authorizing slavery and legislating for it. Read the enactments on the subject.
See Exodus xxi. Chap., beginning at the 2d verse.
“If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve thee; and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him.
“If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne him children, the wife and children shall be her master’s; he shall go out by himself.
“And if the servant shall say I love my master, my wife and my children; I will not go out free: then his master shall bring him unto the Judges; he shall also bring him unto the door, or the door posts; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.”
This was the law concerning Hebrew servants, and in this law we see a feature which has ever been regarded as the most abhorrent in slavery, and that is, that husbands could be torn from their wives, and fathers from their children; and that hard condition could only be avoided by another condition equally hard, which was that the husband and father became a slave for life, or until after the year of Jubilee, after his six years of servitude had expired.
But the children of Israel were freely allowed to purchase slaves of the heathen around them, and these slaves were to serve them during their natural lives; and they were allowed to take as many slaves in war as they were able, except in those cases in which the whole nation was devoted to the sword by the command of God.
Slavery, then, in all its features, was in full existence among the Jews, and sanctioned by the divine law. And by that law a man and all his family could be sold for debt, and had to serve until the year of Jubilee; when a general emancipation took place among Jewish slaves and debtors, and all things became as they were: but as this occurred only every fifty years, thousands must have been born and died in a state of slavery even of the Jewish nation.
But it may be said that this was under the law, and not in accordance with the Gospel dispensation, which proclaims “liberty to the captive,” &c.
Let us then go to the New Testament and see what it says—for under that dispensation we now are—and that, and that alone, is the law rule of our conduct; and most cheerfully and willingly do I commit the whole burden of this question, with all its issues, on this ground.
There never was, since the world began, a truer and firmer friend to man, and civil and religious liberty, than St. Paul, after his conversion to Christianity, and yet he taught any thing but the doctrine of abolitionism; it received neither encouragement nor sanction from him, but the contrary. But let him speak for himself. Read first Corinthians, vii. chap., 20th and 21st verses:
“Let every man abide in the calling wherein he was called. Art thou called, (converted,) being a servant, care not for it; but if thou mayest be free, use it rather.”
