In describing the source whence his ministers should expect their support, the Savior furnished a general principle, which has an obvious and powerful bearing on the subject of slavery.  He would have them remember, while exerting themselves for the benefit of their fellow men, that “the laborer is worthy of his hire.”  He has thus united wages with work.  Whoever renders the one is entitled to the other.  And this manifestly according to a mutual understanding and a voluntary arrangement.  For the doctrine that I may force you to work for me for whatever consideration I may please to fix upon, fairly opens the way for the doctrine, that you, in turn, may force me to render you whatever wages you may choose to exact for any services you may see fit to render.  Thus slavery, even as involuntary servitude, is cut up by the root.  Even the Princeton professor seems to regard it as a violation of the principle which unites work with wages.

The apostle James applies this principle to the claims of manual laborers—­of those who hold the plough and thrust in the sickle.  He calls the rich lordlings who exacted sweat and withheld wages, to “weeping and howling,” assuring them that the complaints of the injured laborer had entered into the ear of the Lord of Hosts, and that, as a result of their oppression, their riches were corrupted, and their garments moth-eaten; their gold and silver were cankered; that the rust of them should be a witness against them, and should eat their flesh as it were fire; that, in one word, they had heaped treasures together for the last days, when “miseries were coming upon them,” the prospect of which might well drench them in tears and fill them with terror.  If these admonitions and warnings were heeded there, would not “the South” break forth into “weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth?” What else are its rich men about, but withholding by a system of fraud, his wages from the laborer, who is wearing himself out under the impulse of fear, in cultivating their fields and producing their luxuries!  Encouragement and support do they derive from James, in maintaining the “peculiar institution” which they call patriarchal, and boast of as the “corner-stone” of the republic?

In the New Testament, we have, moreover, the general injunction, “Honor all men.”  Under this broad precept, every form of humanity may justly claim protection and respect.  The invasion of any human right must do dishonor to humanity, and be a transgression of this command.  How then, in the light of such obligations, must slavery be regarded?  Are those men honored, who are rudely excluded from a place in the human family, and shut up to the deep degradation and nameless horrors of chattelship? Can they be held as slaves, and at the same time be honored as men?