very may be abused. Everything may be abused. But, the claim of the
slaveholder is itself the abuse of the God-ordained relation of master
and servant. Can men be regarded as a chattel?--that is the
question--and so regarded without his consent, and his family treated
as such permanently, without his consent, or even with it?

It comes of this bad interpretation of the Christian law, that in the
nineteenth century slavery still remains,--is cherished. It is not
that the principles of Christianity do not tend to extinguish it. But
men, forcing their false interpretation on the Scriptures, plead their
authority for a system or institution, to which their whole spirit is
opposed,--and which confesses its unscriptural character by keeping
out Christian light, and forbidding the Scriptures with the slave.

To talk of the spirit of Christianity, in distinction from its express
or implied law against slavery, is as if one would trust for the
extinction of sin against the sixth or seventh commands of the
decalogue, by general inculcation of meekness or purity, without
denouncing murder and defining it, or defining between allowed and
disallowed affinity in the marriage law. We may if we do not proscribe
theft, and bring the positive law of God to bear against it, and bring
a law into harmony with the divine, be understood, while we talk only
of the abuses of property, as warning rather against spending stolen
goods in a bad way, than against theft itself? But the design of the
moral law is to define rights, as well as to govern the use of them;
and it requires that not only the tempers of men, but the institutions
of society, be adjusted by the law of equity and charity. It forbids
not only the abuse of just power, but all false usurpations of power,
and classes man-stealers and extortioners as murderers.

Who, if he but examines the laws of social and relative duty, as laid
down in the New Testament Epistles, may not discern that the relation
of master and servant is recognized side by side with the permanent
relations of parent and child, husband and wife, which rest on the law
of nature; just because it is not the temporary, unnatural, and
violent relation of slaveholder and slave which is recognized, but
that of master and servant by contract. The other, its very apologists
allow, will pass away; but these duties are enhanced in a law of
permanent application, and rest on natural principles, common to all
times and all na