acknowledged to have been abuses, then the way will be prepared to try the institution in its principles by the standard of revelation. If it cannot endure this test, it must be classed with abuses, not with normal institutions. We will consider, then,

I. The Attitude of the Bible in regard to Servitude.

Here it would be pertinent to remark that, if the American slaveholder will appeal to Hebrew servitude, he must, in accordance with the principles of the gospel, take for his rule the laws prescribed for the treatment of Hebrew servants. The Mosaic economy made a sharp distinction between the covenant people of God and those of every other nation, conferring upon the former, in many ways, prerogatives over the latter. In accordance with this principle, the rights of Hebrew servants were carefully guarded, and they could not be reduced, at least without their own consent, to perpetual servitude.' But the gospel is the full realization of the idea that God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”2 It teaches us to regard the whole human family as one brotherhood, for whom the one atonement of the gospel has been provided, and who are entitled to be dealt with according to the one law of Christian love. The whole spirit of Christianity is beautifully embodied in our Lord's parable of the good Samaritan, in answer to the question: Who is my neighbor?" Certainly the treatment which servants are entitled to receive under the Christian dispensation, from masters calling themselves Christians, ought not to be more severe than that prescribed for Hebrew servants from their Hebrew masters.3 But on this point we will not insist. With respect to the scriptural treatment of servitude, we shall maintain the following positions:

1. Hebrew servitude did not have its origin in any divine

See this whole subject discussed in the January number of the Bibliotheca for the present year, under the head of Saalschütz on Hebrew Servitude. 2 Acts xvii. 26.

3 See our remarks on this point in the Article above referred to, pp. 71, 72

ordinance, and it is not sanctioned, in the Old Testament, in any other sense than that of being tolerated and regulated, as are polygamy and the power of divorce. The first part of this proposition needs no lengthened discussion. It will not be pretended by any well-informed man that servitude origi nated with Moses or with Abraham. When Abraham bought servants with money, he acted in accordance with a usage which he found already in existence. The origin of slavery is lost in the mists of antiquity. To say that it had its beginning in a divine ordinance, as did the normal institutions of marriage and the sabbath, is to affirm what cannot be maintained by a particle of evidence. No. Slavery, like polygamy, had its origin in human selfishness. Very likely it originated in the land of Nod, in the family of Cain, where we first hear of a man that had two wives.'

But no matter, say the abettors of slavery, it is sanctioned in the Old Testament, and that is enough. We are not disposed to quibble about a word. We should prefer to restrict the term sanction to institutions positively ordained and commanded by God. But if men will apply it to Hebrew servitude, - a widely different thing from American slavery, as we shall show in the proper place, then we go behind the sound of the word, and inquire what it must mean in the present case. It can mean only that he suffered it and regulated it by specific enactments. No man in his senses will seriously pretend that he commanded or even encouraged it. If a practice, whether in its nature salutary

1 Gen. iv. 19.

We say "seriously pretend," for Dr. Ross, in the record he has given us of his speech on the subject of slavery before the General Assembly at New York, after a solemn protest "against having a Doctor-of Divinity priest, Hebrew or Greek, to tell the people what God has spoken on the subject of slavery or any other subject" (pp. 59, 60), has made out a sham argument, apparently for the benefit of the people "up there in the gallery," whom he addresses on p. 58. It turns on the use of the English auxiliary, shall, in Lev. xxv. 44-46:"Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids," etc.; on which he comments thus: "Sir, I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command his people to buy slaves of the heathen round about them," etc. (p. 63). No wonder that the Doctor has a horror of

or hurtful, was to be allowed under the old economy, of course it must be regulated. This is precisely what is done. in regard to divorce and polygamy. In Deut. xxiv. 1—4 we read: "When a man hath taken a wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favor in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her, then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house. And when she is departed out of his house, she may go and be another man's wife. And if the latter husband hate her, and write her a bill of divorcement, and giveth it into her hand, and sendeth her out of his house; or if the latter husband die, which took her to be his wife; her former husband which sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after that she is defiled," etc. That the words rendered "some uncleanness," or, as they are more literally given in the margin, “matter of nakedness," do not refer to fornication or adultery, but (as in Deut. xxiii. 14, where the same words occur in the original), to something about her person offensive to her husband, in respect to which he was to be the sole judge, is manifest from the fact that the Mosaic law punished with death adultery or concealed defilement before the consummation of the marriage relation; 2 but especially from the fact that,

Hebrew, when any person, north or south of Mason and Dixon's line, who was moderately versed in the language, could tell him that, so far as the grammatical form is concerned, the word rendered "shall ye buy" might be equally well rendered may ye buy, and that always in the Hebrew the choice between the two modes of rendering is to be determined by the context. But since the author cries out: "Don't run into the Hebrew" (p. 61), we will test his argument by 'King James's English Bible," though we have always understood that this too was the work of "Doctor-of-Divinity priests in Hebrew and Greek." In Deut. xxi. 10-14, we read: "When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thy hands, and thou hast taken them captive, and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; then thou shalt bring her home to thine house, and she shall shave her head," etc., "and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife," etc. Dr. Ross knows, because he is not destitute of common sense, that this is simply permission; and so it is in the other case.

Heb. Here and in Deut. xxiii. 15 (Eng. version, xxiii. 14),

nakedness of a matter.

2 Deut. xxii. 13 - 21.

while our Lord allows fornication as a valid ground of divorce, he disallows the Mosaic precept as not in harmony with the true idea of marriage, but given because of the hardness of men's hearts. Here, then, we have very specific regulations in respect to a custom which, our Lord himself being judge, was an abuse fraught with evil to society. One may say, if he will insist on the term, that the Mosaic law sanctioned the right of divorce, that is, divorce according to the arbitrary judgment of the husband, — but when we go behind the sound of the word to its sense, we find it to mean that God suffered it by reason of the hardness of men's hearts.

Equally explicit is the regulation concerning polygamy or rather bigamy. "If a man have two wives, one beloved and another hated, and they have borne him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the first-born son be hers that was hated; then it shall be when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved first-born, before the son of the hated which is indeed the first-born. But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated, for the first-born, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath; for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the first-born is his." See how exactly the form of the precept agrees with those concerning servitude: "If a man have two wives;" "If thou buy an Hebrew servant;"3"If thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee."4 There is another precept, equally explicit, given in the same hypothetical form: "If he take him another wife," in addition to the maid-servant

2

1 Between the rabbinical schools of Hillel and Shammai, was a dispute concerning the right of divorce; the former maintaining, from Deut. xxiv. 1, that it might take place according to the arbitrary decision of the husband, the latter restricting it to the case of adultery. In his answer, our Lord virtually concedes the true interpretation of the Mosaic precept, for substance at least, to the school of Hillel, but gives the right of the question to the school of Shammai, on the ground that they held the true view of the marriage relation, as originally ordained of God. "He answered them that this was done by Moses on account of their hardness and sinfulness, as a lesser of evils, and belonged to that dispensation which rapeιoñλdev.” — Alford on Matt. xix. 5.

2 Deut. xxi. 15 – 17. VOL. XIX. No. 75.

3 Ex. xxi. 2.
49

4 Lev. xxv. 13.

66

whom he has betrothed, "her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage shall he not diminish.1 "Her duty of marriage" (Heb.) is her right to conjugal cohabitation with him. There, sir," exclaims Dr. Ross, after quoting the above passage with its context, "God sanctioned the Israelite father in selling his daughter, and the Israelite man to buy her, into slavery and into polygamy. And it was then right because God made it right." 2 Undoubtedly it was right in the sense that God allowed it. But he allowed it as an abuse of the primitive institution of marriage; and the ground of his allowance was the hardness of men's hearts. This is all the sanction that can be claimed for it. Dr. Ross says: "I never yet produced this Bible in its plain, unanswerable authority for the relation of master and slave, but the anti-slavery man ran away into the fog of his Hebrew or Greek, or he jabbered the nonsense that God permitted the sin of slave-holding among the Jews, but that he don't do it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it right, they know, then and now."3 The jabbering of nonsense, which he imputes to anti-slavery men, is something of his own manufacture. There may be, in the world, for anything that we can tell, men foolish and illogical enough to affirm that God "permitted sin," among the Jews. But this is not the position of anti-slavery men. They affirm that God suffered, for the hardness of men's hearts, practices which were, in their nature, abuses fraught with evil; and that he did so, Dr. Ross must admit, or deny the Saviour's authority, and hold, moreover, not only slavery but polygamy and the arbitrary power of divorce, to be customs in themselves good, and in harmony with man's nature and relations. So far as the Old Testament is concerned, God sanctioned polygamy as fully as he did slavery; and if the former is admitted to have been a great abuse, why not the latter? By Dr. Ross's concession, the Jewish law of polygamy was never repealed, and "Christ and his apostles do not declare polygamy to be a sin." 4 True, he introduces from the New 8 Ib. p. 60. + Ib. p. 45.

1 Ex. xxi. 10.

Ross on Slavery, p. 62.