facts demonstrate, in the case of all the offspring of Shem, and Ham, and Japheth. Shem's excellence was not the cause of Shem's blessing; Ham's sin was not the cause of Ham's judgment. It is quite possible to be the occasion of a thing, and yet not to be the cause of that thing. The prediction uttered by Noah was not the ebullition of private passion, but the expression of God's everlasting and immutable purpose. If I were to be injured by a person, and instantly to retaliate in bitter anathemas, it would be sin and revenge, which ought not to be. But when a minister of God, inspired as Noah was, becomes the organ of a prophecy of God, the evidence that he did not express his own private feelings, but was the medium of God's purpose, is found in the fact, that what he prophesied has been literally fulfilled. If this had been personal spite, would God, by the fulfilment of it, have sanctioned it? Surely not. Noah did not give vent to an angry curse, because Ham had sinned; or break forth into a great blessing, because Shem had done good; but he became on this occasion the organ, and no more, of prophecy; the instrument, and no more, of a blessing pronounced upon the one, and of an awful and a solemn judgment inflicted upon the other.

This promise was not so much a personal infliction, meant to light on persons, but a family or a national thing, meant to brand or to beautify great sections of the human race. It was not Canaan personal that he cursed; it was not Shem personal that he blessed; but their descendants. Thus, when we read in the Scripture, "Esau have I hated, Jacob have I loved," we see it was not the individual Esau and the individual Jacob that is spoken of, but the family or the state of which they were the founders and the great forefathers. Even so this great curse or punishment here denounced by Noah, lighted on a race.

But it is the characteristic of all great judgments, that they are transmitted only when the son imitates the depravity of the father, and becomes the conductor of the curse that was pronounced upon the family; but the instant that the son or the descendant dissents from the family in its corrupt features, and develops new and happier ones, the transmission of the curse is arrested, and the individual who is the exception in the family becomes an inheritor of the blessing. An evidence of this is found in the fact that Melchisedec was a descendant of Canaan and of Ham, yet Melchisedec was king of righteousness and king of peace, blessed of God, and a type of the great Messiah. Abimelech was a descendant of Ham or of Canaan, as we find in the 20th chapter of Genesis; yet we read of him that the integrity of his heart in the sight of God was great, and was recognized and blest of God. Thus we find, that though the curse be denounced upon a family, because of some first founder's sin, as soon as a member of that family emerges by purity of character, by loftiness of purpose, by regeneration of heart, from the circle in which the rest are, as far as he is concerned the curse is arrested in its transmission, and he becomes an inheritor of the blessing which was pronounced upon Shem. Thus, the judgment of Noah was rather a prophecy relating to a race, than a curse or a blessing pronounced upon individuals. The difference between

the two is

marked very a prophecy is what we know will be; a curse or a blessing is what we wish to be. What we know will be is one thing, what we wish to be is a very distinct and a very different thing. A bad man wishes ill to the human race; a prophet predicts judgments upon the guilty. Here we have Noah not imprecating a curse to be, but predicting a grand and distinctive condition, domestic, social, and national, that should ultimately be, and has really been. In the very next passage of Genesis, we read of the

divisions of the family of Canaan, of Shem, and Japheth; the sons of Japheth divided the isles around the Mediterranean Sea, including the European nations; the dwellings of Shem were all towards the East, or Asia; the descendants of Ham occupied Africa, and the western parts of Asia, Sidon being their border. Not only does the prophet determine the details of the possessions of the children of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japheth, but he predicts that the descendants of Shem, or Israel, shall have the descendants of Canaan, or his father Ham, for slaves or bondmen. If we take a chart, and trace on it the history of nations, we shall find that the curse denounced upon the family of Ham or Canaan, has been literally and strictly fulfilled. For instance, the Canaanites, as their name testifies, who occupied Canaan before the children of Israel took possession of it, were driven, some from their land, and others were made bondsmen and slaves to Israel. At a subsequent era, in the days of David, the descendants of Ham, or the Canaanites, were swept completely from the land of Canaan. They afterwards settled in Africa; and subsequently they became part and parcel of the Roman empire; and in later times we all know that the descendants of Ham, or the Africans, have been more or less the slaves and the bondsmen of the descendants of Japheth. Let anybody read the history of Africa I am not justifying what is there done, but citing fact - has it not been the nursery of slaves for the nations of Asia and of Europe? And to this day one petty prince in Africa goes to war with another, and the trophies of the conqueror are slaves for the markets of Asia and of America. Slavery is at this moment, notwithstanding the noble sacrifices we have made, as a country, to suppress it, as flourishing and as wide spread as ever it was in the history of unhappy Africa in fact, efforts to arrest it have strangely acted in spreading and supporting it; and

yet it is nothing in the African that makes him essentially a slave. People fancy, that because the African's skull is not rounded so beautifully as ours, that therefore the African's brain is altogether inferior to ours, and his nature very different. Are you aware that the magnificent Christian writer Augustine was an African, it may be a Canaanite? Are you aware that Hannibal, who shook imperial Rome, and made the Cæsars tremble on their thrones, was an African, probably as black as a negro, a descendant of Ham, not from Japheth? And were it not that there is a mysterious judgment resting on the race, that we cannot remove, and that they seem yet unable to overcome, the African, as susceptible of education as we are, would be as signalized by his literature, his skill in war, his success in diplomacy, as any of the descendants of Japheth, or of Shem. At the same time it is worthy of remark, that the very curse of Africa is likely to be the medium of its chiefest blessing; for slavery, which we so deeply deprecate and deplore, is really overruled by God at this moment, to be the means of the Christianization of that country. How often have we tried to ascend the rivers of Africa, and seen our travellers perish midway by the malaria or poisonous air of the climate! And how often have our missionaries travelled in that land, and left their graves the only evidence that they were there! But now the slaves of America are coming into contact with the Christianity of America, and with the Christianity of other nations of the earth; so that at this moment, evil as it is, slavery is overruled to originate black Christian missionaries, to whom the climate offers no obstruction; and who love their countrymen, and go forth to do them good; and thus that which has stained the hands of Europeans with infamy and sin, will be overruled by the God of all grace, to be the enlightenment, and the elevation of a country long sunk in darkness and in the shadow of death. The pre

diction, that the sons of Canaan shall be bondsmen of bondsmen, is expressive of the worst slavery that can be conceived; whenever the Hebrew writers wish to express their sentiments very strongly, they redouble the word and speak thus, "King of kings," which means a very great king; so "Lord of lords;" and in this case, "Bondsmen of bondsmen," denotes the greatest slavery that man can be subjected to. We do not wish to state that this ancient prophecy, which was uttered in the neighborhood of Ararat four thousand years ago, and which is fulfilling, and being fulfilled at the present moment, defying all efforts to diminish it or to avert it, sanctions our support of slavery in the slightest manner; man was never meant to be the property of man, but to be the possession and the property of God only. We are not to take God's prophecy, and go forth and do what our consciences tell us is sin, in order, as we allege, to sanctify that sin by appealing to the predictions of God. A specimen of this I have been amazed at reading in a work published by an illustrious politician of the present day. A very able biography of Lord George Bentinck has been written by a distinguished politician, D'Israeli; and in that biography he makes the extraordinary statement- that it was predicted that the Jews should crucify Christ; and therefore, it is implied, the Jews were not guilty of any sin in doing so. He says, if the crucifiers had not been there, how could the Victim have been immolated? and that the Jews' part in that dread tragedy was as necessary, and therefore as sinless, as was the fact, that the great Victim should die; in other words, he assumes, that we are warranted to attempt to fulfil prophecies, at any sacrifice. Where God prophecies, he will take care of the fulfilment; but where God prescribes to us, it is ours to obey his precepts; and if Mr. D'Israeli, who has so eloquently written upon this subject, had only read the Acts of