“No jubilee trumpet was to cheer their hearts.  Think what the jubilee morning must have been to those slaves in hopeless bondage, if bondage were necessarily such as many fancy.  Our abolitionists represent the bells and guns of our Fourth of July to be a hideous mockery in the ears of the slaves; and multitudes of our good people ludicrously fancy them as most miserable on that day, by the contrast of their enslaved condition with our boasted Independence.  Let us borrow this fancy, and apply it to the Hebrew slave.

“The jubilee trumpets, and all the joyous scenes of the fiftieth year in Israel, caused multitudes of slaves in Israel, we will suppose, to reflect, This Jehovah, God of Israel, has doomed us to hopeless bondage.  We are guilty of having been born so many degrees south or north, east or west, of these Hebrews.  We, by God’s providence, are Gentiles.  Our chiefs sold us, and these Hebrews bought us.  We were betrayed; we were driven out of our homes; unjust wars were made upon us, to make us captives, that we might be sold.  And ‘the Lord’s people’ bought us, by his special edict (Lev. xxv. 44).  Our brother-servants, unfortunate Hebrews, get released in the jubilee year, except these poor creatures who were so unfortunate as to be married in slavery, and, not being willing to be divorced, had their ears fastened, with the ignominious ‘awl,’ to their master’s door-post.  God could have ordained that they, with their wives and children, and we, with ours, should have release in the fiftieth year.  But, no! our bondage is forever, and so is theirs; and our children and their children are to be servants forever.  But we hold it to be a self-evident truth that all men are born free and equal, and have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Slavery is the sum of all villanies.  Our master’s will is our law; we are subject to his passions; we are chattels; we ’are his money.’  This is the language of your God,—­the God whom you worship; and not only so, but you circumcise us to worship Him!

“Some benevolent Levite, jealous for the character of his Maker, replies, ’But God did not institute slavery; He found it in existence, and he only legislates about it, and regulates it.’

“A thousand groans are the prelude to the withering answer which the slaves make to this apology for oppression.

“‘He broke your bonds, it seems,’ they cry, ’in Egypt, and in the Red Sea.  Did He “find slavery” on the opposite shore of the Red Sea?  Why did he not merely “legislate for it, and regulate it?” No, He enacted it.  How dare you apologize for your God with such a miserable pretext?  He made the ordinance separating a husband from wife and children, unless the husband would submit to the indignity of having his ear bored and to the doom of perpetual bondage, in case his wife was a Gentile.  If he goes away, he must leave his wife and children.  Great indulgence have you in multiplying wives; that