Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/84

72 was a religious man, was surprised to find that the servants did not come to prayers.

Slavery, in Greece and at Rome, may in the earliest times have been a social necessity and a sound relation, as it was in the Patriarchal East. But in more civilized times it became a manifest wrong: and then theories were invented to appease the moral misgivings of the slave-owners by shewing that the wrong which conduced so much to their advantage, when viewed by the eye of reason, was the perfection of right. The philosophic Greek feigned that there were certain races of men doomed by their natural inferiority to be the slaves of the superior race; and among the races so doomed he included some which were of the same stock as himself, and certainly would have included those which have become the founders of modern civilization. The