5th.  Another reason for believing that the slavery modification of servitude should not be classed with the confessedly proper relations with which you class it, is the conclusive one, that it interferes with, and tends to subvert, and does actually subvert, these relations.  The Apostles prescribe duties, which are necessary to sustain these relations, and make them fruitful sources of happiness to the parties to them.  Among these duties are the following:  “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord”—­“Children, obey your parents”—­“Husbands, dwell with them” (your wives).  But slavery, where it does not make obedience to these commands utterly impossible, conditions it on the permission of usurpers, who have presumed to step between the laws of God and those on whom they are intended to bear.  Slavery, not the law of God, practically determines whether husbands shall dwell with their wives:  and an amount of anguish, which God alone can compute, testifies that slavery has thus determined, times without number, that husbands shall not dwell with their wives.  A distinguished gentleman, who has been much at the South, is spending a little time in my family.  He told me but this day, that he had frequently known the air filled with shrieks of anguish for a whole mile around the spot, where, under the hammer of the auctioneer, the members of a family were undergoing an endless separation from each other.  It was but last week, that a poor fugitive reached a family, in which God’s commands, “Hide the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth”—­“Hide not thyself from thy own flesh”—­are not a dead letter.  The heaviest burden of his heart is, that he has not seen his wife for five years, and does not expect to see her again:  his master, in Virginia, having sold him to a Georgian, and his wife to an inhabitant of the District of Columbia.  Whilst the law of God requires wives to “submit themselves to their husbands, as it is fit in the Lord;” the law of slavery commands them, under the most terrific penalties, to submit to every conceivable form of violence, and the most loathsome pollution, “as it is fit” in the eyes of slaveholders—­no small proportion of whom are, as a most natural fruit of slavery, abandoned to brutality and lust.  The laws of South Carolina and Georgia make it an offence punishable with death, “if any slave shall presume to strike a white person.”  By the laws of Maryland and Kentucky, it is enacted “if any negro, mulatto, or Indian, bond or free, shall, at any time, lift his or her hand in opposition to any person, not being a negro or Indian, he or she shall, in the first-mentioned State, suffer the penalty of cropped ears; and, in the other, thirty-nine lashes on his or her bare back, well laid on, by order of the justice.”  In Louisiana there is a law—­for the enactment of which, slavery is, of course, responsible—­in these words:  “Free people of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves