is winked at “for the hardness of your hearts;” but the poor Hebrew must abandon his wife and family if he chooses freedom!  They are his master’s “property,” “his money,” and God gave the servant these children, knowing that they would be the “property” of another, and that he would have no unencumbered right to them; and down through all ages they and their descendants must be servants.  And now you tell us, “God did not institute” this!  He only “found it!” He “regulated it!” Come, blow up your trumpet, reverend Levite!  Go, worship the God of whom you feel half ashamed.  Do not ask us to worship and love a Being who is bound by the laws of fate so that he cannot do otherwise, if he would, than make one of us a slave forever, while the man who grinds with me at the same mill, goes with his wife and children, forever free!’”

“Those remarks have the true Boston tone,” said Mrs. North.

“Yes,” said I, “there were brave men before Agamemnon, Horace tells us.  There is slavery forever,” said I, “or the separation of husband and wife, father and children, unless the man would be a slave forever.  What ‘partings’ there must have been!  What struggles in those who concluded to take the fatal ‘awl’ through their ears, before they could make up their minds to be slaves forever.  See the hardship of the case.  If the man ‘loves his wife and children,’ he may be a slave; that love would make him spend and be spent for them in freedom, in his humble home, amid the sweets of liberty; but no; if he loves his wife he must take the bitter draught of slavery with his love.  But if he hates her and his children, he may be free!  What a bounty on conjugal fickleness, on unnatural treatment of offspring!”

“Was there no Canada?” said Mrs. North, biting off her thread.  “O, I recollect; Hagar went there.  I wonder if the angel who remanded her was removed from office, on his return to heaven.”

“Come, wife,” said Mr. North, “there is such a thing as being converted too much.  Please, Sir, will you answer the question as to the consistency of all this with the divine wisdom and goodness?”

“That,” said I, “is not the question which you wish to ask.”

“I do not understand you,” said he; “please to explain.”

“You wish to ask,” said I, “how I reconcile these things with your notions of wisdom and benevolence.”

“Why,” said he, “I have my ideas of divine wisdom and goodness, and I wish to make these things square with them.”

“And that,” said I, “is just the rock on which you all split.  Your ideas of the divine goodness must be based on a complete view of the revealed character and conduct of God.  But you and your friends say, ’this and that ought to be, or ought not to be,’ and you try your Maker by that measure.  Now I say, ‘he that reproveth God, let him answer it.’  Are not the things which I have quoted, parts of divine revelation, as much as the flood and the passover?”