time and earnings, and even the power to “own any thing, or acquire any thing?” a “quart of corn a-day,” the legal allowance of food[C]! their only clothing for one half the year, “one shirt and one pair of pantaloons[D]!” two hours and a half only, for rest and refreshment in the twenty-four[E]!—­their dwellings, hovels, unfit for human residence, with but one apartment, where both sexes and all ages herd promiscuously at night, like the beasts of the field.  Add to this, the ignorance, and degradation; the daily sundering of kindred, the revelries of lust, the lacerations and baptisms of blood, sanctioned by law, and patronized by public sentiment.  What was the bondage of Egypt when compared with this?  And yet for her oppression of the poor, God smote her with plagues, and trampled her as the mire, till she passed away in his wrath, and the place that knew her in her pride, knew her no more.  Ah!  “I have seen the afflictions of my people, and I have heard their groanings, and am come down to deliver them.”  HE DID COME, and Egypt sank a ruinous heap, and her blood closed over her.  If such was God’s retribution for the oppression of heathen Egypt, of how much sorer punishment shall a Christian people be thought worthy, who cloak with religion a system, in comparison with which the bondage of Egypt dwindles to nothing?  Let those believe who can that God commissioned his people to rob others of all their rights, while he denounced against them wrath to the uttermost, if they practised the far lighter oppression of Egypt—­which robbed it’s victims of only the least and cheapest of their rights, and left the females unplundered even of these.  What!  Is God divided against himself?  When He had just turned Egypt into a funeral pile; while his curse yet blazed upon her unburied dead, and his bolts still hissed amidst her slaughter, and the smoke of her torment went upwards because she had “ROBBED THE POOR,” did He license the victims of robbery to rob the poor of ALL?  As Lawgiver did he create a system tenfold more grinding than that for which he had just hurled Pharaoh headlong, and overwhelmed his princes, and his hosts, till “hell was moved to meet them at their coming?”

[Footnote A:  The Egyptians evidently had domestic servants living in their families; these may have been slaves; allusion is made to them in Ex. ix. 14, 20, 21.]

[Footnote B:  The land of Goshen was a large tract of country, east of the Pelusian arm of the Nile, and between it and the head of the Red Sea, and the lower border of Palestine.  The probable centre of that portion, occupied by the Israelites, could hardly have been less than sixty miles from the city.  The border of Goshen nearest to Egypt must have been many miles distant.  See “Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt,” an able article by Professor Robinson, in the Biblical Repository for October, 1832.]

[Footnote C:  Law of N.C.  Haywood’s Manual 524-5.]