and loaded them with “the bands of wickedness;” who, “hiding themselves from their own flesh,” disowned their own mothers’ children.  Professions of piety joined with the oppression of the poor, they held up to universal scorn and execration, as the dregs of hypocrisy.  They warned the creature of such professions, that he could escape the wrath of Jehovah only by heart-felt repentance.  And yet, according to the ecclesiastics with whom we have to do, the Lord of these prophets passed by in silence just such enormities as he commanded them to expose and denounce!  Every where, he came in contact with slavery in its worst forms—­“horrible cruelties” forced themselves upon his notice; but not a word of rebuke or warning did he utter.  He saw “a boy given for a harlot, and a girl sold for wine, that they might drink,"[8] without the slightest feeling of displeasure, or any mark of disapprobation!  To such disgusting and horrible conclusions, do the arguings which, from the haunts of sacred literature, are inflicted on our churches, lead us!  According to them, Jesus Christ, instead of shining as the light of the world, extinguished the torches which his own prophets had kindled, and plunged mankind into the palpable darkness of a starless midnight!  O savior, in pity to thy suffering people, let thy temple be no longer used as a “den of thieves!”

[Footnote 6:  Jeremiah, xxii. 13.]

[Footnote 7:  Isaiah, lviii. 6, 7.]

[Footnote 8:  Joel, iii. 3.]

  “THOU THOUGHTEST THAT I WAS ALTOGETHER SUCH AN ONE AS THYSELF.”

In passing by the worst forms of slavery, with which he every where came in contact among the Jews, the Savior must have been inconsistent with himself.  He was commissioned to preach glad tidings to the poor; to heal the broken-hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives; to set at liberty them that are bruised; to preach the year of Jubilee.  In accordance with this commission, he bound himself, from the earliest date of his incarnation, to the poor, by the strongest ties; himself “had not where to lay his head;” he exposed himself to misrepresentation and abuse for his affectionate intercourse with the outcasts of society; he stood up as the advocate of the widow, denouncing and dooming the heartless ecclesiastics, who had made her bereavement a source of gain; and in describing the scenes of the final judgment, he selected the very personification of poverty, disease and oppression, as the test by which our regard for him should be determined.  To the poor and wretched; to the degraded and despised, his arms were ever open.  They had his tenderest sympathies.  They had his warmest love.  His heart’s blood he poured out upon the ground for the human family, reduced to the deepest degradation, and exposed to the heaviest inflictions, as the slaves of the grand usurper.  And yet, according to our ecclesiastics, that class of sufferers who had been reduced immeasurably below every other shape and form of degradation and distress;