God against slavery: and the freedom and duty of the pulpit to rebuke it, as a sin against God.

Front matter

Wi>^

Wf s^

SSESP

Preface

For the privilege of having been permitted to deliver these discourses without interruption, and with a cordial answering sympathy on the part of the public, I thank God and take courage. Seldom have I found a heart more thirsty for divine truth, more attentive under it, and more manifestly responding to it, and grateful for it, than in the great congregations whom God in his good providence brought out to listen to these sermons. I commenced them, mucli questioning as to the result, but determined to leave consequences to God, and to proclaim, out and out, the whole truth in his word in regard to the great reigning and destroying sin of our country. I endeavored to do this to the best of my ability. The event was, that instead of driving men away in anger, the assertion of the freedom of the pulpit, and the proof of it from the prophets and apostles, and the use of it in demonstrating the sinfulness of slavery, brought thousands on thousands to hear. They came, desiring to learn what God had really said in His word in regard to slavery. The church could not contain the multitudes that thronged, night after night, to listen to a simple, plain exhibition of God's own truth, in regard to the guilt of this iniquity in His sight, and the inevitable consequences of it, if persisted in. ^

IV PREFACE.

Undoubtedly, Old Testament truth is a strange thing to many ; they are not aware how it burns, how it cuts, how it probes and pierces, as a discemer and reprover of sin, and how the mighty Hebrew prophets, ever living, ever new, seem to hold a grand inquest over our organic iniquities, and to walk among us with the writer's inkhorn, and the measuring plumb-lines of the Mosaic laws. The people, generally, are glad to witness these operations. The people love to hear God's word demonstrating and rebuking the iniquity of slavery ; and it is only crooked politicians, and political Christians, and preachers standing in awe of them, who cry out against it, and call it political preaching. This vulgar watchword is losing all its terrors, and begins to be, as it deserves to be, thoroughly despised.

The people prefer freedom, and are glad to find that God's word not only does not sanction slavery, but is against it, wholly and utterly, from beginning to end. But those men who prefer slavery along with freedom, slavery for others and freedom for themselves, and whose plan is to combine both, and give them the same sanction and the same rights everywhere, would bo glad to find some support of slavery, some shield for it in God's word ; and, if any one could demonstrate from God's word that slavery is right, he might do that from the pulpit ad infinitum, and they would not regard it at all as political preaching, but as simply the genuine meekness of wisdom pivnching peace by Jesus Christ, and the very perfection of gospel conservatism. There are many who, without the least wincing, will hear you preach about the slavery

PREFACE. V

of sin, but not one word will they endure about the sin of slavery.

I have been delighted to find a great enthusiasm among young men, for the freedom of God's word in dealing with the iniquity of oppression. They feel that it is no necessary part of religion to put down, or conceal, or crucify, our native impulses in behalf of freedom, or our native sense of justice against cruelty and wrong. They have but little sympathy with those who make political or commercial expediency, in regard to great questions of right or wrong, the Urim and Thummim of their divinest consultations.

The series of discourses began with an examination of the dreadful influence and consequences of unrighteous law, as illustrated in the history of the Hebrews, under the light of the prophets. Now, in consenting to throw several of them into a volume, I have taken the liberty of breaking them up into twenty chapters, both for the sake of introducing some details into the argument, which could not be condensed in speaking within compass of the time given to a sermon, and also to relieve and sustain the attention of the reader, and give greater prominence to the principles developed in the discussion.

I am more than ever convinced of the right and duty of every preacher of God's word to preach on this subject, as contained in His word, and to show the people how He regards it ; and the providence that directs and overrules all things is manifesting more clearly than ever the wickedness of the attempt to shield slavery from the reprobation of God's word, by denouncing every mention of it as

VI PREFACE.

political preaching. That outcry is move likely to cover up a jealousy against religion in politics, than any real hatred of politics in religion. To the law and to the testimony : should not the people seek unto their God ? And if their leaders speak not according to His word, it is because there is no light in them.

The volume is affectionately and respectfully dedicated to the young men of my own congregation, and to all lovers of freedom and truth in all places.

Contents

Page ClIAP. I. — SHALL THE THRONE OF INIQUITY HAVE FELLOWSHIP WITH

THEE, WHICH FKAMETH MISCHIEF WITH A LAW ?

Chap. II. — the prevalence and power of unrighteous law, and

Chapter I

SHALL THE THRONE OP INIQUITY HAVE FELLOWSHIP WITH THEE, WHICH FRAMETH MISCHIEF BY A LAW?

P8A.LM XCiv. 20.

There are plenty of answers to this question in the Word of God ; but the most startling and overwhelming is the answer by divine judgment, in the destruction of the thrones and kingdoms of Israel and Judah. We have but to trace a few steps in the Jewish history, and we find lessons that, for the closeness of their application to our own period, and people, and country, and the terror of their warning against our own legalized and cherished sins, are absolutely appalling. Would to God we might lay them to our heart !

The time from the beginning of the Hebrew kingdom under Saul to its division under Rehoboam, the son and successor of Solomon, was not much longer than that which has elapsed from our revolutionary war to the present day. And the progress of the nation had been about as rapid and mighty as our own. What a prodigious difference between the state of the people and the extent of the kingdom at the beginning of Saul's reign, and the close of Solomon's ! 1*

In this brief time, cities rose as by enchantment, and territories were added, and brought under the one great confederation, till the fame of its prosperity, and the fear of its greatness, filled the world.

But in the midst of all this, the causes of ruin grew on with frightful rapidity ; luxury, aristocracy, grandeur, riches, pride, family-wealth and rivalry, insolence, commerce with Egypt and with foreign countries, bringing in alliances, intermarriages, the imitation of foreign vices and customs, and at length the open, undisguised, and heaven-defying establishment of idolatry for Solomon's pagan concubines and wives. The wisest of kings had grown the maddest in his rebellion against God, and his iniquitous example before his people. By his own vices he had conducted the country from the climax of power and greatness to the verge of ruin. In the greatest apparent grandeur of its prosperity, none but God knew the precipice on which the kingdom tottered, nor how soon its proud union was to be dissolved forever. There it was, strong and mighty in appearance, yet instantly to be riven, as when the frost splits a rock, or one last blow upon the wedge rives the oak asunder. The blow descends from God, the kingdoms separate, and thenceforward, what a career of warning to all the nations of the earth is theirs ?

The lead in wickedness was assumed by Israel under Jeroboam, as one of the separate and rival kingdoms : the first great national step in open sin was his. By what he considered a master-stroke of policy, but which proved his ruin, he set up the two golden calves, to serve for the uses of his kingdom, in place of the worship of the Temple at Jerusalem. The one he inaugurated at Bethel, and the other at Dan, and proclaimed to all the people, with the semblance of the kindest consideration for their wants and fatherly compassion for their burdens, it is too much for you, too irksome and too great a task, to go up to Jerusalem at the times appointed in the service of the temple ; these will answer for your gods, ye people ! These shall be to you the representatives of the gods that brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and here shall you rejoice in your worship ! The appointed ministers of God's worship, who would not subscribe to these decrees of the king and his government, were ejected from their offices, and in their places Jeroboam appointed an idolatrous priesthood from the riff-raff of the people ; whoever was willing so accept a devil's chaplaincy under his government, him he set to work in the ministration of oblations and of incense before those golden calves ; and so the people, the king, and Baal, were all served and glorified, flattered and cajoled, at one and the same time.

And so the thing became a stately sin, a systematized organic iniquity ; and the people went to worship before one or the other of these calves, even unto Dan. The topography of these places is the best illustration of the passage, and for want of the consideration of that matter, the force of the history is nearly lost. One of them, Dan, was at the extreme north ; the other, Bethel, at the extreme south, on the borders of Jeroboam's kingdom. The whole of Jeroboam's kingdom lay north of Judah. If he had set up both calves at Dan, it would have been too far north to attract his subjects of the south ; if he had set them up in Bethel only, the people of the north coming down so far as that for worship, would have been tempted to continue their journey a few miles further to Jerusalem itself. But up at Dan he caught in the snare all the population of the north, and down at Bethel all the inhabitants of the south. And by setting at the heart of Bethel the whole circle of his priesthood, and making the ceremonies of. the worship there both gorgeous and attractive, he caught as in a great Vanity Fair nearly all unstable persons, whose consciences might have startled them on a pilgrimage for the Holy City, to engage in the worship of the Temple itself. Passing through Bethel, they would stop to gaze at the golden calves, they would enter into conversation with the worshipers there, they would be met by temptations and seductive bribes, and in the state of moral debauchery to which the conduct of Solomon had reduced the nation, it was not difficult to make any, except the most truly conscientious of the people, believe that they could serve both God and Mammon.

Jeroboam must have sounded the heart of the nation, and must have known that he could calculate on the idolatrous disposition of the people, otherwise he never would have dared to propose such a measure. But he had watched the passions of men, and he knew well how deeply the examples, and the idolatrous shrines, made so familiar by Solomon, had corrupted the people, and how far he could himself rely upon them. Besides, he is supposed to have set guards on the borders of the kingdom between Judah and Israel, at the feast times especially, to prevent his subjects from crossing the line, and going up to the Temple in obedience to the law of God. And so, between allurements and force, between his lies and compulsion, between the power of law, unrighteous, and- the examples of the great multitude obeying it as righteous, he succeeded in quieting the most troubled and audacious consciences, and induced his people to believe that inasmuch as this worship at the altars of the calves was commanded by law, and they were bound to obey magistrates, and not to set themselves against the government, it might and must be considered a permitted substitute for the Temple worship. Moreover, the payment of tithes seems to have been done away, when Jeroboam turned the Levites out of office, and put in a set of his own priests to do his bidding; and that was an exemption which would please the covetous multitude greatly. The king well knew how to make up for the loss ; he could extort from them in other ways double what the willing support of the true worship of God would have cost them.

Now this whole mighty revolution, first, in the establishment of Jeroboam's authority and kingdom as foreign and separate from that of Rehoboani, and second, in the impious establishment of a new and separate religious worship, the commixture of idolatry and the divine law under one and the same form, would necessitate new laws, and would bring about, in many points, inevitably, a conflict between the statutes of the kingdom and the statutes of God. But the people chose to obey man rather than God. They agreed, as men do now, when they blasphemously set the laws of a human government higher than God's law, that the law of the land, right or wrong, must be obeyed at all hazards, and that to teach otherwise is to teach rebellion. They said that the statutes of the king and his government must be obeyed, and "they willingly walked after the commandment," as the accusation is brought against them for doing this by the prophet Hosea ; so that the characteristic description of this monarch, up to the time of Omri and Ahab, who each set new iniquities a going, and framed laws still more infamous, was that of "Jeroboam the son of Nebat, wno made Israel to sin."

The obedience of the people to such a monarch and government in such commanded sins, was rebellion against God ; and rebellion against the monarch and government would have been obedience to God. And God by his prophets plainly denounced vengeance against the nation, for thus preferring to obey man's laws rather than God's. Your very blessings shall be blasted, said he, and you shall be swept with desolation, delivered up to captivity and the sword, because you have kept the statutes of Omri, and all the works of the house of Ahab, and ye walk in their counsels. Ye have turned judgment into gall, and the fruit of righteousness into hemlock.

Through the impious policy of Jeroboam, and the consent and submission of the people, it thus came about that the separation of the ten tribes swas as the building of a vast reservoir of iniquity in Israel ; a fountain of atheism and licentiousness, of which the people continued drinking to the latest generations, forsaking God, and the cold-flowing waters of his sanctuary, and hewing them out cisterns of Satan, and springs of the vilest abominations.

Chapter II

TiiE PREVALENCE AND POWER OF UNRIGHTEOUS LAW, AND THE RUIN OP THE NATION IN CONSEQUENCE OF OBEYING IT.

Here we have come upon a marked and mighty era. The separation of this great Hebrew kingdom into two, and the establishment of these regal and governmental dynasties and machineries, not only constituted the most important revolution since the deluge, and the greatest event of all the history of empire up to that time, but it had consequences, and it set in motion tides of, principle and courses of action, that made a stratum in men's morals and character; it was a dispensation, a period of social and governmental theory of life, as distinct as any period in all the formations of geology. The periods of granite primordial foundation, and of fossiliferous rocky strata, and of alluvial deposits, are not more strongly marked and demonstrated, or more important as demonstrations in themselves of the mighty changes in the globe. The thing not justifies only, but commands our careful study ; it ought not to be passed over with a superficial view.

For here began the wide, germinating, sweeping habit of rebellion against God under cover of obedience to man ; that plague in the body politic and social, worse than the yellow fever, worse than any pestilence ever begotten or active among men, of a supreme submissive regard to the laws of a human government rather than the laws of God. It is in this respect a most prominent and awful era ; a period marked, as you will see, all along the record of the history, down to the time when the kingdom was swept from existence, as the 'period of the sins of Jeroboam, the so?i of Nebat, who made Israel to sin. The first book of Kings ends, as its course has often been signalized, with that stigma, that scar, that trench of God's wrath, and of moral infamy in the cause and subject of it.

Ahab and Jezebel were the next grand incarnation of such wickedness. And as upon the surface of the globe, when a roaring cataract or deluge has passed over it, there are left huge mountain cliffs, frowning over the country in front, and behind them a sloping trail of land where the soil has gathered and held on, indicating which way the convulsion and the torrent rolled forward, so stand these monarch forms, rent, blasted, blackened, the leaders of the people's apostacy from God, and the landmarks of His vengeance. And from one to the other, it seems as if you could still hear the thunders roar and reverberate. Look back to the 21st chapter of the first book of Kings, and mark the interview between Elijah the prophet and Ahab in Naboth's vineyard, and you find in the person and character of that monarch the defiant pinnacle on which God's wrathful lightning descended. " Thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the Lord ; and I will make thine house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, for the provocation wherewith thou hast provoked me to anger, and made Israel to sin." And look back still further to the 16th chapter, 25th and 26th verses, to the person and character of Omri, who wrought the same evil in the sight of the Lord, and did worse than all before him, for he walked in all the ways of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and in his sin, wherewith he made Israel to sin. And then, before him, look back to Baasha, and before him, to Nadab, the immediate successor and son of Jeroboam. The voice of every peal of thunder, and the sentence trenched by every flash of lightning, is the same dreadful accusation, Thou hast walked in tbe way of Jeroboam, and hast

MADE MY PEOPLE ISRAEL TO SIN.

And how was it ? What does this repeated phrase in the indictment cover up? How could the man carry all Israel with him in his wickedness ? Mere example could not have done it ; permission could not have done it ; bribes could not have done it, nor persuasion, nor the inherent temptations of devil-worship. No ! But in league with all these influences, law could do it ; the State power could forcibly persuade, and if the people would yield up their conscience, the government would find no opposition to their most impious enactments. We learn the secret from Micah and Hosea, two of the prophets cotemporar y in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. "For the statutes of Omri are kept, and all the works of the house of Ahabj and ye walk in their counsels, that I should make thee a desolation, and the inhabitants thereof a hissing." "The princes of Judah were like than that remove the bound; therefore will I pour out my. wrath upon them like water. Ephraim is oppressed and broken in judgment, because he

WILLINGLY WALKED AFTER THE COMMANDMENT."

It was thus that the king, the princes, the government, by their unconstitutional and infamous legislation, by new enactments, framed on purpose, made Israel to sin. You gather this demonstration from the history and the prophets together ; and this is one of the points in which you see the usefulness and importance of a close comparative study of the prophets by the history, and the history by the prophets.

It was a usurpation, under color of lata, thus forced upon the people, and the experiment being once successful, then, in giving up their conscience, and renouncing their allegiance to God, they surrendered all their liberties. They should have resisted at the outset ; but there are never wanting those, who affirm that law is to be obeyed at all hazards, the moment it is law, no matter of what character. So,

20 I ; ( I I> A G A I X S T SLAVERY.

by the power and majesty of unrighteous law, which is as when the starry angel, first in heaven'3 ranks, brightest of the sons of the morning, drew after him the third part of heaven in his rebellion, the king and the government compelled the people. For because of the original majesty, the awfulness, the reverential glory, the transcendant importance of law, even its perversion wears the semblance of its authority ; even bad law, wicked law, accursed law, appears not less than archangel ruined, and men bow down to it, and worship it, and range themselves under its banners, especially when popular and profitable sins are protected by it. Sometimes, under its pressure, men must have the firmness of Abdiel to stand up against it, and nothing but God's word and His righteousness in their hearts will enable them to do it.

This usurpation began in Israel. But you are not to suppose this kind of wickedness was the exclusive property of that kingdom. You might have imagined that after such a divulsion of the tribes, the separation between Israel and Judah would have been so wide, and the enmity so mortal, that certainly the torrent of these devilish iniquities could not have crossed the gulf, and rolled over the house and kingdom of David. But where the heart is not right with God, occasion can easily be found for any wickedness. There was a- mine of Satan's combustibles in the bosom of Judah ready to be fired ; and there was an elective affinity, a power of attraction by evil examples, instead of repulsion by disgust ; there was an electric intelligence and fire of depravity shooting from one side to the other. You have but to run your eye down to the 8th chapter of the 2d Book of Kings, and the 15th, 16th, and 17th verses, and you discover the secret. u In the fifth year of Joram, the son of Ahab, king of Israel, Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, began to reign in Jerusalem. And he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as did the house of Ahab ; for the daughter of Ahab was his ivife, and he did evil in the sight of the Lord." Here you have the bridge, the telegraphic wires, the sympathies. And running on to the 26th verse you have another step, the son of Jehoram reigning in Jerusalem, and his mother's name was Athaliah, the granddaughter of Omri, king of Israel And he walked in the way of the house of Ahab, and did evil in the sight of the Lord, as did the house of Ahab ; for he was the so?i-in-laio of the house of Ahab.

And in 2 Chron. xxii. 8, 4, it is added, that his mother was his counselor to do wickedly ; wherefore he did evil in the sight of the Lord like the house of Ahab ; for they were his counselors after the death of his father to his destruction. The singular intensity of wickedness, the eminent and inveterate profligacy and malignity accumulated in this family, as the force of galvanism collected in a complicated battery, will be better understood, if you consider that Ahab, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, took to wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshiped him. Him, king Ahab, and the murderess his wife, Elijah the Tishbite confronted. These related and confederate families of Israel and Judah threw over their kingdoms a net-work of the same diabolical statutes ; and to these enactments, and the terrors used in their enforcement, the sacred historian refers, when it is recorded, as in 2 Chron. xxi. 11, that the king of Judah caused the inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication, and compelled them into all this wickedness. So this mighty sin passed into vogue in Judah, and from Ahab and Jezebel's families, in connection with Jeroboam's, it ran on, till in the kingdom and house of David itself, Manasseh went far beyond even Ahab in the form, the magnitude, and the monstrousness of his sins. And of him it is said in 2 Chron. xxxiii. 9, 10, that Manasseh made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to err, and to do worse than the heathen, whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel. And the Lord spake to Manasseh and to his people, but they would not hearken. And in 2 Kings xxi. 9, 11, God declares that Manasseh seduced the jieople to do more abominable and horrible wickedness than even the Amorites, and made Judah to sin with his idols, besides filling Jerusalem from one end to the other with innocent b]

Chapter III

COMPULSION BY THE GOVERNMENT, ENACTING WICKED LAWS TO DRIVE THE PEOPLE INTO SIN; AND THE DAMNATION OF SUCH GUILT. THE INIQUITY OP PREACHERS DEFENDING OR EXCUS- ING IT.

Now in this account we have the fact of a compulsion laid by the government upon the people, to drive them into sin, to constrain them, and force obedience to the statutes of an idol worship. But this compulsion was no other than the choice of obeying other statutes than God's. Being compelled to disobey either God's law or the king's, they chose to disobey God's, alleging, perhaps, that whatever laws the government enacted, they were bound to obey, God's law to the contrary notwithstanding. Sometimes the princes took the lead, and proposed the enactment of mischief by a law, according to the references in Hos. v. 10, and xiii. 2, the princes removing the bound, and enacting that those who sacrificed shall kiss the calves. So in 2 Chron. xxiv. 17, 18, after the death of Jehoiada the priest, we have the princes coming, and making obeisance to the king, and the king hearkening to them, and all together leaving the house of the Lord God of their fathers, and serving groves and idols. All this information is concentrated finally in the 17th chapter of the 2d book of Kings, where the whole transcript of the people's wickedness, and of God's final wrath upon them for it, is so solemnly summed up. For they walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the Lord cast out from before the children of Israel, and in the statutes of the kings of Israel, which they had made. Also Judah kept not the commandments of the Lord their God, but walked in the statutes of Israel which they made ; walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did, and departed not from them.

Now it is impossible to find any thing in all history more terribly instructive than all this. It shows* the mutual responsibility of government and people, both to one another and to God, and the consequences of disregarding it. It shows the manner in which the responsibility and guilt of government and people may get inextricably involved and entangled, and unless there be in the people a conscience of resistance in behalf of God, they go to ruin together. It shows that wicked laws are no authentication or excuse of personal wickedness, nor any authorization of disobedience to God. They are not to be obeyed, but on the contrary denounced and rejected ; and only by being thus faithful to God, can a people keep their freedom. And while it shows that a people are on the high road to ruin, who will suffer and obey wicked statutes, it also shows the terrific responsibility and wickedness of those who concoct and endeavor to enforce such statutes, and who set the example of such iniquity. If there be a lower deep in hell than any other deep, such men will, beyond all question, occupy it, along with those who have put out or concealed the light of God's word, and have put up false lights to lure men upon the breakers. It is such as these, whom God gives judicially over to a reprobate mind, to be filled with all unrighteousness ; who, knowing the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

Nothing can go beyond this wickedness; it is a fountain sin, a germinating sin, an accumulating and multiplying sin, a sin that causes and compels others to sin, a sin that enlarges from generation to generation all the way into the eternal world. If it brings a million under its power this year, it may bring two millions the next ; this generation ten, the next generation twenty. Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way ; and all the people shall say, Amen ! But he that strikes out the eyesight of a whole nation, that obliterates the law of justice and humanity, and sets in its place statutes of injustice and inhumanity, and thus compels a nation so blinded, to wander in iniquity, what shall be said of such a monster ? What curse is heavy enough for such an incarnation of malignity, or what curse can measure in retribution the dreadful consequences of such crime ?