order to teach mankind to be governed by
principle and to disregard permissions, then the omission could not have
arisen from a love of brevity. Were it not, indeed, just as easy to give
a precept forbidding, as to give one permitting, the existence of
slavery? Again, if a great and world-devouring sin, such as the
abolitionists hold slavery to be, has been left unnoticed, lest its
condemnation should impliedly sanction other sins, then is it not worse
than puerile to suppose that the omission was made for the sake of
brevity, or to teach mankind that the permissions of the Most High may
in certain cases be treated with contempt, may be set at naught, and
despised as utterly inconsistent, as diametrically opposed to the
principles and purity of his law?

If the abolitionist is so completely lost in his attempts to meet the
argument from the silence of Scripture, he finds it still more difficult
to cope with that from its express precepts and injunctions. _Servants,
obey your masters_, is one of the most explicit precepts of the New
Testament. This precept just as certainly exists therein as does the
great principle of love itself. "The obedience thus enjoined is placed,"
says Dr. Wayland, "not on the ground of duty to man, but on the ground
of duty to God." We accept the interpretation. It cannot for one moment
disturb the line of our argument. It is merely the shadow of an attempt
at an evasion. All the obligations of the New Testament are, indeed,
placed on the same high ground. The obligation of the slave to obey his
master could be placed upon no higher, no more sacred, no more
impregnable, ground.

Rights and obligations are correlative. That is, every right implies a
corresponding obligation, and every obligation implies a corresponding
right. Hence, as the slave is under an obligation to obey the master, so
the master has a right to his obedience. Nor is this obligation
weakened, or this right disturbed, by the fact that the first is imposed
by the word of God, and rests on the immutable ground of duty to him.
If, by the divine law, the obedience of the slave is due to the master,
then, by the same law, the master has a right to his obedience.

Most assuredly, the master is neither "a robber," nor "a murderer," nor
"a manstealer," merely because he claims of the slave that which God
himself commands the slave to render. All these epithets may be, as they
have been, hurled at us by the abolitionist. His anathem