forcible.  I cannot refrain, sir, from saying, that you greatly wrong the memory of that blessed Apostle of the Lord Jesus, in construing his writings to authorize such violence upon the persons and rights of men.  And greatly, also, do you wrong the Resolution in question, by your endeavor to array the Bible against it.  The Resolution is right; it is noble—­it denotes in the source whence it emanated, a proper sense of the rights and dignity of man.  It is all the better for being marked with an honorable contempt of wicked and heaven-daring laws.  May I, having the suspicion, or even the certain knowledge, that my fellow man was once held in slavery, and is still legally a slave, seize upon him and reduce him again to slavery?  May I thus deal with a guiltless and unaccused brother?  Human laws may, it is true, bear me out in this man-stealing, which is not less flagrant than that committed on the coast of Africa:—­but, says the Great Law-giver, “The word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day:”—­and, it is a part of this “word,” that “he that stealeth a man shall surely be put to death.”  In that last day, the mayors, recorders, sheriffs, and others, who have been engaged, whether in their official or individual capacity, in slave-catching and man-stealing, will find human laws but a flimsy protection against the wrath of Him, who judges his creatures by his own and not by human laws.  In that “last day,” all who have had a part, and have not repented of it, in the sin of treating man as property; all, I say, whether slaveholders or their official or unofficial assistants, the drivers upon their plantations, or their drivers in the free States—­all, who have been guilty of throwing God’s “image” into the same class with the brutes of the field—­will find, that He is the avenger of his poorest, meanest ones—­and that the crime of transmuting His image into property, is but aggravated by the fact and the plea that it was committed under the sanction of human laws.

But, to return—­wherein does the letter of Paul to Philemon justify slaveholding?  What evidence does it contain, that Philemon was a slaveholder at the time it was written?  He, who had been his slave “in time past,” had, very probably, escaped before Philemon’s conversion to Christ.  This “time past,” may have been a long “time past.”  The word in the original, which is translated “in time past,” does not forbid the supposition.  Indeed, it is the same word, which the Apostle uses in the thirteenth verse of the first chapter of Galatians; and there it denotes a long “time past”—­as much as from fifteen to eighteen years.  Besides, Onesimus’ escape and return both favor the supposition, that it was between the two events that Philemon’s conversion took place.  On the one hand, he fled to escape from the cruelties of an unconverted master; on the other, he was encouraged to follow the Apostle’s advice, by the consideration, that on his return to