their treatment of their servants.... Believers will act in conformity
with the Gospel in this. And the result of such obedience, if it could
become general, would be, that first the evils of slavery, and then
slavery itself, would pass away naturally, and as healthfully as
children cease to be minors.

_Prof. Hodge's Commentary._

[D] See 2 Brevard's Digest, 229; Prince's Digest, 446.

[E] Civil Code, Art. 35.

[F] Job ch. 32, v. 17-20, Barnes's translation.

[G] It is sometimes said that the crime of adultery is neither
perpetrated nor encouraged by the breaking up of slave-families,
because, generally, the connections formed are not truly marriage, not
being solemnized according to forms of law, and hence the marriage
obligation _cannot_ be violated.

It may be replied, if this be so, it presents slavery in a worse light
still, for it encourages and perpetuates a state of universal
concubinage. But it is _not_ so. When a slave takes a companion, and
they consent and engage to live together as husband and wife until
death, and they thus declare their intentions before others, whether any
legal form is gone through or not, they are as truly "no more twain but
one flesh" as were Adam and Eve. It has been thus decided by our courts
in regard to white persons.

[H] Rev. R. I. Breckenridge, D. D.

[I] Mehemet Ali.

[J] The publishers understand the writer to mean, that the working of
them without wages,--the withholding that which is just and
equal,--should be immediately and universally abandoned, and that
emancipation should be granted as speedily as the slaves can be prepared
to use and enjoy their freedom. The right should be acknowledged, and
the needful means for its security immediately used. The writer does not
say, that holding men in bondage is not generally sinful, nor that all
sin should not be immediately repented of and forsaken, but only that
there may be exceptions where for a time, and under very peculiar
circumstances, it may not be sinful, and cannot consistently with the
greatest good be abandoned, without some previous means of preparation.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Three Prize Essays on American Slavery, by
R. B. Thurston and A.C. Baldwin and Timothy Williston

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