It is a trade, a life of robbery, that vaults through all the gradations of the climax at a leap—­the dread, terrific, giant robbery, that towers among other robberies, a solitary horror, monarch of the realm.  The eighth commandment forbids the taking away, and the tenth adds, “Thou shalt not COVET any thing that is thy neighbor’s;” thus guarding every man’s right to himself and his property, by making not only the actual taking away a sin, but even that state of mind which would tempt to it.  Who ever made human beings slaves, or held them as slaves without coveting them?  Why do they take from them their time, their labor, their liberty, their right of self-preservation and improvement, their right to acquire property, to worship according to conscience, to search the Scriptures, to live with their families, and their right to their own bodies?  Why do they take them, if they do not desire them?  They COVET them for purposes of gain, convenience, lust of dominion, of sensual gratification, of pride and ostentation. They break the tenth commandment, and pluck down upon their heads the plagues that are written in the book. Ten commandments constitute the brief compend of human duty. Two of these brand slavery as sin.

The giving of the law at Sinai, immediately preceded the promulgation of that body of laws and institutions, called the “Mosaic system.”  Over the gateway of that system, fearful words were written by the finger of God—­“HE THAT STEALETH A MAN AND SELLETH HIM, OR IF HE BE FOUND IN HIS HAND, HE SHALL SURELY BE PUT TO DEATH.”  See Exodus, xxi. 16.

The oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, and the wonders wrought for their deliverance, proclaim the reason for such a law at such a time—­when the body politic became a theocracy, and reverently waited for the will of God.  They had just been emancipated.  The tragedies of their house of bondage were the realities of yesterday, and peopled their memories with thronging horrors.  They had just witnessed God’s testimony against oppression in the plagues of Egypt—­the burning blains on man and beast—­the dust quickened into loathsome life, and cleaving in swarms to every living thing—­the streets, the palaces, the temples, and every house heaped up with the carcasses of things abhorred—­even the kneading troughs and ovens, the secret chambers and the couches, reeking and dissolving with the putrid death—­the pestilence walking in darkness at noonday, the devouring locusts and hail mingled with fire, the first-born death-struck, and the waters blood, and, last of all, that dread high hand and stretched out arm, that whelmed the monarch and his hosts, and strewed their corpses in the sea.  All this their eyes had looked upon,—­earth’s proudest city, wasted and thunder-scarred, lying in desolation, and the doom of oppressors traced on her ruins in the hand writing of God, glaring in letters of fire mingled with blood—­a blackened monument of wrath to the uttermost against the stealers of men.