You will find, in the
thirty-fourth of Jeremiah, that, not content with having Gentile slaves,
the Hebrews violated the law requiring them to release each his Hebrew
slaves once in seven years.
"'I made a covenant with your fathers,' God says, 'in the day that I
brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, saying, At the end of seven
years let ye go every man his brother an Hebrew which hath been sold
unto thee. But ye turned and polluted my name, and caused every man his
servant to return, and brought them unto subjection. Ye have not
hearkened unto me in proclaiming a liberty every one to his
brother;--behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the
sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine.'
"Thus it is evident that the relation of master and servant was
originally ordained and instituted by God as a benevolent arrangement to
all concerned,--not 'winked at,' or 'suffered,' like polygamy, but
ordained,--that it was full of blessings to all who fulfilled the duties
of the relation in the true spirit of the institution; and, moreover, it
is true that there are few curses which will be more intolerable than
they will suffer who make use of their fellow-men, in the image of God,
for the purposes of selfishness and sin; while those who feel their
accountableness in this relation, and discharge it in the spirit of the
Bible, will find their hearts refined and ennobled, and the relationship
will be, to all concerned, a source of blessings whose influences will
bring peace to their souls when the grave of the slave and that of his
owner are looking up into the same heavens from the common earth.
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