t faith, no, not in Israel_."--Matt.
viii., 10.

They also cited Dr. Adam Clark, the great Bible commentator; Dr.
Neander's work, entitled _Planting and Training the Church_, and
Dr. Mosheim's _Church History_, as evidence that the Bible not only
sanctioned slavery but authorized its perpetuation through all
time.( 2) In other words, pro-slavery advocates in effect affirmed
that these great writers:

"Torture the hollowed pages of the Bible,
To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood,
And, in oppression's hateful service, libel
Both man and God."

While the teachings of neither the Old nor the New Testament, nor
of the _Master_, were to overthrow or to establish political
conditions as established by the temporal powers of the then age,
yet it must be admitted that large numbers of people, of much
learning and a high civilization, believed human slavery was
sanctioned by divine authority.

The deductions made from the texts quoted were unwarranted. The
principles of justice and mercy, on which the Christian religion
is founded, cannot be tortured into even a toleration (as, possibly,
could the law of Moses) of the existence of the unnatural and
barbaric institution of slavery, or the slave trade.

Slavery was wrong _per se;_ wholly unjustifiable on the plainest
principles of humanity and justice; and the consciences of all
unprejudiced, enlightened, civilized people led them in time to
believe that it had no warrant from God and ought to have no warrant
from man to exist on the face of the earth.

The friends of freedom and those who believed slavery sinful never
for a moment assented to the claim that it was sanctioned by Holy
Writ, or that it was justified by early and long-continued existence
through barbaric or semi-barbaric times. They denied that it could
thus even be sanctified into a moral right; that time ever converted
cruelty into a blessing, or a wrong into a right; that any human
law could give it legal existence, or rightfully perpetuate it
against natural justice; they maintained that a Higher Law, written
in God's immutable decrees of mercy, was paramount to all human
law or practice, however long continuing; that the lessons taught
by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount and in all his life and
teachings were a condemnation of it; and that an enlightened,
progressive civilization demanded its final overthrow.

In America: Slavery is _dead_. We return to its history.

Greece had