Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/45

Rh father’s will, which, is now merged, for all children who have come to manhood, in the law of the State. His lips pronounced the blessing and the curse, which can now be pronounced without absurdity only by the moral judgment of society at large. Such a despotism was in fact necessary to the existence of each of these primitive communities. Had it been bound together by any looser bond, it would have perished in the perpetual contest with its competitors for the hunting-ground, the pasture, and the springs of water, or have been swallowed up by the wilderness, amidst the terrors and dangers of which these little germs of social existence must have hung between life and death.

It is on this state of society, but at a late period of it, that the history of the Hebrews opens. The original family has broadened into a tribe or clan by taking into it members not of its own blood; the wreck, perhaps, of other families which had perished in the primæval struggle for existence. These new members are servants to the head of the tribe, on whose protection their lives must depend. Nations with regular governments, and distinctions of class, have been formed in the countries on the edge of which Abraham and his tribe wander. In these nations slavery exists. Its first source probably was war; a further supply being obtained, when the value of the slave to the indolent warrior was felt, by piracy and kidnapping. The traffic in men, which is the strongest evidence of the existence of Slavery in the true sense of the term, has commenced. Abraham himself, from his commerce with slave-owning nations, has servants