Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/77

Rh the discontent of the slaves which were worked on Sunday.” Mr. Olmsted adds in a note that he also saw slaves at work every Sunday that he was in Louisiana. “The law permits slaves to be worked, I believe, on Sunday; but requires that some compensation shall be made to them when they are, such as a subsequent holyday.” And who is to fix or enforce the compensation? It is scarcely possible that the same protection should be given to the slave’s day of rest in a modern community, as in a community ruled by the strict and inexorable Hebrew Law.

The most important point of all remains to be mentioned. In Greece and at Rome the slave took no part in the public worship of the State. At some of the holier rites, his presence would have been a pollution. If he was employed in the temples it was for menial service. We may be sure that never except as a menial did he stand near the Consul sacrificing to Latian Jupiter on the Alban Mount. He can never have been present at the dramatic festivals of Dionysus, which, under the form of a religious ceremony, were the highest school of mental culture for the Athenian people: nor can he have mounted the Acropolis in the sacred procession on the day holy to Athene. He was