Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: their masters; and were the relation ordained of God, the unconcern would, surely, be both philosophical and sinless. God cannot approve of a system of servitude, in which the master is guilty of assuming absolute power—of assuming God's place and relation towards his Cellow-men. Were the master, in every case, a wise and good man—as wise and good as is consistent with this wicked and heaven-daring assumption on his part—the condition of the slave would it is true, be far more tolerable, than it now is. But even then, we should protest as strongly as ever against slavery; for it would still be guilty of its essential wickedness of robbing a man of his right to himself, and of robbing God of His right to him, and of putting these stolen rights into the hand of an erring mortal. Nay, if angels were constituted slaveholders, our objection to the relation would remain undiminished ; since there would still be the same robbery of which we now complain. But you will say, that I have overlooked the servitude in which the Jews held strangers and foreigners; and that it is on this, more than any other, that you rely for your justification of slavery. I will say nothing now of this servitude ; but before I close this communication, I will give my reasons for believing, that whatever was its nature, even if it were compulsory, it cannot be fairly pleaded in justification of slavery. After you shall have allowed, as you will allow, that slavery, as it exists, is at war with God, you will be likely to say, that the fault is not in the theory of it; but in the practical departure from that theory; that it is not the system, but the practice under it, which is at war with God. Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it. But to indulge you, we will loo...