this communication, to give you my
reasons for denying that you are at liberty to plead in behalf of
slavery, the example of any compulsory servitude in which Jews may have
held foreigners. My promise is now fulfilled, and I trust that the
reasons are such as not to admit of an answer.

Driven, as you now are, from every other conceivable defence of
slaveholding it may be (though I must hope better things of you), that
you will fly to the ground taken by the wicked multitude--that there is
authority in the laws of man for being a slaveholder. But, not only is
the sin of your holding slaves undiminished by the consideration, that
they are held under human laws; but, your claiming to hold them under
such laws, makes you guilty of an additional sin, which, if measured by
its pernicious consequences to others, is by no means inconsiderable.
The truth of these two positions is apparent from the following
considerations.

1st. There is no valid excuse to be found, either in man's laws or any
where else, for transgressing God's laws. Whatever may be thought, or
said to the contrary, it still remains, and for ever will remain true,
that under all circumstances, "sin is the transgression of the (Divine)
law."

2d. In every instance in which a commandment of God is transgressed,
under the cover and plea of a human law, purporting to permit what that
commandment forbids, there is, in proportion to the authority and
influence of the transgressor, a fresh sanction imparted to that law;
and consequently, in the same proportion the public habit of setting up
a false standard of right and wrong is promoted. It is this habit--this
habit of graduating our morality by the laws of the land in which we
live--that makes the "mischief framed by a law" so much more pernicious
than that which has no law to countenance it, and to commend it to the
conscience. Who is unaware, that nothing tends so powerfully to keep the
traffic in strong drink from becoming universally odious, as the fact,
that this body and soul destroying business finds a sanction in human
laws? Who has not seen the man, authorized by these laws to distribute
the poison amongst his tippling neighbors, proof against all the shafts
of truth, under the self-pleasing and self-satisfying consideration,
that his is a lawful business.

This habit of setting up man's law, instead of God's law, as the
standard of conduct, is strikingly manifested in the fact, that on the
ground, t