estic grew out of a
distinction guarded with great care throughout the Mosaic system. To
permit this to be rendered void, would have been to divide the system
against itself. This God would not tolerate. Nor, on the other hand,
would he permit the master, to throw off the responsibility of
instructing her children, nor the care and expense of their helpless
infancy and rearing. He was bound to support and educate them, and all
her children born afterwards during her term of service. The whole
arrangement beautifully illustrates that wise and tender regard for the
interests of all the parties concerned, which arrays the Mosaic system
in robes of glory, and causes it to shine as the sun in the kingdom of
our Father. By this law, the children had secured to them a mother's
tender care. If the husband loved his wife and children, he could compel
his master to keep him, whether he had any occasion for his services or
not, and with such remuneration as was provided by the statute. If he
did not love them, to be rid of him was a blessing; and in that case,
the regulation would prove an act for the relief of an afflicted family.
It is not by any means to be inferred, that the release of the servant
from his service in the seventh year, either absolved him from the
obligations of marriage, or shut him out from the society of his family.
He could doubtless procure a service at no great distance from them, and
might often do it, to get higher wages, or a kind of employment better
suited to his taste and skill, or because his master might not have
sufficient work to occupy him. Whether he lived near his family, or at a
considerable distance, the great number of days on which the law
released servants from regular labor, would enable him to spend much
more time with them than can be spent by most of the agents of our
benevolent societies with _their_ families, or by many merchants,
editors, artists, &c., whose daily business is in New York, while their
families reside from ten to one hundred miles in the country.

We conclude this Inquiry by touching briefly upon an objection, which,
though not formally stated, has been already set aside by the whole
tenor of the foregoing argument. It is this,--

_"The slavery of the Canaanites by the Israelites, was appointed by God
as a commutation of the punishment of death denounced against them for
their sins."_--If the absurdity of a sentence consigning persons to
_death_, and at the sam