The advocates of slavery find themselves at their wit’s end in pressing the Bible into their service.  Every movement shows them hard pushed.  Their ever-varying shifts, their forced constructions and blind guesswork, proclaim both their cause desperate, and themselves.  Meanwhile their invocations for help to “those good old slaveholders and patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,"[A] sent up without ceasing from the midst of their convulsions, avail as little as did the screams and lacerations of the prophets of Baal to bring an answer of fire.  The Bible defences thrown around slavery by the professed ministers of the Gospel, do so torture common sense, Scripture, and historical facts it were hard to tell whether absurdity, fatuity, ignorance, or blasphemy, predominates, in the compound; each strives so lustily for the mastery, it may be set down a drawn battle.  How often has it been bruited that the color of the negro is the Cain-mark, propagated downward.  Cain’s posterity started an opposition to the ark, forsooth, and rode out the flood with flying streamers!  How could miracle be more worthily employed, or better vindicate the ways of God to man than by pointing such an argument, and filling out for slaveholders a Divine title-deed!

[Footnote A:  The Presbytery of Harmony, South Carolina, at their meeting in Wainsborough, S.C., Oct. 28, 1836, appointed a special committee to report on slavery.  The following resolution is a part of the report adopted by the Presbytery.  “Resolved, That slavery has existed from the days of those GOOD OLD SLAVEHOLDERS AND PATRIARCHS, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who are now in the kingdom of Heaven.”

Abraham receives abundant honor at the hands of slave-holding divines.  Not because he was the “father of the faithful,” forsook home and country for the truth’s sake, was the most eminent preacher and practiser of righteousness in his day; nay, verily, for all this he gets faint praise; but then he had “SERVANTS BOUGHT WITH MONEY!!!” This is the finishing touch of his character, and its effect on slaveholders is electrical.  Prose fledges into poetry, cold compliments warm into praise, eulogy rarifies into panegyric and goes off in rhapsody.  In their ecstasies over Abraham, Isaac’s paramount claims to their homage are lamentably lost sight of.  It is quite unaccountable, that in their manifold oglings over Abraham’s “servants bought with money,” no slaveholder is ever caught casting loving side-glances at Gen. xxvii. 29, 37, where Isaac, addressing Jacob, says, “Be lord over thy brethren and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee.”  And afterwards, addressing Esau, he says, speaking of the birth-right immunities confirmed to Jacob, “Behold I have made him thy Lord and all his brethren have I GIVEN TO HIM FOR SERVANTS!”