“What do you say to this, Mr. North?” I asked again.

Said Mrs. North, “I begin to see the origin and cause of infidelity among the abolitionists.”

“Tell me,” said Mr. North, “how you view it.”

“On stating this, once,” said I, “in a public meeting, I raised a clamor.  Three or four men sprung to their feet, and one of them, who first caught the chairman’s eye, cried out, his face turning red, his eyes starting from their sockets, his fist clenched, ’I demand of the gentleman whether he means to approve of all the abominations of American slavery!  Is he in favor of separating husbands and wives, parents and children?  Let us know it, Sir, if it be so.  No wonder that strong anti-slavery men turn infidels when they hear Christian men defending American slavery from the Bible.  No wonder that they say, “The times demand, and we must have, an anti-slavery constitution, an anti-slavery Bible, and an anti-slavery God.”  Mr. Moderator, will the gentleman answer my question,—­Do you mean to approve all the atrocities of American slavery, on the ground that the Bible countenances them?’

“I was never more calm in my life.  I replied, ’Mr. Chairman, taking for my warrant an inspired piece of advice as to the best way of answering a man according to his folly, it would be just, should I reply to the gentleman’s question, Yes, I do.  But the gentleman, I perceive, is too much excited to hear me.’

“He had flung himself round in his seat, put his elbow on the back of it, and his hand through his hair; he then flung himself round in the opposite direction, and put his arm and hand as before, and he blew his nose with a sound like a trombone.

“I then said, ’Mr. Chairman, if all that the gentleman meant to ask was, Do you find any countenance under any circumstances, for the relation of master and slave in the divine legation of Moses,—­and this was all which, as a fair man, not carried away by a gust of passion, he should have asked me,—­my answer was correct and proper.  If he wished to know my views of what is right and proper as to the marriage relation of our slaves, he should have put the question in a different shape.  But first, Sir,’ said I, ’if he dislikes the twenty-first chapter of Exodus, his controversy must be with his God, not with me.  Sinai was, let me remind him, more of a place than Bunker Hill.  I am not a friend of “oppression” any more than the gentleman; but I trust that had I lived in Israel, I should never have thought of being more humane than my Maker.’

“I then proceeded to say that (as before remarked to you) we are not warranted by the Bible to make men slaves when we please; nor, if slavery exists, are we commanded to adopt the rules and regulations of Hebrew slavery.

“But we do learn from the Bible that property in man is not in itself sinful,—­not even to say of a man, ‘He is my money.’

“Were it intrinsically wrong, God would not have legislated about it in such ways; for granting, if you please, the untenable distinction about his ‘not appointing’ slavery, but ‘finding it in existence’ and legislating for it, what necessity could there have been for making such a law as that relating to the boring of the ear, rather than giving the slave his wife and children and suffering them all to go free?