anti-slavery men into whose hands my essays chanced to fall, have
frankly confessed to me, that in their Bible reading, they had
overlooked the plain teaching of the Holy Ghost, by taking what they
read in the Bible about masters and servants, to have reference to hired
servants and their employers.

You ask me for my opinion about the emancipation movement in the State
of Kentucky. I hold that the emancipation of hereditary slaves by a
State is not commanded, or in any way required by the Bible. The Old
Testament and the New, sanction slavery, but under no circumstances
enjoin its abolition, even among saints. Now, if religion, or the duty
we owe our Creator, was inconsistent with slavery, then this could not
be so. If pure religion, therefore, did not require its abolition under
the law of Moses, nor in the church of Christ--we may safely infer, that
our political, moral and social relations do not require it in a State;
unless a State requires higher moral, social, and religious qualities in
its subjects, than a gospel church.

Masters have been left by the Almighty, both under the patriarchal,
legal, and gospel dispensations, to their individual discretion on the
subject of emancipation.

The principle of justice inculcated by the Bible, refuses to sanction,
it seems to me, such an outrage upon the rights of men, as would be
perpetrated by any sovereign State, which, to-day, makes a thing to be
property, and to-morrow, takes it from the lawful owners, _without
political necessity or pecuniary compensation_. Now, if it be morally
right for a majority of the people (and that majority possibly a meagre
one, who may not own a slave) to take, without necessity or
compensation, the property in slaves held by a minority, (and that
minority a large one,) then it would be morally right for a majority,
without property, to take any thing else that may be lawfully owned by
the prudent and care-taking portion of the citizens.

As for intelligent philanthropy, it shudders at the infliction of
certain ruin upon a whole race of helpless beings. If emancipation by
law is philanthropic in Kentucky, it is, for the same reasons,
philanthropic in every State in the Union. But nothing in the future is
more certain, than that such emancipation would begin to work the
degradation and final ruin of the slave race, from the day of its
consummation.

Break the master's sympathy, which is inseparably connected with his
property right i