"Not so with the slaves of foreign extraction; nor even with the Hebrew
whose ear was bored, provided his wife was given him in slavery, and he
had elected to live with her rather than be free. Not even upon the
death of the owner could such slaves be manumitted, as was the case
ordinarily with regard to Hebrew slaves; but property in these Gentile
slaves, and in Hebrew slaves reduced to the same condition, God ordained
should be an 'inheritance,' passing down forever from father to child.
"No jubilee trumpet was to cheer their hearts. Think what the jubilee
morning must have been to those slaves in hopeless bondage, if bondage
were necessarily such as many fancy. Our abolitionists represent the
bells and guns of our Fourth of July to be a hideous mockery in the ears
of the slaves; and multitudes of our good people ludicrously fancy them
as most miserable on that day, by the contrast of their enslaved
condition with our boasted Independence. Let us borrow this fancy, and
apply it to the Hebrew slave.
"The jubilee trumpets, and all the joyous scenes of the fiftieth year in
Israel, caused multitudes of slaves in Israel, we will suppose, to
reflect, This Jehovah, God of Israel, has doomed us to hopeless bondage.
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