we find to be that the slave is, nevertheless, a man; and hence it follows that these rights were not inseparable from his state of being a man, or that he had not the rights.

If slavery is sinful because it infringes the rights of man, then any other thing is also sinful which infringes them. Will the disciples of Dr. Channing deny that these rights are infringed by the constitution of the civil government? The law gives parents the right to govern, command, and restrain minor children; to inflict punishment for their disobedience. Is parental authority a sin? Government, in every form, is found to deprive females of a large proportion of the rights which men possess. When married, their rights are wholly absorbed in the rights of the husband. This must be very sinful!

Idiots have no rights. In reality, the very idea of rights vanishes away with the power to exercise them. But in a state of civil government, it is a mere question of expediency how personal rights shall be adjusted; which is very manifest, if we look at the different constitutions of government now in the world. In one, men who follow certain occupations have certain rights as a consequence. Men who are found guilty of certain breaches of the law lose a portion or all their rights. The president of our senate loses the right to vote, except under condition; and we agree that a mere majority shall rule. Thus forty-nine of the hundred cease to find their rights available. They must submit. Man, as a member of civil society, is only a small fraction of an unit, and has no right to exercise a right unconformably to the expression of the sense of the general good. Man has no right to live independent of his fellowman, like a plant or a tree; consequently, his rights must be determined and bounded by the general welfare. Dr. Channing ceases to be enlightened by moral science when he announces that, because a man is "conscious of duty," therefore, what he may think his right cannot be affected by others "without crime." So reverse may be the fact, that it may be a crime in him to claim the right his conscious duty may suggest.

Man cannot be said to be in possession of all things that he, or such theorists, may deem his rights only in a monocratic state. But how will he retain them? For then, so far as he shall have intercourse with others, every thing will come to be decided by the law of might; so that, instead of gaining, he will lose all rights. But suppose him to live without intercourse; what is a naked, abstract right, that yields him nothing above the brute? God never made

a man for such a state of life; because it at once includes rebellion to his government; and, therefore, its every movement will be to retrograde.

Will the disciples of Dr. Channing be surprised to find that the only medicine God has prepared for such a loathsome moral disease as will then be developed, is slavery to a higher order of men?

LESSON VI.

DR. CHANNING'S third position is to offer explanations to prevent misapplication of the principles presented in his first two proposi

tions.

Vol. ii. page 51, he says-" Sympathy with the slave has often degenerated into injustice towards the master." We fully agree with him; and we also admit "that the consciences of men are often darkened by education." This short chapter is evidently written in a spirit of conciliation, and contains many truths eloquently told; yet, he finally grasps his doctrines, and repeats his elucidations.

*

His fourth position is, "To unfold the evils of slavery." He says the first great evil is the debasement of the slave. Page 60: "This word, (slave,) borrowed from his condition, expresses the ruin wrought by slavery within him. * *To be an instrument of the physical, material good of another, whose will is his highest law, he is taught to regard as the great purpose of his being. Here lies the evil of slavery. Its whips, imprisonment, and even the horrors of the middle passage from Africa to America, these are not to be named in comparison with this extinction of the proper consciousness of a human being, with the degradation of a man into a brute."

If it be a fact that the debasement of the negro race has been brought about by their having been made slaves in America; then it will be a very strong argument, we are willing to acknowledge, an insurmountable one, against the institution. That Dr. Channing thinks such to be the fact, we have no doubt; for we cannot a moment admit that he would assert what he did not believe was true. But "the consciences of men are often darkened by education." We hold that the assertion is capable of proof, that the debasement

of the race was the moral, the necessary effect of a long course of sin; and that, instead of slavery producing the debasement, the fact is, the debasement produced the slavery; or, in other words, slavery is the moral, the necessary effect of the debasement.

The leading object, through all our studies, is the elucidation of the fact, that sin has a poisonous effect upon the moral, mental, and physical man, that is in constant action in the direction of deterioration, debasement, ruin, death. Such we teach to be the doctrine of the holy books, spread through the whole volume, elucidated upon every page; that slavery, like a saviour, steps in upon this descending road, arresting the downward progress, the rapid fall to final, to unalterable ruin and death.

"If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments; if they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments,—then will I visit their transgressions with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes." Ps. lxxxix. 30-32. "A righteous man hateth lying: but a wicked man is loathsome, and cometh to shame." Prov. xiii. 5. "Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, return, ye children of men." Ps. xc. 3. "I have therefore delivered unto the mighty one of the heathen; he shall surely deal with him: I have driven him out for his wickedness." Ezek. xxxi. 11. "And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hands of the children of Judah, and they shall sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far off; for the Lord hath spoken it." Joel iii. 8. "Nevertheless

they shall be his servants (y slaves), that they may know my (slaves),

:

service (y, slavery), and the service (7), slavery) of the kingdoms of the countries." 2 Chron. xii. 8. "The show of their countenance doth witness against them; and they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not. Wo unto their soul! for they have rewarded evil unto themselves." Isa. iii. 9. "Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge; and their honourable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst." "And the mean man shall be brought down, and the mighty man shall be humbled, and the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled but the Lord of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and God that is holy shall be sanctified in righteousness." Isa. v. 13, 15, 16.

Dr. Channing's book before us goes on to specify this debasement as to the intellect; its influence on the domestic relations; how it "produces and gives license to cruelty." The fact that

debasement reaches all these points, we agree to; nay, further, that it reaches to every act and thought. But we refer all these displays of debasement to the result of the degradation, of which slavery is only the moral, the natural consequence. If we find a man debased as to one thing, it is in conformity with the common sense of mankind to expect to find him debased as to another.

*

Channing, pp. 78, 79. "I proceed to another view of the evils of slavery. I refer to its influence on the master. * * * I pass over many views. * * I will confine myself to two considerations. The first is, that slavery, above all other influences, nourishes the passion for power and its kindred vices. There is no passion which needs a stronger curb. Men's worst crimes have sprung from the desire of being masters, of bending others to their yoke."

It is to be lamented that man is so prone to sin; that he is not more undeviating in the paths of virtue, of goodness, of perfection. The charge made by Dr. Channing in the passage quoted, we are sorry to acknowledge, is too true. But so far as we have any knowledge of the history of man, even in the absence of slavery, the time has never been when the passion for power and its kindred vices did not find sufficient food for their nourishment. The evil passions alluded to are not so particular as to their food but that, if they do not find a choice thing to nourish themselves on, they will feed and nourish themselves on another.

It, perhaps, would not be difficult to show that the love of power and its kindred vices first operated to bring on us "all our wo;" stimulated Cain to kill Abel; in fact, has been in most powerful action among those causes that have introduced slavery to the world. Slavery gave no birth to these passions. They drove Nebuchadnezzar from his throne down to the degradation of the brute. "Is not this great Babylon that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?" Dan. iv. 12.

He had great power, great wealth, and, it is true, he had great possessions in slaves. The prophet understood his case, and spoke plainly. If his owning thousands of slaves merely had nursed in him a forgetfulness of God, the seer would not have hesitated so to inform him. Great prosperity in the affairs of the world in his case, as in some others of a somewhat later day, so puffed him up that he forgot who he was. The owning of slaves may puff up a silly intellect doubtless, often does; but the same intellect would be

more likely to be puffed up by a command of a more elevated grade, as officers of government, or, even in private life, by the control of superior amounts of wealth; or even by the conceit of possessing a great superiority of intellect.

Doubtless, the disciples of Dr. Channing will agree that abundant instances of such tumidity might be found in any country, even among those who never owned a slave.

It may be a fact, that, to some, the having control over and owning a slave have a greater tendency to produce the effect of puffing up the owner than would his value in money or other property; because it may be a fact that a given amount in one kind of property may possess such tendency to a greater extent than another. But the truth probably is, that one man would be the most puffed up by one thing, and another man by another. We agree that being thus puffed up is a sin; that it leads to consequences extremely ruinous, and often fatal. Very small men are also liable to the disease, and they sometimes take it from very slight causes. It is true, "there is no passion that needs a stronger curb." What we contend is, that it is not a necessary consequence of owning slaves, any more than it is of owning any other property, or of possessing any other command of men; and that so far as it is an argument against owning slaves, it is also an argument against owning any other property, or of having any other control, or of possessing any other command among men.

LESSON VII.

DR. CHANNING continues his view of the evils of slavery, and says, p. 80, 81

"I approach a more delicate subject, and one on which I shall not enlarge. To own the persons of others, to hold females in slavery, is necessarily fatal to the purity of a people: that unprotected females, stripped by their degraded condition of woman's self-respect, should be used to minister to other passions in man than the love of gain, is next to inevitable. Accordingly, in such a community, the reins are given to youthful licentiousness. Youth, everywhere in peril, is, in these circumstances, urged to vice with a terrible power. And the evil cannot stop at youth. Early licentiousness is fruitful of crime in mature life. How far