are handcuffed to keep them from running away, or beating their drivers’ brains out.  Was this the Mosaic plan, or an improvement left for the wisdom of Solomon?  The usage, doubtless, claims a paternity not less venerable and biblical!  Perhaps they were lashed upon camels, and transported in bundles, or caged up, and trundled on wheels to and fro, and while at the Holy City, “lodged in jail for safe keeping,” religions services extra being appointed, and special “ORAL instruction” for their benefit.  But meanwhile, what became of the sturdy handmaids left at home?  What hindered them from marching off in a body?  Perhaps the Israelitish matrons stood sentry in rotation round the kitchens, while the young ladies scoured the country, as mounted rangers, to pick up stragglers by day, and patrolled the streets as city guards, keeping a sharp look-out at night.

4. Their continuance in Jewish families depended upon the performance of various rites and ceremonies necessarily VOLUNTARY.

Suppose a servant from the heathen should, upon entering a Jewish family, refuse circumcision; the question whether he shall remain a servant, is in his own hands.  If a slave, how simple the process of emancipation!  His refusal did the job.  Or, suppose that, at any time, he should refuse to attend the tri-yearly feasts, or should eat leavened bread during the Passover, or compound the ingredients of the anointing oil, he is “cut off from the people;” excommunicated.

5. We infer the voluntariness of the servants of the Patriarchs from the impossibility of their being held against their wills. The servants of Abraham are an illustration.  At one time he had three hundred and eighteen young men “born in his house,” and probably many more not born in his house.  The whole number of his servants of all ages, was probably MANY THOUSANDS.  Doubtless, Abraham was a man of a million, and Sarah too, a right notable housekeeper; still, it is not easy to conceive how they contrived to hold so many thousand servants against their wills, unless the patriarch and his wife took turns in performing the Hibernian exploit of surrounding them!  The neighboring tribes, instead of constituting a picket guard to hem in his servants, would have been far more likely to sweep them and him into captivity, as they did Lot and his household.  Besides, Abraham had neither “Constitution,” nor “compact,” nor statutes, nor judicial officers to send back his fugitives, nor a truckling police to pounce upon panic-stricken women, nor gentleman-kidnappers, suing for patronage, volunteering to howl on the track, boasting their blood-hound scent, and pledging their “honor” to hunt down and “deliver up,” provided they had a description of the “flesh marks,” and were stimulated in their chivalry by pieces of silver.  Abraham seems also to have been sadly deficient in all the auxiliaries of family government, such as stocks, hand cuffs, foot-chains, yokes, gags, and thumb-screws.  His destitution of these patriarchal indispensables is the more afflicting, when we consider his faithful discharge of responsibilities to his household, though so deplorably destitute of the needful aids.