invariably represent that people to be slaves who are compelled to submit to oppressive laws. Demagogues, in their addresses to the populace, arouse their passions by appeals to them whether they are willing to be slaves, as they endeavour to enforce upon their minds the importance of a change in the legislative or executive offices of the State, because those in power have been exercising that power oppressively upon the people. In fact, if the lowest, most degrading forms of oppression are intended to be represented by one word, that word is "slavery." When a man is so low as to be called a slave, there is no one word that language can afford to signify a more oppressive state into which he might be placed than that very word SLAVE. There may be terms significant of lower and more debased character, but none that would represent a greater degree of oppression. All nations employ the word which in their language signifies the condition of a slave, to express that sort of degradation which is either the occasion or the effect of oppression. But the idea of an oppressed condition always

enters more or less into the signification of the term whether it be used in a literal or a figurative sense. If there be, therefore, a synonym of the word slavery, it must be the word oppression, for in the common use of language these two words are made to be almost convert

ible terms. A people oppressed without being able to throw off their oppressions are an enslaved people-and no one speaks of an enslaved people without feeling that they are an oppressed people.

If slavery be, then, a condition of oppression, and that nothing is slavery which does not involve the idea of oppression, it would seem to be almost unnecessary to attempt to prove that the Bible does not justify nor even tolerate slavery. But that it may be seen what the Bible does teach on this subject, I shall take up the examination of those passages in the Scriptures which are generally supposed to favour the institution of slavery, and I think I shall prove to every candid mind, that such a construction does injustice to the God of the Bible, and is a perversion

of the language employed by the inspired writers.

There is a difficulty in the mind of every slaveholder in the way of a correct interpretation of the Scriptures, arising from the use of the word servant. When he reads any thing in the Bible about servants he is very apt to have in his mind just such servants as he is accustomed to have about him; and hence he readily arrives at the conclusion that God sanctions slavery. So also as to the words bondmen and bondmaids, even a Northerner is liable to be wrongly biased in his construction, in consequence of his habit of thinking of the Southern slaves as bondmen and bondmaids. Were it not, however, for the existence of slavery within the field of our common observation, we would have other classes than slaves to recognize as servants and as bondmen. Neither servant nor bondman necessarily implies slavery. A slave is both a servant and a bondman, because the master requires the slave to be a servant, and because the law binds him to obedience. But others than slaves may be either servants or bondmen. If I serve

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you, I am your servant. If I bind myself to serve you for certain considerations I am your bondman. In either case I may have redress when you violate your obligations, and therefore I am not a slave.

Now I beg the reader to bear in mind this distinction, and remember that throughout, I am not arguing against the relation of master and servant, nor master and bondman; but against the relation of master and slave. He must not allow himself to evade the true issue, by making that specific which is generic. The specific thing is SLAVERY, and this I have already clearly defined. It is a condition of servitude in which there is oppression without the means of redress or deliverance. If it be said such a condition is to be found elsewhere than in so-called slave States, I admit it, and candidly allow that slavery, if not to the same extent of oppression as in our Southern States, nevertheless to a very guilty extent, whether under that name or not, exists both in England and in the Northern States of this Union. But this fact does not extenuate or palliate a yet greater degree of slavery, such as we wit

ness among the blacks of the South. The oppressive laws of the North, are no justification of greater oppressions at the South. Nevertheless, what I am about to prove is that slavery whether in the less cruel form in which it exists in a free state, or in the more cruel form in which it is to be found in Georgia or Carolina, has no sanction, no justification in the Bible.

And now what does the Bible say about slaves ? Is the reader aware that the word "slave" does not occur either in the Old or New Testament from beginning to end? In King James' translation it is introduced once in the Old Testament, but it is in italics, which indicates that it is merely supplied by the translators, but is not in the original text. It also occurs in the same translation only once in the New Testament; but in the original text it is "bodies," and not "slaves." We have therefore no word either in the Old or New Testament which in the original Hebrew and Greek means slavery. If therefore such a condition be alluded to in the Bible, it must be comprehended in some other term or terms, of which the context