was partially drawn into the evil current, though he does not appear to have been a willful polygamist.  It is asserted by Jonathan Ben Uzziel, the Jerusalem Targum, and other learned authorities, that Hagar and Keturah are the same person; but if this be a mistake, there is still no evidence that Abraham took Keturah till after the death of Sarah.  Polygamists, both in the Jewish nation and elsewhere, have not failed to plead Abraham’s example in defense of their conduct.  Early association had somewhat obscured his moral perceptions of right and wrong.  Had he waited for the Divine command before carrying out Sarah’s suggestion, no incident in his life would have given countenance to the demoralizing practice.  Isaac was a monogamist, though Jacob, through the artifice of Laban, became a polygamist.  That Laban’s family were tinctured with idolatry is unquestionable; and with idolatry came many other vices.  When Jacob with his household took his departure from Laban, Rachel stole certain images which were her father’s, the character of which was unmistakably indicated by Laban when he demanded, “Wherefore have ye stolen my gods?” Yet such was the general apostasy of the times, that this family was so much in advance of any other, that it was to it that Abraham was obliged to send, a generation previous, for a suitable wife for the amiable and meditative Isaac.  What wonder then that many practices prevailed among the descendants of Jacob that were not in accordance with either the will or the word of God!

Though plurality of wives was customary both before and after the giving of the Law, it was by no means ordained by it.  A man had no more right, in carrying out the designs of the Almighty, to have two or more wives living at the same time, than a woman had to have two or more husbands living at the same time.  Wherever the Bible speaks of the duty of husbands to wives, or of wives to husbands, the singular form is invariably used, as husband and wife.  For instance, when God brought the woman he had made to Adam, he (Adam) says:  “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife”—­not wives—­“and they shall be one flesh.”  And again, “They twain shall be one flesh.”  What God has directly commanded, and what he merely suffers men to do without imposing insuperable restraints upon them, are two very different things.

It is asserted that the Mosaic Law makes a very great and decidedly partial distinction between men-servants and maid-servants, greatly to the disadvantage of the latter, particularly in their release from servitude.  These same texts—­some of them, at least—­have been quoted in defense of African slavery.  The term, selling a Jewish servant, in the Scripture, is simply the same as binding out a child under English law.  A Jewish father could only “sell,” or in other words bind out, his daughter for six years, and that before she was of a suitable age to be married.[J] At the expiration of six years her apprenticeship ceased, and the maid-servant was free, unless she voluntarily perpetuated her own servitude.