The ancient Jews understood the words in the decalogue, Thou shalt not steal, of man-stealing; and thought that the other sorts of theft were implied in the last precept, Thou shalt not covet. Under the Mosaic law, manstealing was the only capital robbery; for the theft of property was expiated by ample restitution. But to enslave a Jew, was deemed an equal crime with murder; and as it virtually involves the same consequences, it insured the same punishment: and it was no subject of inquiry, whether the slave was actually kidnapped by the claimant, or purchased from another; but if it could be manifested, that such a person was detained by him contrary to the law of God, no alternative existed, death was his immediate portion.

The principles of moral right and wrong are invariable. They are not circumscribed by geographical boundaries, or particular periods of time; but apply to every individual, of all communities, and in every age. Practices condemned among the Israelites, upon the basis of eternal rectitude, never can be justified: and Jewish aberrations from the requisitions of their own heaven-promulged law, instead of furnishing us an example to copy, provide a beacon for alarm and instruction.

The public formularies of the United States, exhibit the vast contradiction between our doctrine and practice, with oracular authority.

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator, with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”—Declaration of Independence.

"All men are born equally free and independent; all men have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights; among which are, the enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; and, in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness. Among the natural rights, some are in their very nature unalienable, because no equivalent can be given or received for them. Of this kind, are the rights of conscience."--New-Hampshire.

"All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights: among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; and that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness."--Massachusetts.

"All men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent and indefeisible rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property and reputation, and of pursuing their own happiness."--Pennsylvania.

"Through divine goodness, all men have by nature, the rights of worshipping and serving their Creator, according to the dictates of their consciences, of enjoying and defending life and liberty, and acquiring and protecting reputation and property, and, in general, of obtaining objects suitable to their condition, without injury by one to another; and these rights are essential to their wel fare."-Delaware.

"All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights; of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."- Virginia.

"All men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, among which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."- Vermont.

"There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."--North-Western Territory.

"All men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, unalienable rights, among which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. There shall be neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in this state."-- Ohio.

How callous must that heart be to all shame, which, notwithstanding these self-evident truths, can gravely maintain the necessity of protracting slavery, and uphold its horrors by his actual participation: for every liberal mind is thoroughly convinced of the unrighteousness and inexpediency of this, the most cruel, detestable, and consummately wicked measure, that has been ever devised by mercantile avarice, or sanctioned by a sordid, narrow and misguided policy.

"What hypocrisy and villany, to profess that we are votaries of liberty, while we encourage or countenance the most ignoble slavery. We cannot form to ourselves an idea of an object more ridiculous, than an American patriot signing declarations of independence with one hand, and with the other brandishing his whip over his affrighted slave."

How awfully deluded must he be, who, wilfully closing his eyes to the splendour of divine illumination, and shielding his soul from all the arrows of conviction, will consider himself Messiah's disciple, though by the bible, his conscience, his own theological and republican creed, and the supreme law of the land, he stands condemned for injustice and inhumanity before the church and the world-A cruel man-stealing Christian!

The wholesale man-stealer, like Cain, bears the mark in his forehead; he is a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth and the "Christian broker in the trade of blood," whose wealth is increased by alienating all social affections, by severing all relative ties, by dissolving all domestic relations, and by transplanting from one state to another these wretched creatures, because they have a different tinge from himself, is the primeval murderer's own offspring.

"These same slaveholders would wade through seas of the blood of white men, as well as black men, to gratify their despotic propensities, if they were not restrained: it is the fear, not the love of either God or man, that restrains them."

These are the unadulterated truths of the gospel. Can a follower of the meek and lowly Jesus be connected with

a system which essentially generates such malevolent' principles, and such barbarous conduct? Yet churchofficers display a predominant insensibility to this complicated turpitude. The quintessence of all wicked absurdity is to hear an oppressor, in the name of him "who touched Isaiah's hallowed lips with fire," expatiate upon the BOOK delivered to Jesus in Nazareth.

As equity and injustice, philanthrophy and barbarism, vice and religion, cannot coalesce; every officer and member of the church who steals slaves, although he professes to believe and inculcate the evangelical charity which he does not exemplify, is equally culpable with the Ishmaelite, who kidnapped their African ancestors.

SLAVERY IMPIOUS, UNJUST, AND CRUEL.

THE Slavery of our species combines every base characteristic. When that august period shall have arrived, that the total extinction of this monster shall be celebrated with the triumphs of Christianity-the inscription which will narrate its existence will simply record-here lies the enemy of man, whose principles were irreligion, whose dispositions were cruelty, whose language was falsehood, whose conduct was injustice, and whose pretensions were hypocrisy. An impious, barbarous, and deceitful thief! Yet this idol has usurped a prominent station in the temple of God, and silences the voice of those who minister and serve in the sanctuary-until the blind are leading the blind into the ditch of perdition.

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Slavery is impious, for it directly subverts the divine authority. The supremacy of the great Jehovah is denied, and his government of the human family entirely wrested from him by this vile usurpation. Every principle which dignifies, every affection which refines, and every which adorns, are inseparable from a permanently operative and deeply impressed conviction of our responsibility before God, for the correct improvement of the privileges with which he has enriched us: but all these are extin

guished as soon as man is degraded to a brute. No alternative exists; inferiors in wealth and civil stations must be considered as moral agents, or must be classed with the flocks and herds of the field. Hence, slavery involves the most awful consequences, and wretchedness irremediable. It is a wilful disobedience to the commandments of God; and not only exposes the criminal to the wrath of the judge, but is a most artful and diabolical invention to exclude even the sufferer by this ungodly machination from the celestial regions of bliss.

He who has scrutinized the uniform tendency of involuntary servitude; who examines the unvarying practice of those who ingulph the bodies and souls of men in the net of their selfishness and insensibility; and who, with the eye of Christian philanthropy, has investigated the moral character of the servants, knows, that a slaveholder is an unfeeling despot, who would overthrow God's jurisdiction.

Very few men-stealers comparatively, are even nominal Christian believers. How can a person pretend to be a disciple of the crucified Jesus, who hinders his worship and contravenes his commands; in whom all evangelical charity is extinct; and who will neither enter the kingdom of heaven, nor permit those to approach who would crave admission at the gate? The spirit of Christianity and the practice of men-thieves are at total oppugnation; and consequently they exert their energies to counteract the progress of" pure and undefiled religion." By their example and influence, they endeavour to diminish all regard for sacred institutions, to impede the acquisition of all necessary knowledge, and to obstruct their slaves from listening to the admonitions of divine truth.

Christianity promulges liberty to the captive; it depicts all the misery which must necessarily follow an equitable remuneration, if God requites the slave-holder, as he has abused his fellow-man ; it inculcates the doctrines of justice, which the man-stealer ever violates; of mercy, which never regulate his intercourse with others; of love, which are swallowed up by an avaricious, dissipated extinction of feeling; and of religious fear, which has been exterminated from his heart, by his deliberate rejection of the light