Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/61

Rh the Christian dispensation all men are brethren in Christ.

It would be the reverse of the truth to say, with the Roman satirist, that the Hebrews, compared with the other nations of antiquity, were exclusive and inhospitable towards foreigners and people of other religions: that they “would not direct on his road the man who did not worship as they did, nor guide to the spring any but the circumcised.” Their law, on the contrary, breathes a spirit of kindness and hospitality towards the stranger quite unexampled in that hard and inhospitable world. The Greek, though his mind was large and his intercourse varied, called all nations but his own by a name of opprobrium and contempt; and his treatment of them was quite in accordance with that name, till one of them conquered him, when his former pride towards all sank into sycophancy towards the conqueror. The humane Athenians, in the time of Pericles, Phidias, and Sophocles, revised the list of citizens, and having discovered that five thousand persons not of pure Athenian blood had crept into the register, not only expelled them, but sold them all as slaves. The Roman had one word for foreigner and enemy, nor was his language belied by his conduct towards his neighbours. The Hebrew is repeatedly and most emphatically enjoined by his law to be kind to the stranger and never to oppress him; and this on the ground, so humbling to national pride, that he had been himself an oppressed and despised dweller in a strange land. “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of