36. "If thy brother be
waxen poor thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a STRANGER or a
sojourner, that he may live with thee, take thou no usury of him or
increase, but fear thy God." Could this same stranger be taken by one
that feared his God, and held as a slave, and robbed of time, earnings,
and all his rights?

VII. Servants were placed upon a level with their masters in all civil
and religious rights. Num. xv. 15, 16, 29; ix. 14. Deut. i. 16, 17. Lev.
xxiv. 22.

III.--DID PERSONS BECOME SERVANTS VOLUNTARILY, OR WERE THEY MADE
SERVANTS AGAINST THEIR WILLS?

We argue that they became servants _of their own accord_.

I. Because to become a servant in the family of an Israelite, was to
abjure idolatry, to enter into covenant with God[A], be circumcised in
token of it, bound to keep the Sabbath, the Passover, the Pentecost, and
the Feast of Tabernacles, and to receive instruction in the moral and
ceremonial law. Were the servants _forced_ through all these processes?
Was the renunciation of idolatry _compulsory_? Were they _dragged_ into
covenant with God? Were they seized and circumcised by _main strength_?
Were they _compelled_ mechanically to chew, and swallow the flesh of the
Paschal lamb, while they abhorred the institution, spurned the laws that
enjoined it, detested its author and its executors, and instead of
rejoicing in the deliverance which it commemorated, bewailed it as a
calamity, and cursed the day of its consummation? Were they _driven_
from all parts of the land three times in the year to the annual
festivals? Were they drugged with instruction which they nauseated?
Goaded through a round of ceremonies, to them senseless and disgusting
mummeries; and drilled into the tactics of a creed rank with loathed
abominations? We repeat it, to became a _servant_, was to become a
_proselyte_. And did God authorize his people to make proselytes, at the
point of the sword? by the terror of pains and penalties? by converting
men into _merchandise_? Were _proselyte and chattel_ synonymes, in the
Divine vocabulary? Must a man be sunk to a _thing_ before taken into
covenant with God? Was this the stipulated condition of adoption, and
the sole passport to the communion of the saints?

[Footnote A: Maimonides, who wrote in Egypt about seven hundred years
ago, a contemporary with Jarchi, and who stands with him at the head of
Jewish writers, gives the following testimony on this point: "Whether a
servant b