ing at whose right hand he sits. The second person of a Trinity cannot be superior to the angels, because he hath obtained a more excellent name than they, in being called the Son of God.

The Trinitarian then, who makes "Son of God" equivalent to "God the Son," must give up this passage as utterly subversive of his theory, and hand it over to the Arian and Humanitarian. The Arian will interpret "worlds" in the second verse to mean the material universe, and make the Son to have been the instrument in the hands of God in the creation. The Humanitarian will adopt the more common meaning of the word atras, and consider it as signifying periods of time, or states of the world, as we familiarly say, the ancient and the modern world. To him "Son of God" becomes a title of the Messiah, having nothing to do with his nature, and is seized and dilated on by this writer to elevate the origin of Christianity above that of Judaism. He is confirmed in this view by the fact, that the Son is made use of by God, just as the prophets were made the instrument of God in speaking to men. His moral perfections and miraculous powers are no more than represented in the expressions, "who being a reflection of his glory and the image of his substance," since man himself, at his first creation, is said to have been made in the image of God.

Take another example. "But when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law; or in other words, made a man, and a Jew. Now, unless you arbitrarily change the meaning of the word "God" here, from the whole Deity to the first person of a Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity is overthrown from this passage likewise. If it was the Father that sent forth the Son, there might be some color for making Son to mean a part of the Deity, but it was God, the whole Deity, that has sent forth his Son. This of course cannot be the Son, the second person of the Trinity, for he is the Son of only the Father and not of the whole Deity. Son then, so far as this passage is concerned, may be only a title of the Messiah, and have no respect to his nature. Above all does it give no countenance to such an expression as "God the Son." And whenever we meet with the expression "Son of God" applied to Christ, it is an evidence not in favor of the doctrine of the Trinity, but against it. A Son of God CANNOT be a person of a Trinity in God.

The error of inventing such an expression as "God the Son," so unauthorized by the Bible, was made in consequence of mistaking the import of the expression, God the Father. "Father" is an epithet applied to Deity in the Scriptures, on account of his paternal relation to the universe, not to a person of a Trinity, but to the whole Deity, and is not as a correlative to God the Son. Thus in the expression, "Our Father which art in heaven." "One God and Father of all, who is above all." "To us there is but one God, the Father." This would not be true if there were another "God the Son." To make the thing more sure, Jesus Christ appears in the same sentence, not as "God the Son," but simply as "Lord," and that only in a subordinate and instrumental capacity. "One God, of whom are all things, and one Lord, by whom are all things." How he came to be Lord, Peter tells us in the Acts, when he says, "God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ." Now whatever Lordship Jesus Christ exercises, it is not inherent in his nature, but conferred on him by God. His Lordship then is not of a physical character over the universe, but merely of a moral and spiritual nature over the church, or over mankind. Lord Jesus Christ then, an expression so often recurring in the New Testament, is so far from being equivalent to "God the Son," that there is an infinite distance between them. One is what God exalted Jesus of Nazareth to be, and the other is Deity.

The

Take one more example of the strange changes which the Trinitarian hypothesis leads us to make in the meanings of words, as they pass under our eye. In the last conversation of Jesus with his disciples, where he speaks of God as his Father, the mass of people consider him as speaking of the first person of a Trinity, not only without proof, but within sight of proof to the contrary. They read such passages as the following, without perceiving their bearing. "For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world and go to the Father." God and Father are here evidently synonymous, and if so, all idea of a Trinity disappears, for the word, "Father," being coextensive with the word "God," includes the whole Deity. The person here spoken of came from God. Whereas the Trinitarian hypothesis is, that the second person of a Trinity was sent by the first.

Be it understood, that we do not accuse our Episcopalian brethren of worshipping three Gods. We are confident, especially from the observation of the few last years, that Trinitarianism is fast subsiding into the mild form of Sabellianism in all denominations, and the language of Creeds and Liturgies remains to show rather what opinions were than what they are. We close by urging all, who are accustomed to worship "God the Son" and "God the Holy Ghost," to take their Bibles, and search them once more, and see whether they can find any such expressions in them. Then, when they have satisfied themselves on that point, let them examine if the Trinitarian hypothesis can be sustained in any other way, than by continually varying the meaning of the words "God" and "Father," from the whole Deity to a first person of a Trinity.

G. W. B.

SLAVERY.*

IN the October number of the Southern Review, we find an elaborate and powerfully written vindication of slavery on Scriptural and quasi religious grounds. We propose in the following article to present an outline of that argument, and, so far as we may be able, to expose the fallacies on which it is based. We feel ourselves called to do this by the startling and dangerous character of the ground assumed, - a ground on which negro slavery is not excused or palliated, but legitimated as a divine institution, against which it is impious to contend. The argument in brief is this. When Noah recovered from that fit of intoxication, in which Ham, the father of Canaan, had treated him with gross indignity, he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethHe also said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. He said yet farther, God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. These blessings and curses

ren.

The Southern Quarterly Review, October, 1842. Art. 3.- Canaan identified with the Ethiopian.

were prophetically uttered by divine inspiration, and were uttered for all coming times. In fulfilment of these predictions, the posterity of Canaan have always been a servile race. They became the servants of Shem, when the Israelites subdued them, and made them hewers of wood and drawers of water. Of the Canaanites, subdued under Joshua, the modern Africans are the descendants, and lawful heirs of the patriarch's curse, the latter part of which has been and is now being fulfilled in our own land. For Japheth, that is, a nation of European extraction, here dwells in the tents of Shem, that is, where stood the wigwams of the Shem-descended North American Indians; and the said Japheth has been led in the course of divine Providence to transport Canaan, in the person of his sable descendants, to be his servant; nay more, Japheth has "even made Canaan servant of servants, by putting him under the delegated authority of overseers and others." For this office of servants God has fitted the descendants of Canaan both in body and soul. They come ready made slaves from the Creator's hands; and the anatomist and psychologist are constrained to admit that they bear ineffaceable marks of their menial destination. Slavery then is of God; the slave-trade is a pious calling; and anti-slavery is infidelity.

Such is the syllabus of a chain of argument, which covers more than sixty octavo pages. The subordinate heads of proof and illustration we shall cite in the sequel, with such comments as our limits will permit.

The whole argument rests on the postulate, that Noah's blessing and curse, on the occasion above referred to, were prophetical. That he uttered the blessing and the curse, we doubt not; nor do we doubt that the Jews, in their national hatred of the Canaanites, deemed them oracular. But that the Almighty has punished Ham's gross indecency, by imprinting marks of degradation and servitude upon all his son Canaan's posterity till the end of time, or that the Almighty selected a man, just waking from the brutal sleep of intoxication, to utter a prediction the most comprehensive, the farthest reaching of any in the Old Testament, we may emphatically say, Credat JUDÆUS; for surely no sober-minded Christian can seriously breathe such reproach upon the divine justice and purity.

But admitting for the moment that these curses were prophetical, let us see how far they were fulfilled. The writer in the Southern Review introduces his argument with a precious

morceau of philological criticism, in which he claims for Noah's curse a retrospective fulfilment in the names of Canaan and Ham. The verb, from which Canaan is derived, literally denotes to submit one's self, to bend the knee; and by putting these, two definitions together, (though in common cases a word bears but one meaning at a time,) the very convenient signification of self-submissive knee-bender is obtained for Canaan. Now, unless the Almighty had intended that Canaan's posterity should be slaves forever, he would' never have suffered Ham to have imposed upon his son a name, from which a reviewer of the nineteenth century could extract this doubledistilled meaning. We are also told that "the Hebrew verb, from which the noun Ham is derived, signifies generator or parent, also hot, and in the Coptic and other dialects hot and black, or burnt black," from which sentence we may infer, that Hebrew verbs correspond to both nouns and adjectives in other languages, as also that the Coptic is a dialect of the Hebrew, seeing that a Hebrew verb has a signification in the Coptic. The Hebrew verb, from which Ham is derived, means in Hebrew, to be or to become warm. We are not aware that this verb is used in the Coptic, though we find in our lexicons a Coptic adjective, probably of kindred derivation, which means black. But even if Ham does mean warm in the Hebrew, and Chemi black in the Coptic, what has all this to do with the question of negro slavery? No one doubts that Ham's posterity are both warm and black; but they are warmer and blacker in Guinea than in North America. If the name of their progenitor was prophetical, let then his posterity remain where they can best fulfil the prophecy.*

We come now to the alleged fulfilment of Noah's prophecy in the Canaanites, who were subdued under Joshua.

"Ham had more sons than Canaan, the knee-bender, but it does not appear that the duty of being servant of servants was obligatory on any other branch of Ham's family. Some of the other branches became distinguished for their arts and arms, but not the knee-bender, Canaan. We learn from the

* Our author, in defining the name of Ham, heaps upon the poor man's head all the meanings that he can find for the whole circle of cognate words. He makes Ham to denote the parent or generator of the black race of men in hot climates! The whole paragraph is a rare philological curiosity.