very.

"Nothing," says Dr. Spring, "is more plain to my mind than that the
word of God recognizes the relation between master and slave as one of
the established institutions of the age; and, that while it addresses
slaves as Christian men, and Christian men as slaveholders, it so
modifies the whole system of slavery as to give a death-blow to all
its abuses, and breathes such a spirit, that in the same proportion in
which its principles are imbibed, the yoke of bondage will melt away,
all its abuses cease, and every form of human oppression will be
unknown. The Bible is no agitator. It changes human governments only
as it changes the human character. It aims at transforming the
dispositions and hearts of men, and diffusing through all human
institutions the supreme love of God, and the impartial love of man."

Now, this either means that the Bible requires that all institutions
be adjusted and harmonized with the moral law--the law of love--or it
means nothing. For, we maintain, that slavery is _per se_ wrong, where
the enslaver has no direct warrant from heaven, or the enslaved has
not forfeited liberty by crime on principles of recognized and
universal equity; and the whole Bible forbidding wrong must be held as
forbidding slavery, or any arbitrary and inhuman tamperings with the
inalienable rights of a fellow-creature.

If slavery is not a wrong in itself, irrespective of what are called
its abuses, then all that is essential in it may be retained from age
to age; and all the amelioration which the Christian law superinduces
may be such as to consist with the violation of the natural
prerogatives of humanity, and with the denial to man of the essential
and dearest privileges of social and domestic life, with the denial of
the rights of conscience too. For slavery, as distinguished from
service by contract, is this thing and no other:--it is labor
undefined, unrewarded, on the condition of being used as vendible
property, and every independent right of the slave, as an
intellectual and moral being, is ignored. By practical indulgence
such rights may be sometimes conceded. But the slave-law ceases as
such when these are recognized.

Now, we hold it a libel on the Bible to affirm that it sanctions such
slavery. We must warn you of the fallacy that lies in this distinction
of the thing itself, and its abuse. What is called the abuse here is
the essence and the characteristic of the subject. Service as well as
sla