of Georgia, that he had known a number of attempts (attempts most probably but in form and name) to effect the conviction of whites for their undoubted murder of slaves.  But in every instance, the jurors perjured themselves, rather than consent that a man should be put to death, for the liberty he had taken in disposing of a thing.  They had rather perjure themselves, than by avenging the blood of a slave with that of a man, make a breach upon the policy of keeping the slave ignorant, that he has the nature, and consequently the rights, of a man.]

Professor Hodge tells his readers, in substance, that the selling of men, as they are sold under the system of slavery, is to be classed with the cessions of territory, occasionally made by one sovereign to another; and he would have the slave, who is sold from hand to hand, and from State to State, at the expense to his bleeding heart, of the disruption of its dearest ties, think his lot no harder than that of the inhabitant of Louisiana, who was passed without his will, from the jurisdiction of the French government to that of the United States.

When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he must, at least for a time, feel himself to be anywhere but at home, amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning.  This is very evident in the case before us—­especially, when now and then, old habits of thought and feeling break out, in spite of every effort to repress them, and the Professor is himself again, and discourses as manfully, as fearlessly, and as eloquently, as he ever had done before the slaveholders got their hands upon him.  It is not a little amusing to notice, that, although the burden of his article is to show that slavery is one of God’s institutions, (what an undertaking for a Professor of Theology in the year 1836!) he so far forgets the interests of his new friends and their expectations from him, as to admit on one page, that “the general principles of the gospel have destroyed domestic slavery throughout the greater part of Christendom;” and on another, that “the South has to choose between emancipation, by the silent and holy influence of the gospel, or to abide the issue of a long continued conflict against the laws of God.”  Whoever heard, until these strange times on which we have fallen, of any thing, which, to use the Professor’s language about slavery, “it is in vain, to contend is sin, and yet profess reverence for the Scriptures,” being at war with and destroyed by the principles of the gospel.  What sad confusion of thought the pro-slavery influences, to which some great divines have yielded, have wrought in them!

I will proceed to argue, that the institution in the Southern States called “slavery,” is radically unlike any form of servitude under which Jews were held, agreeably to the Divine will; and also radically unlike any form of servitude approved of God in the patriarchal families.