sold as a slave to an Egyptian, by the Ishmaelites, and from other sources. But the Hebrews came into Egypt, not as slaves, but as citizens, in full fellowship and equality with the lords of Egypt, in virtue of their relation to Joseph, the savior of Egypt in the days of the famine. We do not find that the Scriptures have blamed the Egyptians because they held the Hebrews in a condition of vassalage, but because they abused them, and would not let them go, when God called for them by the ministration of Moses. We see no parallel, therefore, between the condition of the Hebrews in Egypt, and the slavery of the negro race, as ordained from the lips of Noah, and from Mount Sinai.
Egypt was the house in which God saw fit to place the seed of Abraham, till such time as the nations of the land of Canaan should become ripe for destruction, when he intended to take the Hebrews away from the Egyptians, as he had promised Abraham; Gen. XV, 13, 14. The sojourn of the people of Israel in the country of Egypt, was not, therefore, a state of bond slavery, in which the Egyptians claimed and held them as their property, but only as a nation of vassals, providentially placed among them, who, on account of their rapid increase in the country oppressed them grievously, in order to keep them from becoming numerous, as appears from Exod. i, 9-11. Had they not been a body politic in Egypt, they could not have acquired wealth, so as to have left the country possessed of great substance, besides that which the Egyptians, in their fear, bestowed upon them, when they went out of the country, toward
