r age--he guarantees to the foreign slaveholder perfect protection,
while he comes in among the Israelites, for the purpose of dwelling,
and raising and selling slaves, who should be acclimated and accustomed
to the habits and institutions of the country. And worse still for the
sublimated humanity of the present age, God passes with the right to buy
and possess, the right to govern, by a severity which knows no bounds
but the master's discretion. And if worse can be, for the morbid
humanity we censure, he enacts that his own people may sell themselves
and their families for limited periods, with the privilege of extending
the time at the end of the sixth year to the fiftieth year or jubilee,
if they prefer bondage to freedom. Such is the precise character of two
institutions, found in the constitution of the Jewish commonwealth,
emanating directly from Almighty God. For the fifteen hundred years,
during which these laws were in force, God raised up a succession of
prophets to reprove that people for the various sins into which they
fell; yet there is not a reproof uttered against the institution of
_involuntary slavery_, for any species of abuse that ever grew out of
it. A severe judgment is pronounced by Jeremiah, (chapter xxxiv: see
from the 8th to the 22d verse,) for an abuse or violation of the law,
concerning the _voluntary_ servitude of Hebrews; but the prophet pens it
with caution, as if to show that it had no reference to any abuse that
had taken place under the system of _involuntary slavery_, which existed
by law among that people; the sin consisted in making hereditary
bond-men and bond-women of Hebrews, which was positively forbidden by
the law, and not for buying and holding one of another nation in
hereditary bondage, which was as positively allowed by the law. And
really, in view of what is passing in our country, and elsewhere, among
men who profess to reverence the Bible, it would seem that these must be
dreams of a distempered brain, and not the solemn truths of that sacred
book.

Well, I will now proceed to make them good to the letter, see Levit.
xxv: 44, 45, 46; "Thy bond-men and thy bond-maids which thou shalt have,
shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy
bond-men and bond-maids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that
do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that
are with you, which they begat in your land. And they shall be your
pos