Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Hopkins

Hopkins opens by borrowing the slaveholders own shield: Scripture. Then he twists it into a blade. By conceding that God "saw fit" to permit slavery in ancient Israel, he sidesteps the easy rebuttal that abolitionists simply dont understand the Bible. The move is strategic: accept the premise, then interrogate the leap from a bounded, historically specific allowance to a roaming permission slip for cruelty in the present.

The key phrase is "wise reasons" - a pious placeholder that quietly drains the pro-slavery argument of certainty. If the reasons are Gods and not ours, human imitation becomes presumptuous, even blasphemous. Hopkins is not primarily debating whether the Bible contains slavery; he is attacking the moral logic of treating biblical description as moral authorization. The question he asks is meant to sound ridiculous, because it is: if you can justify enslaving your neighbor by citing Israel, why not justify murder and theft by the same method? He yokes slavery to "kill" and "take possession of their estates", forcing readers to see enslavement as part of a larger portfolio of domination.

Context matters: late colonial and early American New England Calvinism prized moral reasoning under divine sovereignty. Hopkins, linked to the New Divinity and the abolitionist currents that would swell after the Revolution, is speaking into a culture that had begun calling itself a republic of liberty while profiting from unfreedom. His subtext is a challenge to Christian complicity: if your theology can make peace with enslaving "fellow-men", it can make peace with anything.