Chapter 5
Carry it out, and what is the progress and the end of it? This. Human reason--the human heart--will be supreme. Some, I grant, will hold to a revelation of some sort. A thing more and more transcendental,--a thing more and more of fog and moonshine,--fog floating in German cellars from fumes of lager-beer, and moonshine gleaming from the imaginations of the drinkers. Some, like Socrates and Plato, will have a God supreme, personal, glorious, somewhat like the true; and with him many inferior deities,--animating the stars, the earth, mountains, valleys, plains, the sea, rivers, fountains, the air, trees, flowers, and all living things. Some will deny a personal God, and conceive, instead, the intelligent mind of the universe, without love. Some will contend for mere law,--of gravitation and attraction; and some will suggest that all is the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Here, having passed through the shadows and the darkness, we have reached the blackness of infidelity,--blank atheism. No God--yea, all the way the "_fools_" were saying in their hearts, no God. What now is man? Alas! some, the Notts and Gliddons, tell us, man was indeed _created_ millions of ages ago, the Lord only knows when, in swarms like bees to suit the zones of the earth,--while other some, the believers in the _vestiges of creation_, say man is the result of development,--from fire, dust, granite, grass, the creeping thing, bird, fish, four-footed beast, monkey. Yea, and some of these last philosophers are even now going to Africa to try to find men they have heard tell of, who still have tails and are jumping and climbing somewhere in the regions around the undiscovered sources of the Nile.
This is the progress and the result of the Edwards theory; because, deny or hesitate about revelation, and man cannot prove, _absolutely_, any of the things we are considering. Let us see if he can. Edwards writes, "On the supposition that the will or law of God is the primary foundation, reason, and standard of right and virtue, every attempt _to prove the moral perfection or attributes of God is absurd_." Here, then, Edwards believes, that, to reach the primary foundation of right and virtue, he must not take God's word as to his perfection or attributes, no matter how fully _God_ may have _proved_ his word: no; but he, Edwards, he, man, must first _prove_ them in _some other way_. And, of course, he believes he can reach such primary foundation by such other proof. Well, let us see how he goes about it. I give him, to try his hand, the easiest attribute,--"POWER." I give him, then, all creation, and providence besides, as his _black-board_, on which to work his demonstration. I give him, then, the lifetime of Methuselah, in which to reach his conclusion of proof.--Well, I will now suppose we have all lived and waited that long time: what is his _proof_ OF INFINITE POWER? Has he found the EXHIBITION of _infinite power?_ No. He has found _proof_ of GREAT POWER; but he has not reached the DISPLAY of _infinite power_. What then is his _faith_ in infinite power after such _proof?_ Why, just this: he INFERS _only_, that THE POWER, _which did the things he sees, can go on, and on, and on, to give greater, and greater, and greater manifestations of itself!_ VERY GOOD: _if so be, we can have no better proof_. But _that_ PROOF is infinitely below ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. And all manifestations of power to a _finite creature_, even to the archangel Michael, during countless millions of ages, never gives, because it never can give to him, ABSOLUTE PROOF _of infinite power_. But the word of GOD gives the PROOF ABSOLUTE, _and in a moment of time!_ "I AM THE ALMIGHTY!" The _perfect proof_ is in THAT WORD OF GOD.
I might set Edwards to work to prove the _infinite wisdom_, the _infinite benevolence_, the _infinite holiness_--yea, the EXISTENCE--of God. And he, finite man, in any examination of creation or providence, must fall infinitely below the PERFECT PROOF.
So then I tell Edwards, and all agreeing with him, that _it is absurd_ to attempt to _prove_ the moral perfection and attributes of God, if he thereby seeks to reach the HIGHEST EVIDENCE, _or if he thereby means to find the_ PRIMARY GROUND _of moral obligation_.
Do I then teach that man should not seek the _proof_ there is, of the perfection and attributes of God, in _nature and providence_? No. I hold that such proof unfolds the _meaning_ of the FACTS declared in the WORD of God, and is all-important, as such expansion of meaning. But I say, by authority of the Master, that _the highest proof, the absolute proof, the perfect proof_, of the FACTS as to _who God is, and what he does_, and the PRIMARY OBLIGATION _thereupon, is in the_ REVEALED WORD.
FRED. A. ROSS.
Huntsville, Ala., April 3, 1857.
N.B.--In notice of last Witness's extract from Erskine, I remark that Thomas Erskine was, and may yet be, a lawyer of Edinburgh. He wrote _three works_:--_one_ on the _Internal Evidences_, the _next_ on _Faith_, the _last_ on the _Freeness of the Gospel_. They are all written with great ability, and contain much truth. But all have in them fundamental _untruths_. There is least in the Evidences; more in the essay on Faith; most in the tract on the Freeness of the Gospel,--which last has been utterly refuted, and has passed away. His _Faith_ is, also, not republished. The Evidences is good, like good men, notwithstanding the evil.
Letters to Rev. A. Barnes.
Introduction.
As part of the great slavery discussion, Rev. A. Barnes, of Philadelphia, published, in October, 1856, a pamphlet, entitled, "The CHURCH and SLAVERY." In this tract he invites every man to utter his views on the subject. And, setting the example, he speaks his own with the greatest freedom and honesty.
In the same freedom of speech, I have considered his views unscriptural, false, fanatical, and infidel. Therefore, while I hold him in the highest respect, esteem, and affection, as a divine and Christian gentleman, and cherish his past relations to me, yet I have in these letters written to him, and of him, just as I would have done had he lived in France or Germany, a stranger to me, and given to the world the refined scoff of the one, or the muddy transcendentalism of the other.
My first letter is merely a glance at some things in his pamphlet, in which I show wherein I agree and disagree with him,--_i.e._ in our estimate of the results of the agitation; in our views of the Declaration of Independence; in our belief of the way men are made infidels; and in our appreciation of the testimonies of past General Assemblies.
The other letters I will notice in similar introductions.
These letters first appeared as original contributions to the Christian Observer, published and edited by Dr. A. Converse, Philadelphia.
I take this occasion to express my regard for him, and my sense of the ability with which he has long maintained the rights and interests of the Presbyterian body, to which we both belong; and the wise and masterly way in which he has vindicated, from the Bible, the truth on the slavery question. To him, too, the public is indebted for the first exhibition of Mr. Barnes's errors in his recent tract which has called forth my reply.
No. I.
Rev. A. Barnes:--
_Dear Sir_:--You have recently published a tract:--"The Church and Slavery."
"The opinion of each individual," you remark, "contributes to form public sentiment, as the labor of the animalcule in the ocean contributes to the coral reefs that rise above the waves."
True, sir, and beautifully expressed. But while, in harmony with your intimation, I must regard you one of the animalcules, rearing the coral reef of public opinion, I cannot admit your disclaimer of "special influence" among them in their work. Doubtless, sir, you have "special influence,"--and deserve to have. I make no apology for addressing you. I am one of the animalcules.
I agree, and I disagree, with you. I harmonize in your words,--"The present is eminently a time when the views of every man on the subject of slavery should be uttered in unambiguous tones." I agree with you in this affirmation; because the subject has yet to be fully understood; because, when understood, if THE BIBLE does _not_ sanction the system, the MASTER must cease to be the master. The SLAVE must cease to be the slave. He must be _free_, AND EQUAL IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE. _That_ is your "_unambiguous tone_". Let it be heard, if _that_ is the word of God.
But if THE BIBLE _does_ sanction the system, then _that_ "unambiguous tone" will silence abolitionists who admit the Scriptures; it will satisfy all good men, and give peace to the country. That is the "_tone_" I want men to hear. Listen to it in the past and present speech of providence. The time was when _you_ had the very _public sentiment_ you are now trying to form. From Maine to Louisiana, the American mind was softly yielding to the impress of emancipation, in some hope, however vague and imaginary. Southern as well as Northern men, in the church and out of it, not having sufficiently studied the word of God, and, under our own and French revolutionary excitement, looking only at the evils of slavery, wished it away from the land. It was a _mistaken_ public sentiment. Yet, such as it was, you had it, and it was doing your work. It was Quaker-like, mild and affectionate. It did not, however, work fast enough for you. You thought that the negro, with his superior attributes of body and mind and higher advantages of the nineteenth century, might reach, in a day, the liberty and equality which the Anglo-American had attained after the struggle of his ancestors during a thousand years! You got up the agitation. You got it up in the Church and State. You got it up over the length and breadth of this whole land. Let me show you some things you have secured, as the results of your work.
_First Result of Agitation_.
1. The most consistent abolitionists, affirming the sin of slavery, on the maxim of created equality and unalienable right, after torturing the Bible for a while, to make it give the same testimony, felt they could get nothing from the book. They felt that the God of the Bible disregarded the thumb-screw, the boot, and the wheel; that he would not speak for them, but against them. These consistent men have now turned away from the word, in despondency; and are seeking, somewhere, an abolition Bible, an abolition Constitution for the United States, and an abolition God.
This, sir, is the _first result_ of your agitation:--the very van of your attack repulsed, and driven into infidelity.
_A Second Result of Agitation_.
2. Many others, and you among them, are trying in exactly the same way just mentioned to make the Bible speak against slave-holding. You get nothing by torturing the English version. People understand English. Nay, you get little by applying the rack to the Hebrew and Greek; even before a tribunal of men like you, who proclaim beforehand that Moses, in Hebrew, and Paul, in Greek, _must_ condemn slavery because "_it is a violation of the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence_." You find it difficult to persuade men that Moses and Paul were moved by the Holy Ghost to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson! You find it hard to make men believe that Moses saw in the mount, and Paul had vision in heaven, that this future _apostle of Liberty_ was inspired by Jesus Christ.
You torture very severely. But the muscles and bones of those old men are tough and strong. They won't yield under your terrible wrenchings. You get only groans and mutterings. You claim these voices, I know, as testimony against slavery. But you cannot torture in secret as in olden times. When putting the question, you have to let men be present,--who tell us that Moses and Paul won't speak for you,--that they are silent, like Christ before Pilate's scourging-men; or, in groans and mutterings,--the voices of their sorrow and the tones of their indignation,--they rebuke your pre-judgment of the Almighty when you say if the Bible sanctions slavery, "it neither ought to be nor could be received by mankind as a divine revelation."
This, sir, is the _second result_ you have gained by your agitation. You have brought a thousand Northern ministers of the gospel, with yourself, to the verge of the same denial of the word of God which they have made, who are only a little ahead of you in the road you are travelling.
_A Third Result of Agitation._
3. Meanwhile, many of your most pious men, soundest scholars, and sagacious observers of providence, have been led to study the Bible more faithfully in the light of the times. And they are reading it more and more in harmony with the views which have been reached by the highest Southern minds, to wit:--That the relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible;--that it is a relation belonging to the same category as those of husband and wife, parent and child, master and apprentice, master and hireling;--that the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, _were ordained in Eden for man, as man_, and _modified after the fall_, while the relation of slavery, as a system of labor, is _only one form of the government ordained of God over fallen and degraded man_;--that the _evils_ in the system are _the same evils_ of OPPRESSION we see in the relation of husband and wife, and all other forms of government;--that slavery, as a relation, suited to the more degraded or the more ignorant and helpless types of a sunken humanity, is, like all government, intended _as the proof of the curse of such degradation, and at the same time to elevate and bless_;--that the relation of husband and wife, being for man, as man, _will ever be over him_, while slavery will remain so long as God sees it best, as a controlling power over the ignorant, the more degraded and helpless;--and that, when he sees it for the good of the country, he will cause it to pass away, if the slave can be elevated to liberty and equality, political and social, with his master, _in_ that country; or _out of_ that country, if such elevation cannot be given therein, but may be realized in some other land: all which result must be left to the unfoldings of the divine will, _in harmony with the Bible_, and not to a newly-discovered dispensation. These facts are vindicated in the Bible and Providence. In the Old Testament, they stare you in the face:--in the family of Abraham,--in his slaves, bought with his money and born in his house,--in Hagar, running away under her mistress's hard dealing with her, and yet sent back, as a fugitive slave, by the angel,--in the law which authorized the Hebrews to hold their brethren as slaves for a time,--in which parents might sell their children into bondage,--in which the heathen were given to the Hebrews as their slaves forever,--in which slaves were considered so much the money of their master, that the master who killed one by an unguarded blow was, under certain circumstances, sufficiently punished in his slave's death, because he thereby lost his money,--in which the difference between _man-stealing_ and _slave-holding_ is, by law, set forth,--in which the runaway from heathen masters may not be restored, because God gave him the benefits of an adopted Hebrew. In the New Testament:--wherein the slavery of Greece and Rome was recognised,--in the obligations laid on master and slave,--in the close connection of this obligation with the duties of husband and wife, parent and child,--in the obligation to return the fugitive slave to his master,--and _in the condemnation of every abolition principle_, "AS DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH." (1 Tim. vi. 1-5.)
This view of slavery is becoming more and more, not only the settled decision of the Southern but of the best Northern mind, with a movement so strong that you have been startled by it to write the pamphlet now lying before me.
This is the _third result_ you have secured:--to make many of the best men in the North see the infidelity of your philosophy, falsely so called, on the subject of slavery, in the clearer and clearer light of the Scriptures.
_Another Result of Agitation_.
4. The Southern slave-holder is now satisfied, as never before, that the relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible; and he feels, as never before, the obligations of the word of God. He no longer, in his ignorance of the Scriptures, and afraid of its teachings, will seek to defend his common-sense opinions of slavery by arguments drawn from "Types of Mankind," and other infidel theories; but he will look, in the light of the Bible, on all the good and evil in the system. And when the North, as it will, shall regard him holding from God this high power for great good,--when the North shall no more curse, but bid him God-speed,--then he will bless himself and his slave, in nobler benevolence. With no false ideas of created equality and unalienable right, but with the Bible in his heart and hand, he will do justice and love mercy in higher and higher rule. Every evil will be removed, and the negro will be elevated to the highest attainments he can make, and be prepared for whatever destiny God intends. This, sir, is the _fourth result_ of your agitation:--to make the Southern master _know_, from the Bible, his right to be a master, and his duty to his slave.
These _four results_ are so fully before you, that I think you must see and feel them. You have brought out, besides, tremendous political consequences, giving astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of God and to speak it to the land. I rejoice that all the South now know that God gives the right to hold slaves, and, with that right, obligations they must fulfil. I rejoice that the day has dawned in which the North and South will think and feel and act together on the subject of slavery. I thank God for the agitation. May he forgive the folly and wickedness of many who have gotten it up! May he reveal more and more, that surely the wrath of man shall praise him, while the remainder of wrath he will restrain!
_Declaration of Independence_.
I agree with you, sir, that _the second paragraph_ of the Declaration of Independence contains _five affirmations_, declared to be self-evident truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to liberty,--to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident truth, or a truth at all. On the contrary, that each one is contrary to the Bible; that each one, separately, is denied; and that all five, collectively, are denied and upset by the Bible, by the natural history of man, and by providence, in every age of the world. I say this now. In a subsequent communication, I will prove what I affirm. For the present I merely add, that the Declaration of Independence stands in no need of these false affirmations. It was, and is, a beautiful whole without them. It was, and is, without these imaginary maxims, the simple statement of the grievances the colonies had borne from the mother-country, and their right _as colonies_, when thus oppressed, to declare themselves independent. That is to say, the right given of God to oppressed children to seek protection in another family, or to set up for themselves somewhat before _twenty-one_ or natural maturity; right belonging to them _in the British family;_ right sanctioned of God; right blessed of God, in the resistance of the colonies _as colonies_--not as individual men--to the attempt of the mother-country to consummate her tyranny. But God gives no sanction to the affirmation that he has _created all men equal_; that this is _self-evident,_ and that he has given them _unalienable rights;_ that he has made government to _derive its power solely from their consent_, and that he has given them _the right to change that government in their mere pleasure_. All this--every word of it, every jot and tittle--is the liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, Garrison, or Barnes.
Sir, that paragraph is an _excrescence_ on the tree of our liberty. I pray you take it away. Worship it if you will, and in a manner imitate the Druid. He gave reverence to the _mistletoe_, but first he removed the _parasite_ from the noble tree. Do you the same. Cut away _this mistletoe_ with golden knife, as did the Druid; enshrine its imaginary divinity in a grove or cave; then retire there, and leave our oak to stand in its glory in the light of heaven. Men have been afraid to say all this for years, just as they have been timid to assert that God has placed master and slave in the same relation as husband and wife. Public sentiment, which you once had and have lost, suppressed this utterance as the other. But now, men speak out; and I, for one, will tell you what the Bible reveals as to that part of the Declaration of Independence, as fearlessly as I tell you what it says of the system of slavery.
_How Men are made Infidels_.
I agree with you that some men have been, are, and will be, made infidels by hearing that God has ordained slavery as one form of his government over depraved mankind. But how does this fact prove that the Bible does not sanction slavery? Why, sir, you have been all your life teaching that some men are made infidels by hearing any truth of the Bible;--that some men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement, Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. True: and these men find "_great laws of their nature,--instinctive feelings_"--just such as you find against slavery, and not more perverted in them than in you, condemning all this Bible. And they hold now, with your sanction, that a book affirming such facts "_cannot be from God_."
Sir, some men are made infidels by hearing the Ten Commandments, and they find "_great laws of their nature_," as strong in them as yours in you against slavery, warring against every one of these commandments. And they declare now, with your authority, that a book imposing such restraints upon human nature, "_cannot be from God_" Sir, what is it makes infidels? You have been wont to answer, "They _will not_ have God _to rule over them_. They _will not_ have the BIBLE _to control the great laws of their nature."_ Sir, that is the true answer. And you know that _the great instinct of liberty_ is only one of _three great laws_, needing special teaching and government:--that is to say, _the instinct to rule; the instinct to submit to be ruled; and the instinct for liberty._ You know, too, that the instinct _to submit_ is the strongest, the instinct _to rule_ is next, and that the _aspiration for liberty_ is the weakest. Hence you know the overwhelming majority of men have ever been willing to be slaves; masters have been next in number; while the few have struggled for freedom.