is milder, being allowed to be
correct, would only prove, that God's abhorrence of Southern bondage as
much exceeds that which he expressed of Egyptian bondage, as the one
system is more full than the other of oppression and cruelty.

We learn from the Bible, that it was not because of the _abuses_ of the
Egyptian system of bondage, but, because of its sinful nature, that God
required its abolition. He did not command Pharaoh to cease from the
_abuses_ of the system, and to correct his administration of it, but to
cease from the system itself. "I have heard," says God, "the groaning of
the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage;"--not whom
the Egyptians, availing themselves of their absolute power, compel to
make brick without straw, and seek to waste and exterminate by the
murder of their infant children;--but simply "whom the Egyptians keep in
bondage." These hardships and outrages were but the leaves and branches.
The root of the abomination was the bondage itself, the assertion of
absolute and slaveholding power by "a new king over Egypt, which knew
not Joseph." In the next verse God says: "I will rid you"--not only from
the burdens and abuses, as you would say, of bondage,--but "out of their
(the Egyptians) bondage" itself--out of the relation in which the
Egyptians oppressively and wickedly hold you.

God sends many messages to Pharaoh. In no one of them does He reprove
him for the abuses of the relation into which he had forced the Jews. In
no one of them is he called on to correct the evils which had grown out
of that relation. But, in every one, does God go to the root of the
evil, and command Pharaoh, "let my people go"--"let my people go, that
they may serve me." The abolitionist is reproachfully called an
"ultraist" and "an immediatist." It seems that God was both, when
dealing with this royal slaveholder:--for He commanded Pharaoh, not to
mitigate the bondage of the Israelites, but to deliver them from it--and
that, too, immediately. The system of slavery is wicked in God's sight,
and, therefore, did He require of Pharaoh its immediate abandonment. The
phrase, "let my people go, that they may serve me," shows most
strikingly one feature of resemblance between Egyptian and American
slavery. Egyptian slavery did not allow its subjects to serve God,
neither does American. The Egyptian master stood between his slave and
their God: and how strikingly and awfully true is it, that the American
mas