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. 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 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. The great number of days on which the law released servants
from regular labor, would enable him to spend much more time with his
family, 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 same
time to perpetual _slavery_, did not sufficiently laugh at itself, it
would be small self-denial, in a case so tempting, to make up the
deficiency by a general contribution. For, _be it remembered_, only
_one_ statute was ever given respecting the disposition to be made of
the inhabitants of Canaan. If the sentence of death was pronounced
against them, and afterwards _commuted_, when? where? by whom? and in
what terms was the commutation, and where is it recorded? Grant, for
argument's sake, that all the Canaanites were sentenced to un