writes a letter, gives it to Caesar, and bids him return, staff in hand, to the “corner-stone of our republican institutions.”  Now, what would my Caesar do, who had ever felt a link of slavery’s chain?  As he left his spiritual father, should we be surprised to hear him say to himself, What, return of my own accord to the man who, with the hand of a robber, plucked me from my mother’s bosom!—­for whom I have been so often drenched in the sweat of unrequited toil!—­whose violence so often cut my flesh and scarred my limbs!—­who shut out every ray of light from my mind!—­who laid claim to those honors to which my Creator and Redeemer only are entitled!  And for what am I to return?  To be cursed, and smitten, and sold!  To be tempted, and torn, and destroyed!  I cannot thus throw myself away—­thus rush upon my own destruction.

[Footnote 43:  “Why should I care?”]

Who ever heard of the voluntary return of a fugitive from American oppression?  Do you think that the doctor and his friends could persuade one to carry a letter to the patriarch from whom he had escaped?  And must we believe this of Onesimus?

“Paul sent back Onesimus to Philemon.”  On what occasion?—­“If,” writes the apostle, “he hath wronged thee, or oweth the aught, put that on my account.”  Alive to the claims of duty, Onesimus would “restore” whatever he “had taken away.”  He would honestly pay his debts.  This resolution the apostle warmly approved.  He was ready, at whatever expense, to help his young disciple in carrying it into full effect.  Of this he assured Philemon, in language the most explicit and emphatic.  Here we find one reason for the conduct of Paul in sending Onesimus to Philemon.

If a fugitive slave of the Rev. Dr. Smylie, of Mississippi, should return to him with a letter from a doctor of divinity in New York, containing such an assurance, how would the reverend slaveholder dispose of it?  What, he exclaims, have we here?  “If Cato has not been upright in his pecuniary intercourse with you—­if he owes you any thing—­put that on my account.”  What ignorance of southern institutions!  What mockery, to talk of pecuniary intercourse between a slave and his master! The slave himself, with all he is and has, is an article of merchandise.  What can he owe his master?  A rustic may lay a wager with his mule, and give the creature the peck of oats which he has permitted it to win.  But who, in sober earnest, would call this a pecuniary transaction?

“TO BE HIS SERVANT FOR LIFE!” From what part of the epistle could the expositor have evolved a thought so soothing to tyrants—­so revolting to every man who loves his own nature?  From this?  “For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldst receive him for ever.”  Receive him how? As a servant, exclaims our commentator.  But what wrote the apostle?  “NOT now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, especially to me, but how much