mpensated for their labor, and in all
respects treated with parental kindness? Neither inadequate
remuneration, physical discomfort, intellectual ignorance, moral
degradation, is essential to the condition of a slave. Yet if all these
ideas are removed from the commonly received notion of slavery, how
little will remain. All the ideas which necessarily enter into the
definition of slavery are deprivation of personal liberty, obligation of
service at the discretion of another, and the transferable character of
the authority and claim of service of the master.[263] The manner in
which men are brought into this condition; its continuance, and the
means adopted for securing the authority and claim of masters, are all
incidental and variable. They may be reasonable or unreasonable, just or
unjust, at different times and places. The question, therefore, which
the abolitionists have undertaken to decide, is not whether the laws
enacted in the slaveholding States in relation to this subject are just
or not, but whether slaveholding, in itself considered, is a crime. The
confusion of these two points has not only brought the abolitionists
into conflict with the Scriptures, but it has, as a necessary
consequence, prevented their gaining the confidence of the North, or
power over the conscience of the South. When Southern Christians are
told that they are guilty of a heinous crime, worse than piracy,
robbery, or murder, because they hold slaves, when they know that Christ
and his apostles never denounced slaveholding as a crime, never called
upon men to renounce it as a condition of admission into the church,
they are shocked and offended, without being convinced. They are sure
that their accusers can not be wiser or better than their divine Master,
and their consciences are untouched by denunciations which they know,
if well founded, must affect not them only, but the authors of the
religion of the Bible.

The argument from the conduct of Christ and his immediate followers,
seems to us decisive on the point, that slaveholding, in itself
considered, is not a crime. Let us see how this argument has been
answered. In the able "Address to the Presbyterians of Kentucky,
proposing a plan for the instruction and emancipation of their slaves,
by a committee of the Synod of Kentucky," there is a strong and extended
argument to prove the sinfulness of slavery, _as it exists among us_, to
which we have little to object. When, however, the d