UT TO DEATH[A]." Ex. xxi. 16.

[Footnote A: A writer in the American Quarterly Review, commenting on
this passage, thus blasphemes. "On this passage an impression has gone
abroad that slave-owners are necessarily menstealers; how hastily, any
one will perceive who consults the passage in its connection. Being
found in the chapter which authorizes this species of property among the
Hebrews, it must of course relate to _its full protection from the
danger of being enticed away from its rightful owner."_--Am. Quart.
Review for June, 1833. Article "Negro slavery."]

The oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, and the wonders wrought for
their deliverance, proclaim the reason for such a law at such a time.
They had just been emancipated. The tragedies of their house of bondage
were the realities of yesterday, and peopled their memories with
thronging horrors. They had just witnessed God's testimony against
oppression in the plagues of Egypt--the burning blains on man and beast;
the dust quickened into loathsome life, and swarming upon every living
thing; the streets, the palaces, the temples, and every house heaped up
with the carcases of things abhorred; the kneading troughs and ovens,
the secret chambers and the couches, reeking and dissolving with the
putrid death; the pestilence walking in darkness at noonday, the
devouring locusts, and hail mingled with fire, the first-born
death-struck, and the waters blood; and last of all, that dread high
hand and stretched-out arm, that whelmed the monarch and his hosts, and
strewed their corpses on the sea. All this their eyes had looked upon;
earth's proudest city, wasted and thunder-scarred, lying in desolation,
and the doom of oppressors traced on her ruins in the hand-writing of
God, glaring in letters of fire mingled with blood--a blackened monument
of wrath to the uttermost against the stealers of men. No wonder that
God, in a code of laws prepared for such a people at such a time, should
uprear on its foreground a blazing beacon to flash terror on
slaveholders. "_He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be
found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death."_ Ex. xxi. 16. Deut.
xxiv, 7[A]. God's cherubim and flaming sword guarding the entrance to
the Mosaic system!

[Footnote A: Jarchi, the most eminent of the Jewish Commentators, who
wrote seven hundred years ago, in his comment on this stealing and
making merchandize of men, gives the meaning thus:--"Using a man a