[Footnote A:  Jeremiah xxii. 13.]

[Footnote B:  Isaiah lviii. 6,7.]

[Footnote C:  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; who had been most rudely thrust out of the family of Adam, and forced to herd with swine; who, without the slightest offense, had been made the foot-stool of the worst criminals; whose “tears were their meat night and day,” while, under nameless insults and killing injuries, they were continually crying, O Lord, O Lord:—­this class of sufferers, and this alone, our biblical expositors, occupying the high places of sacred literature, would make us believe the compassionate Savior coldly overlooked.  Not an emotion of pity; not a look of sympathy; not a word of consolation, did his gracious heart prompt him to bestow upon them!  He denounces damnation upon the devourer of the widow’s house.  But the monster, whose trade it is to make widows and devour them and their babes, he can calmly endure!  O Savior, when wilt thou stop the mouths of such blasphemers!

IT IS THE SPIRIT THAT QUICKENETH.

It seems, that though, according to our Princeton professor, “the subject” of slavery “is hardly alluded to by Christ in any of his personal instructions[A],” he had a way of “treating it.”  What was that?  Why, “he taught the true nature, DIGNITY, EQUALITY, and destiny of men,” and “inculcated the principles of justice and love."[B] And according to Professor Stuart, the maxims which our Savior furnished, “decide