1st.  My strongest reason is, that the great and comprehensive principles, and the whole genius and spirit of Christianity, are opposed to slavery.

2d.  In the case of Pharoah and his Jewish slaves, God manifested his abhorrence of the relation of slavery.  The fact that the slavery in this case was political, instead of domestic, and, therefore, of a milder type than that of Southern slavery, does not forbid my reasoning from the one form to the other.  Indeed, if I may receive your declaration on this point, for the truth, I need not admit that the type of the slavery in question is milder than that of Southern slavery;—­for you say, that “their (the Jews) condition was that of the most abject bondage or slavery.”  But the supposition that it is milder, being allowed to be correct, would only prove, that God’s abhorrence of Southern bondage as much exceeds that which he expressed of Egyptian bondage, as the one system is more full than the other of oppression and cruelty.

We learn from the Bible, that it was not because of the abuses of the Egyptian system of bondage, but, because of its sinful nature, that God required its abolition.  He did not command Pharaoh to cease from the abuses of the system, and to correct his administration of it, but to cease from the system itself.  “I have heard,” says God, “the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage;”—­not whom the Egyptians, availing themselves of their absolute power, compel to make brick without straw, and seek to waste and exterminate by the murder of their infant children;—­but simply “whom the Egyptians keep in bondage.”  These hardships and outrages were but the leaves and branches.  The root of the abomination was the bondage itself, the assertion of absolute and slaveholding power by “a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.”  In the next verse God says:  “I will rid you”—­not only from the burdens and abuses, as you would say, of bondage,—­but “out of their (the Egyptians) bondage” itself—­out of the relation in which the Egyptians oppressively and wickedly hold you.

God sends many messages to Pharaoh.  In no one of them does He reprove him for the abuses of the relation into which he had forced the Jews.  In no one of them is he called on to correct the evils which had grown out of that relation.  But, in every one, does God go to the root of the evil, and command Pharaoh, “let my people go”—­“let my people go, that they may serve me.”  The abolitionist is reproachfully called an “ultraist” and “an immediatist.”  It seems that God was both, when dealing with this royal slaveholder:—­for He commanded Pharaoh, not to mitigate the bondage of the Israelites, but to deliver them from it—­and that, too, immediately.  The system of slavery is wicked in God’s sight, and, therefore, did He require of Pharaoh its immediate abandonment.  The phrase, “let my people go, that they may serve me,” shows most strikingly one feature