Page:The duties of masters and slaves respectively (1845).djvu/17

13 in the slaves of this class must have been defective; and no lapse of time, no repetitions of transfer from one to another, can ever make that title good. The original title must have been fraudulently obtained, and however often transferred, it is, and it must ever be, still invalidated by the fraud involved in its origin. It is an admitted axiom, that the receiver of stolen goods, is as bad as the thief. He who first made his fellow man a slave, was a man-stealer; he was guilty of oppression and robbery; the first purchaser of such slave, became in the very act of purchase, a participator in the guilt of his reduction to slavery; and with every transfer of title, was transferred also the guilt of that original theft. A man who holds his fellow man in involuntary bondage is, therefore, and must ever be, an oppressor, and a manstealer. Now the Apostles declare, that 'men-stealers shall not inherit the kingdom of God;' consequently the masters to whom the Apostles wrote, were not men-stealers; they were not slaveholders in the modern sense of the word."

The answer to this objection is obvious. If the reasoning here employed be correct, that all involuntary bondage is the fruit of oppression, and that every slaveholder is a man-stealer, then it must be conceded that, under the Old Testament dispensation, God did sanction oppression and man-stealing; for he did expressly permit the purchase, the holding, and the sale of men held to involuntary and perpetual bondage; and bondage entailed on their descendants. And yet, both in the Old and the New Testament, God does condemn man-stealing as a crime fatal to all profession of piety. Unless then we choose to charge God with injustice and inconsistency both, we must admit that slaveholding does not necessarily involve guilt of any kind; that a man may lawfully hold his fellow man in involuntary bondage, without being thereby stained with guilt of robbery, oppression, or injustice, and the title to property in slaves may be held and conveyed to others, without the attendance or conveyance of the guilt of any crime. If this might be true in Abraham's day, and in the days of the Jewish Judges and the Jewish Kings, it may be true also in our own day. Certain it is, that in the times of the Apostles of Jesus Christ, this must have been true. The masters addressed by the Apostles in the New Testament, are by them supposed to be capable of discharging their duty as masters and of being good Christians nevertheless. A man-stealer (as these same Apostles teach, see I Tim. 1:10; comp. also Exod. 21:16, and Deut. 24:7) cannot be a good Christian; therefore, if inspired Apostles judged correctly, these masters were certainly not men-stealers. But these masters were most unquestionably slaveholders, in the fullest