Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/64

52 all men as brethren is understood; they live under, and will be judged by, the law of Christ.

There is indeed one passage (Exod. xxi. 7) which is cited by American defenders of slavery as divinely authorizing a Christian to sell his own child as a slave: “And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.” But read on, and it will appear that the passage has nothing to do with this matter. “If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her into a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money.” Clearly this refers to the sale and purchase of a woman, not as a slave, but as a wife; though a wife of an inferior kind, such as the concubine of the Levite in the Book of Judges who has fled from her lord, and whom he pursues to her father’s house. Such a mode of providing for a daughter and obtaining a wife was familiar enough to the coarseness of primitive antiquity not only in the Jewish but in other nations. The Anglo-Saxons in the earliest times regularly sold their daughters as wives, and their laws speak of buying women in the plainest terms. The recognition of the practice in the Mosaic law is important to the present question, as shewing us that it is with the earliest and rudest