and educate them, and all her children born afterwards during her term of service.  The whole arrangement beautifully illustrates that wise and tender regard for the interests of all the parties concerned, which arrays the Mosaic system in robes of glory, and causes it to shine as the sun in the kingdom of our Father.[B] By this law, the children had secured to them a mother’s tender care.  If the husband loved his wife and children, he could compel his master to keep him, whether he had any occasion for his services or not.  If he did not love them, to be rid of him was a blessing; and in that case, the regulation would prove an act for the relief of an afflicted family.  It is not by any means to be inferred, that the release of the servant in the seventh year, either absolved him from the obligations of marriage, or shut him out from the society of his family.  He could doubtless procure a service at no great distance from them, and might often do it, to get higher wages, or a kind of employment better suited to his taste and skill.  The great number of days on which the law released servants from regular labor, would enable him to spend much more time with his family, than can be spent by most of the agents of our benevolent societies with their families, or by many merchants, editors, artists, &c., whose daily business is in New York, while their families reside from ten to one hundred miles in the country.

[Footnote B:  Whoever profoundly studies the Mosaic Institutes with a teachable and reverential spirit, will feel the truth and power of that solemn appeal and interrogatory of God to his people Israel, when he had made an end of setting before them all his statutes and ordinances.  “What nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments SO RIGHTEOUS, as all this law which I set before you this day.”  Deut. iv. 8.]

We conclude this inquiry by touching upon an objection, which, though not formally stated, has been already set aside by the tenor of the foregoing argument.  It is this,—­“The slavery of the Canaanites by the Israelites, was appointed by God as a commutation of the punishment of death denounced against them for their sins."[A] If the absurdity of a sentence consigning persons to death, and at the same time to perpetual slavery, did not sufficiently laugh at itself; it would be small self-denial, in a case so tempting, to make up the deficiency by a general contribution.  Only one statute was ever given respecting the disposition to be made of the inhabitants of Canaan.  If the sentence of death was pronounced against them, and afterwards commuted, when? where? by whom? and in what terms was the commutation, and where is it recorded?  Grant, for argument’s sake, that all the Canaanites were sentenced to unconditional extermination; how can a right to enslave them, be drawn from such premises?  The punishment of death is one of the highest recognitions of man’s moral nature possible.  It proclaims him rational,