God against Slavery. master to him. If an ox or an ass had strayed from its owner, any one finding the beast, was commanded to restore it to its owner, as his property; but if a man's servant had fled away, every one was in like manner forbidden to restore him; demonstrating in the strongest manner that a servant was never regarded as property, and could not be treated as such. A man's ox belonged to him, and must be restored to him as his property; but a man's servant did not belong to him, and could not be his property, and if he chose to take himself away, was not considered as taking away any thing that belonged to his master, or could be claimed and taken back by him. "It is not possible for an incidental demonstration to be stronger than this. If the possibility of property in man had been admitted, if servants had been regarded as slaves, and masters as owners, then the law of God would no more have permitted any two-legged property to run away from the owner, to steal itself from the master, than a four-legged property; a biped would have no more right of property in himself than a quadruped; and the law would no more have permitted any man to secrete, protect, and keep back from the owner a strayed or runaway biped in the shape of a man, than a strayed or runaway quadruped in the shape of an ox or an ass. "Ox, ass, sheep, raiment, or any manner of lost thing which another challengeth to be his, the thing shall be judged; if stolen, thou shalt make restitution to the owner; if found, thou shalt bring it back to the owner." But a servant is not a lost thing, not an article of property, and there is no such thing as an owner of him recognised. my's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him 'If thou meet even thine eneagain.' But thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which has escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in any one of thy gates where it liketh him best; thou shalt not oppress him.' He is a freeman, as any of you, free to choose his residence, free to go and come as he pleases, free to stay unmolested, in whatever place he may prefer, and there is no owner to him, no creature that has any power to interfere with his liberty, no law binding him as any man's property, but an explicit, divine law, recognizing, guarding, and establishing, beyond possibility of denial or interference, his sole right of property and ownership in himself. "Now, I maintain that it is not possible for language or thought to present a stronger incidental demonstration than this, of the impossibility of a creature of the human race being property. The demonstration is absolutely all the stronger for being incidental. It never entered into the mind of the sacred writer, it never entered into God's heart, to set forth, in a formal proposition, that the claim of property in man is sin, or that no man can be the owner of a man, because there stood the law, He that stealeth or selleth, or holdeth, shall surely be put to death. Just so, there was no need of saying, as an abstract proposition, that the act of murdering is sin, because the law said, Thou shalt do no murder; and, The murderer shall be put to death. But when we find, side by side, in the catalogue of statutes defining and illustrating the sin of stealing, and commanding the restoration of stolen or lost property, with the appellation of owner bestowed on those to whom such property is to be restored, a commandment not to restore to his master the servant that has fled from his master to thee, the forbidding of such restoration, and the avoidance of the term owner, are intensely significant. "This is the thing to be borne in mind, also, in reading the Epistle of Paul to Philemon. This is the thing that accounts, in the first place, for † Ex. xxiii. 4. Deut. xxiii. 15, 16. • Ex. xxii. 9, 10, 11, his sending back Onesimus to Philemon at all; which he would not have done, and could not conscientiously have done, with the statute in Deuteronomy staring him in the face, had he not known that he was sending him back to a Christian perfectly aware of that statute, and acquainted with God's whole reprobation of the crime of oppression, and the iniquity of claiming property in man. And hence he says to Philemon, "Whom I would have retained," would have done it, and could have done it conscientiously, by the law of God; but perfectly confident in Philemon's Christian integrity, he would not impose that detention upon him, and compel him by the law, but would give him the sweet privilege of yielding up the man to Paul on gospel grounds, and willingly. And hence, also, he says, Thou therefore receive him as I have sent him, not now as a servaut, but above a servant, a brother beloved. "Not now as a servant. It is impossible to understand this, or any part of this remarkable Epistle, indeed, except under the light of all these statutes against slavery, which we have been considering. But the moment you bring this phrase under the convergency, the focus, of this light, the brilliancy is glorious; it is as if a diamond had burst into a blaze. Paul would not, and could not, have returned Onesimus at all except to a man who, as a Christian, well knew God's judgment against slavery; nor to him unless he had had perfect confidence in his Christain integrity, that he would receive him as no longer a servant, a slave, even if he had been one before. Paul would never have sent back Onesimus to any doctors of divinity who proclaim slavery a divine institution, nor to any one who could have stood up and said, as doctors of theology since his day have done, We accept the system of human slavery and conscientiously abide by it. "In the whole history, from that of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, down through the whole line of their descendants, not one instance is to be found of the sale of a man, whether as servant or slave. The only approximations to such a thing are treated and denounced as criminal. When they obtained servants, or purchased them, as the phrase was, they purchased their time and labour from themselves; but if they attempted to sell them, it could not be done without stealing them; it was making articles of property out of them; it was asserting, and violently assuming ownership in them; it was MAN-STEALING. Accordingly, is the transaction of the selling of Joseph, which is described as the crime of stealing; and no person in Judea could ever have sold any human being, no matter by what means in his power, without the conviction of doing what was forbidden of God. Man-selling was no more permitted than man-stealing. "It was on the ground of the impossibility of property in man, that made the selling of him a crime, that the statute was enacted forbidding any man to return the escaping servant to his master. It was on this ground: that every servant belonged to himself and not to his master, and that if his master undertook to treat him as property, he had a perfect right to flee from him, and no man had any right to stop him, but every man was bound by God's own law to assist and defend him. This most beneficent statute was a keystone for the arch of freedom which, by the Jewish legislation, God reared in the midst of universal despotism and slavery; it formed a security for the observance of all the other many provisions in favour of those held to labour or domestic service; it opened a gate of refuge for the oppressed, and operated as a powerful restraint against the cruelty of the tyrannical master. There might be cruelty and tyranny in the land of Judea, but there was a legal escape from it; the servant, if men attempted to treat him as a slave, could instantly quit his master, was not compelled to abide in bondage, was not hunted as a fugitive, nay, by law, was protected from being so hunted, and everywhere on his escape, found friends in every dwelling, and a friend and protector in the law. "In this statute, and in all the others on this subject, we see how shameful is the libel on the word of God, how impious, how blasphemous the charge against it, of sanctioning the system of slavery. They are, in some respects, the meanest and the wickedest of all human moles, who go burrowing among the Scriptures, and twisting and distorting its passages, in the hope of finding some shadow of an excuse for this wickedness. Their work is, as far as in them lies, to make infidels; for they do what God denounced, with his extremest vengeance, the false teachers of old for doing; they belie the word of the Lord, and cause men to turn from it with the feeling that a book that teaches iniquity can not be God's word. But we throw off and denounce their perversion, and we challenge all the world to find anywhere so great a security for human freedom, and against the possibility of human slavery, or so deep a fountain and assurance of benevolence and justice as in these laws. They constitute, beyond all comparison, the most benign, protective, and generous system of domestic service, the kindest to the servants, and the fairest for the masters, ever framed in any country or in any age. The rights of the servants are defined and guaranteed as strictly, and with as much care, as those of the employers or masters. Human beings could not be degraded into slaves or chattels, or bound for involuntary service, or seized and worked for profit, and no wages paid. The defences against these outrages, the denouncement and prohibition of them, are among the clearest legal and historical judgments of God against slavery. The system in our own country, even in the light of only these provisions, holds its power by laws most manifestly conflicting with the divine law, and stands indisputably under the divine reprobation.' We have selected these portions of his work for quotation in preference to any others, to show how convincingly Dr Cheever has applied not only the spirit but the letter of the Bible, to refute the pretensions which have been put forward by the advocates of slavery, based upon the authority of those two passages of Scripture; and being thus convicted of sin, "they are now without excuse; because that when they know God, they glorify Him not as God, neither are thankful, but become vain in their own imaginations, and their foolish hearts are darkened. Professing themselves wise, they become fools, and change the image of God into a thing like four-footed beasts." And they do this deliberately-perverting the word of God, which has been so plainly declared to them, and brought to bear especially upon this their cherished sin. A month ago a public meeting was held in this city to express sympathy with this faithful pastor, who has stood in the Lord's counsel, and caused the people to hear his words. Clergymen of several denominations were present, and it was very meet and right that the ministers of that denomination which has had some complicity with slaveholders, by accepting money from them for church purposes, and by having intimate church connection with them, should take a prominent part in the proceedings; and there is no man of right mind who will not admire the moral courage manifested by Drs Candlish and Guthrie in tacitly acknowledging, by their appearance on that platform, that they regretted the action of their church in this matter, and henceforward repudiated all connection with the owners of human chattels and their advocates. But why, for the honour of the Church of Scotland, was there not upon that platform some one of her ministers, as her representative? Shall we allow it to be said that we are less zealous for God's glory than the clergy of other denominations, -more indifferent to the cause of humanity,-more careless for the salvation of souls? We have purposely abained from touching upon the political or social aspects of this question, because it is strictly and altogether as a religious question that as a Church we should view it, and that Dr Cheever has treated it, (for as he himself says in his argument upon it, "he has not brought politics into religion, but religion into politics,") and we may be assured that as a Church, the Lord will not hold us guiltless if we hold our peace, and refrain from giving our testimony against it. We believe that as a body, we have but one voice of utter condemnation of the odious system against which this noble man is waging so unequal a warfare; and not only as a Church, but as the National Church of this country, we are imperatively called upon to make that voice be heard. We can do this with less reserve than our brethren of the Free Church, as we have never mixed ourselves up in any awkward relationship with the people on the other side of the Atlantic regarding slavery, and we surely mistrust our position as the National Church, if we do not feel that in America, the voice of that Church would be listened to as one of greater authority, than could be those of the dissenting bodies. There was one thing sadly lacking to the completeness of the proceedings of the meeting to which we have referred, and that was a public withdrawal of all connection with the so-called Christian Churches of America, which maintain or are silent upon the subject of this iniquity. We know who has said, "hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophecy unto you; they make you vain; they speak a vision out of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord. They say still unto them that despise Me, the Lord hath said, ye shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart, no evil shall come near you." And is not this the very sin of which the pastors of these churches are guilty, and shall not our brethren's blood be upon us, if, as they do to their people, we prophecy to them smooth things, instead of faithfully rebuking their sin? The Lord has said to every one amongst us, "I have not sent these prophets, yet they run; I have not spoken unto them, yet they prophecy;" shall we keep silence and not warn the people, shall we not cry to them, "Hearken not unto them, for they make the word of God of none effect, by their traditions. We cast them out from amongst us, we deny to them the sacred title of ministers of Christ, so long as they darken the counsels of the Almighty, and pervert the judgments of the Lord." It would be a hard measure, and could not be done without much suffering; but it would be an act of faithfulness both to God and man, and we long to see the Church of Scotland take the initiative in so great an action. It would be worthy of her traditions, and of the people whose religious convictions she represents, and trumpet God against Slavery. tongued it would startle the consciences of those now sitting at ease under the burden of a great sin, who wipe their mouths, and say, "we have done no wickedness.” It seems to us that no church can be blameless, which does not take this action in the present crisis of American affairs. It was truly said by Dr Candlish, that "if there were a dozen Dr Cheevers in the States, all faithfully proclaiming the truth of God upon the subject of slavery as he has done, and is doing, the dreadful aspect which its political horizon presents at this moment, might yet clear into noonday brightness." For the Americans are a deeply religious people, as their innumerable churches, charities, and missions attest;-they must have their consciences put at ease, and they have great faith in their pastors. If then their pastors could awaken their consciences on this matter, instead of putting them to sleep, America might yet be saved the frightful convulsion that seems to threaten her, and go on peacefully fulfilling her great destiny. But ere this can be hoped for, the consciences of the pastors themselves must be stirred, and their hearts must be strengthened for the day of conflict, through which they must undoubtedly pass, if they are true to the Master they profess to serve. And who can do this but the mintsters of other churches? The people cannot, ought not, to instruct their teachers,-they look to them for guidance, and knowledge, and want to hear from them what the Lord hath said to them regarding this matter; and it is we, their brethren in Christ, ambassadors like themselves from our common King, who must not only "beseech them in his stead," but, being like Elijah “very zealous" for the honour of our sovereign, we must urge them by every argument to declare his message faithfully to the people to whom He has sent them, and so shut them up to the necessity of doing so, that it will be impossible for any one to go with false credentials and say, "I also am a servant of the Lord Jesus." This duty is one now palpably laid upon the ministers of all non-slave-holding churches, and being one the performance of which involves no question of church government, church discipline, or peculiar denominational doctrine, the ministers of all denominations may unite with one heart and voice in its fulfilment. Let us not permit ourselves to be excluded from the association of the churches testifying upon this subject, nor let the pride which savours of this world withhold us from taking our part in the movement that has begun regarding it, because we have not been invited to join it. Sectarian differences have a tendency to keep various denominations too much apart, presenting in their separation a very unedifying spectacle to the world, of Christian unity and love; but surely there is some common ground on which they can all meet, for common action in the cause of their common Master; and if there be any such, it is assuredly this one of abhorrence of slavery, and all the sin and vice of which it is the parent; and in our anxious desire that those who in America have, like ourselves been called to the ministry, should show themselves true to the great cause of truth, by becoming its most determined opponents. The most effectual manner in which it is possible to do this at the present time is |