To suppose that God would, with every consideration out of view, but that of having the best relation of employer and laborer, make choice of slavery—­to suppose that He believes that this state of servitude operates most beneficially, both for the master and the servant—­is a high impeachment of the Divine wisdom and goodness.  But thus guilty are you, if you are unwilling to believe, that, if He chose the severe servitude in question, He chose it for the punishment of his enemies, or from some consideration, other than its suitableness for the ordinary purposes of the relation of master and servant.

But it has been for the sake of argument only, that I have admitted that God authorized the Jews to enslave the heathen.  I now totally deny that He did so.  You will, of course, consent that if He did so, it was in a special statute, as was the case when He authorized them to exterminate other heathen:  and you will as readily consent that He enacted the statutes, in both instances, with the view of punishing his enemies.  Now, in killing the Canaanites, the Jew was constituted, not the owner of his devoted fellow man, but simply the executioner of God’s vengeance:  and evidently, such and no other was his character when he was reducing the Canaanite to involuntary servitude—­that he did so reduce him, and was commissioned by God to do so, is the supposition we make for the sake of argument.  Had the Jews been authorized by God to shut up in dungeons for life those of the heathen, whom they were directed to have for bondmen and bondmaids, you would not claim, that they, any more than sheriffs and jailers in our day, are to be considered in the light of owners of the persons in their charge.  Much less then, can the Jews be considered as the owners of any person whom they held in servitude:  for, however severe the type of that servitude, the liberty of its subject was not restricted, as was that of the prisoners in question:—­most certainly, the power asserted over him is not to be compared in extent with that asserted by the Jew over the Canaanite, whom he slew;—­a case in which he was, indisputably, but the executioner of the Divine wrath.  The Canaanite, whether devoted to a violent death or to an involuntary servitude, still remained the property of God:  and God no more gave him up to be the property of the executioner of his wrath, than the people of the State of New York give up the offender against public justice to be the property of the ministers of that justice.  God never suspends the accountability of his rational creatures to himself:  and his rights to them, He never transfers to others.  He could not do so consistently with his attributes, and his indissoluble relations to man.  But slavery claims, that its subjects are the property of man.  It claims to turn them into mere chattels, and to make them as void of responsibility to God, as other chattels.  Slavery, in a word, claims to push from his throne the Supreme Being, who declares, “all souls