“It condemns all infractions of           It outlaws the conjugal
marital or parental rights.”              and parental relations.

“It requires that free scope It forbids any effort, on
should be allowed to human the part of myriads of the
improvement.” human family, to improve
their character,
condition, and prospects.

“It requires that all suitable It inflicts heavy
means should be employed to improve penalties for teaching
mankind” letters to the poorest of

          
                                                                          the poor.

“Wherever it has had free scope, Wherever it has free
it has abolished domestic bondage.” scope, it perpetuates
domestic bondage.

Now it is slavery according to the American system that the abolitionists are set against. Of the existence of any such form of slavery as is consistent with Professor Hodge’s account of the requisitions of Christianity, they know nothing.  It has never met their notice, and of course, has never roused their feelings or called forth their exertions.  What, then, have they to do with the censures and reproaches which the Princeton professor deals around?  Let those who have leisure and good nature protect the man of straw he is so hot against.  The abolitionists have other business.  It is not the figment of some sickly brain; but that system of oppression which in theory is corrupting, and in practice destroying both Church and State;—­it is this that they feel pledged to do battle upon, till by the just judgment of Almighty God it is thrown, dead and damned, into the bottomless abyss.

3. How can the South feel itself protected by any shield which may be thrown over SUCH SLAVERY, as may be consistent with what the Princeton professor describes as the requisitions of Christianity?  Is this THE slavery which their laws describe, and their hands maintain?  “Fair compensation for labor”—­“marital and parental rights”—­“free scope” and “all suitable means” for the “improvement, moral and intellectual, of all classes of men;”—­are these, according to the statutes of the South, among the objects of slaveholding legislation?  Every body knows that any such requisitions and American slavery are flatly opposed to and directly subversive of each other.  What service, then, has the Princeton professor, with all his ingenuity and all his zeal, rendered the “peculiar institution?” Their gratitude must be of a stamp and complexion quite peculiar, if they can thank him for throwing their “domestic system” under the weight of such Christian requisitions as must at once crush its snaky head “and grind it to powder.”

And what, moreover, is the bearing of the Christian requisitions, which Professor Hodge quotes, upon the definition of slavery which he has elaborated?  “All the ideas which necessarily enter into the definition of slavery are, deprivation of personal liberty, obligation of service at the discretion of another, and the transferable character of the authority and claim of service of the master."[86]