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 rage 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 have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.

2. If he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after
the manner of daughters.

3. If he take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of
marriage, shall he not diminish.