asking for a new rendering. And now the anti-slavery men are driving hard
at the same thing. (Laughter.) Sir, shall we permit our people everywhere
to have their confidence in this noble translation undermined and
destroyed by the isms and whims of every or any man in our pulpits? I
affirm, whatever be our perfect liberty of examination into God's meaning
in all the light of the original languages, that there is a respect due to
this received version, and that great caution should be used, lest we
teach the people to doubt its true rendering from the original word of
God. I protest, sir, against having a Doctor-of-Divinity _priest_, Hebrew
or Greek, to tell the people what God has spoken on the subject of
slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin
priest,--I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,--I would as soon go to
Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,--I would as soon have the Pope at once in
his fallible infallibility,--as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery
Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible
rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet
produced this Bible, in its plain unanswerable authority, for the relation
of master and slave, but the anti-slavery man ran away into the fog of
_his_ Hebrew or Greek, (laughter,) or he jabbered the nonsense that God
permitted the _sin_ of slaveholding among the Jews, but that he don't do
it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it
right, they know, then and now. Having thus taken the last puff of wind
out of the sails of the anti-slavery phantom ship, turn to the
twenty-first chapter of Exodus, vs. 2-5. God, in these verses, gave the
Israelites his command how they should buy and hold the Hebrew
servant,--how, under certain conditions, he went free,--how, under other
circumstances, he might be held to service forever, with his wife and her
children. There it is. Don't run into the Hebrew. (Laughter.)

But what have we here?--vs. 7-11:--"And if a man sell his daughter to be a