press him." Now be it, if
you will, that this statute had reference only to servants who should
escape into the land of Israel from Gentile masters; does it not
indicate a strong bias, in the mind of God, to the side of freedom,
rather than that of slavery? And does it not establish the point, that,
in God's estimation, one man cannot rightfully be deemed the property of
another man? Were it otherwise, would not the Jew have been required to
restore a runaway to his pursuing master, just as he was to restore any
other lost thing which its owner should come in search of? Or, to say
the least, would not the Israelites have been allowed to reduce to
servitude among themselves the escaped slave of a heathen master? But
how unlike all this are the actual requirements of the statute. God's
people must neither deliver up the fugitive nor enslave him themselves;
but allow him to dwell among them as a FREEMAN, just "where it liketh
him best." And, in this connection, how significant a fact is it, that
the Bible nowhere empowers the master from whom a slave had escaped to
pursue, seize, and drag back to bondage that escaped slave.

4. That which constitutes the grand fountain of slavery,--the forcible,
stealthy seizure of a man, for the purpose of holding or selling him as
a slave,--was, under the Mosaic dispensation, punishable with death;
and is, in the New Testament, named in connection with the most heinous
crimes. "He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in
his hand, he shall surely be put to death." What could more forcibly
exhibit God's disapprobation of one of the distinctive features of
slavery,--compulsion? What more impressively show the value that he puts
upon a man's personal independence,--his right to himself? Now if God
doomed that man to die a felon's death who should steal and sell a
fellow man, can it be that he would hold him guiltless who should buy
the stolen man, knowing him to have been stolen? God's people were,
indeed, allowed to "buy bondmen and bondmaids" of the strangers that
dwelt among them, and of the surrounding heathen. But were they ever
allowed to buy persons whom they knew to have been unlawfully obtained,
and offered for sale in manifest opposition to their own wishes? If they
were not,--and, from the statute just referred to, it seems certain that
they were not,--does American slavery derive countenance from that which
was tolerated in the Jewish church and nation? True, th