is a person, he cannot be a piece of property, nor has an “owner” any just and moral claim to his services.  Usage, so far from conferring this claim, increases the total amount of injustice; the longer an innocent man is forcibly kept in slavery, the greater the reparation to which he is entitled for the oppressive immorality.  This doctrine I now believe to be irrefutable truth, but I disbelieved it while I thought the Scripture authoritative; because I found a very different doctrine there—­a doctrine which is the argumentative stronghold of the American slaveholder.  Paul sent back the fugitive Onesimus to his master Philemon, with kind recommendations and apologies for the slave, and a tender charge to Philemon, that he would receive Onesimus as a brother in the Lord, since he had been converted by Paul in the interval; but this very recommendation, full of affection as it is, virtually recognizes the moral rights of Philemon to the services of his slave; and hinting that if Onesimus stole anything, Philemon should now forgive him, Paul shows perfect insensibility to the fact that the master who detains a slave in captivity against his will, is guilty himself of a continual theft.  What says Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s Cassy to this?  “Stealing!—­They who steal body and soul need not talk to us.  Every one of these bills is stolen—­stolen from poor starving, sweating creatures.”  Now Onesimus, in the very act of taking to flight, showed that he had been submitting to servitude against his will, and that the house of his owner had previously been a prison to him.  To suppose that Philemon has a pecuniary interest in the return of Onesimus to work without wages, implies that the master habitually steals the slave’s earnings; but if he loses nothing by the flight, he has not been wronged by it.  Such is the modern doctrine, developed out of the fundamental fact that persons are not chattels; but it is to me wonderful that it should be needful to prove to any one, that this is not the doctrine of the New Testament.  Paul and Peter deliver excellent charges to masters in regard to the treatment of their slaves, but without any hint to them that there is an injustice in claiming them as slaves at all.  That slavery, as a system, is essentially immoral, no Christian of those days seems to have suspected.  Yet it existed in its worst forms under Rome.  Whole gangs of slaves were mere tools of capitalists, and were numbered like cattle, with no moral relationship to the owner; young women of beautiful person were sold as articles of voluptuousness.  Of course every such fact was looked upon by Christians as hateful and dreadful; yet, I say, it did not lead them to that moral condemnation of slavery, as such, which has won the most signal victory in modern times, and is destined, I trust, to win one far greater.