Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/85

Rh Roman, a soldier and a lawyer, pretended that servitude was the ransom paid by the vanquished for a life legally forfeited to the victor in war. The American Slave-owner, since he has cast off shame, and embraced as good that which he once excused as a transient evil, has borrowed the theory of the Greek; and he has so far improved upon it as to assert that a negro is not a man: an assertion which, if he really believed it, would take away a shade of darkness from his cruelty only to add a deeper shade of darkness to his lust. All these theories tend to ratify the degradation of the slave, and those which describe his lot as an ordinance of nature tend to make it unchangeable and hopeless. But in the Old Testament we have no theory or suggestion of the kind. On the contrary, the Hebrew master is often reminded that he was himself brought “out of the house of bondage,” and adjured, by that remembrance, to love mercy and do justice.

Did the Hebrew Lawgiver encourage, or did he discourage, the multiplication of Slaves? We have seen already that he provided for the constant reduction of their number by requiring that every Hebrew