he eye of a servant, that
servant immediately became _free_, for such an act of violence evidently
showed he was unfit to possess the power of a master, and therefore that
power was taken from him. All servants enjoyed the rest of the Sabbath,
and partook of the privileges and festivities of the three great Jewish
Feasts; and if a servant died under the infliction of chastisement, his
master was surely to be punished. As a tooth for a tooth and life for
life was the Jewish law, of course he was punished with death. I know
that great stress has been laid upon the following verse:
"Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished,
for he is his money."

Slaveholders, and the apologists of slavery, have eagerly seized upon
this little passage of Scripture, and held it up as the masters' Magna
Charta, by which they were licensed by God himself to commit the
greatest outrages upon the defenceless victims of their oppression. But,
my friends, was it designed to be so? If our Heavenly Father would
protect by law the _eye_ and the _tooth_ of a Hebrew servant, can we for
a moment believe that he would abandon that same servant to the brutal
rage of a master who would destroy even life itself? Let us then examine
this passage with the help of the context. In the 18th and 19th verses
we have a law which was made for _freemen_ who strove together. Here we
find, that if one man smote another, so that he died not, but only kept
his bed from being disabled, and he rose again and walked abroad upon
his staff, then _he_ was to be paid for the loss of his time, and all
the expenses of his sickness were to be borne by the man who smote him.
The freeman's time was _his own_, and therefore he was to be remunerated
for the loss of it. But _not_ so with the _servant_, whose time was, as
it were, _the money of his master_, because he had already paid for it:
If he continued a day or two after being struck, to keep his bed in
consequence of any wound received, then his lost time was _not_ to be
paid for, because it was _not his own_, but his master's, who had
already paid him for it. The loss of his time was the _master's loss_,
and _not_ the servant's. This explanation is confirmed by the fact, that
the Hebrew word translated continue, means "to stand still;" _i.e._, to
be unable to go out about his master's work.

Here then we find this stronghold of slavery completely demolished.
Instead of its being a license to infli