that God was more lenient to the degraded Hebrew master than Southern laws
are to the higher Southern master in like cases. But there you have what
was the divine will. Find fault with God, ye anti-slavery men, if you
dare. In Leviticus, xxv. 44-46, "Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which
thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them
shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the
strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their
families that are with you, which they beget in your land: and they shall
be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your
children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your
bondmen forever."

Sir, I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command
his people to buy slaves from the heathen round about them, and from the
stranger, and of their families sojourning among them. The passage has no
other meaning. Did God merely permit sin?--did he merely tolerate a
dreadful evil? God does not say so anywhere. He gives his people law to
buy and hold slaves of the heathen forever, on certain conditions, and to
buy and hold Hebrew slaves in variously-modified particulars. Well, how
did the heathen, then, get slaves to sell? Did they capture them in
war?--did they sell their own children? Wherever they got them, they sold
them; and God's law gave his people the right to buy them.

God in the New Testament made no law prohibiting the relation of master
and slave. But he made law regulating the relation under Greek and Roman
slavery, which was the most oppressive in the world.

God saw that these regulations would ultimately remove the evils in the
Greek and Roman systems, and do it away entirely from the fitness of
things, as there existing; for Greek and Roman slaves, for the most part,