and festivities of the three great Jewish Feasts; and if a servant died
under the infliction of chastisement, his master was surely to be
punished. As a tooth for a tooth and life for life was the Jewish law,
of course he was punished with death. I know that great stress has been
laid upon the following verse: "Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or
two, he shall not be punished, for he is his money."

Slaveholders, and the apologists of slavery, have eagerly seized upon
this little passage of scripture, and held it up as the masters' Magna
Charta, by which they were licensed by God himself to commit the
greatest outrages upon the defenceless victims of their oppression. But,
my friends, was it designed to be so? If our Heavenly Father would
protect by law the eye and the tooth of a Hebrew servant, can we for a
moment believe that he would abandon that same servant to the brutal
rape of a master who would destroy even life itself. Do we not rather
see in this, the _only_ law which protected masters, and was it not
right that in case of the death of a servant, one or two days after
chastisement was inflicted, to which other circumstances might have
contributed, that the master should be protected when, in all
probability, he never intended to produce so fatal a result? But the
phrase "he is his money" has been adduced to show that Hebrew servants
were regarded as mere _things_, "chattels personal;" if so, why were so
many laws made to _secure their rights as men_, and to ensure their
rising into equality and freedom? If they were mere _things_, why were
they regarded as responsible beings, and one law made for them as well
as for their masters? But I pass on now to the consideration of how the
_female_ Jewish servants were protected by _law_.

1. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then
shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto another nation he shall