flagitious invasion of the laws of nature when it deprives any portion of its subjects of personal freedom; and such persons would be fully justified on the ground of civil justice in resisting or evading such a law. In no court of political equity can a thief plead for stolen property, and in our own, as well as in those of the United States, the receiver is always regarded criminis particeps.

Further still, a fugitive slave might urge his claims to freedom on the grounds of civil society itself. Every such society has just claims on its citizens, to a certain extent. We need neither study Vatel nor Blackstone to know what those claims are, for they are among the selfevident truths which require little or no aid from ratiocination. Every political society has a right to claim that the citizen shall render spontaneous and uniform obedience to just laws; that he cultivate his talents for the public good; that he take care of his own health, and pursue no objects detrimental to his neighbour or the commonwealth; that he should be ever ready to defend the liberties and rights of the state; that he should contribute a fair proportion to the expenditure of the society; and that the citizen ought to provide against himself or his family becoming a burden to the community. Men of all theories admit these claims of society upon its members; but how is a slave, who neither possesses the control of his person or time, who can have no property nor adequate respect for the estate or the rights of others, whose children are not under the command of their parents, and who has no other power of locomotion than his master chooses to concede, to perform all these duties to society? He is a cypher in the eye of the law; has nothing, and can never be anything more than a brute while he is a slave; and as his condition compels him to neglect his parental or marital duties, so it prevents him from meeting the just demands of civil society. Surely, there never was a more conclusive proof of the depravation of human reason, than the fact, that multitudes of nominal and educated Christians argue, without a blush, that a fugitive slave violates the laws of society and religion by escaping from a master who has no just right to his services, and never can acquire one.

If Onesimus should have further pleaded his right to freedom on the great facts of Christianity, we believe his flight cannot be equitably condemned. The Scripture requires the disciples of Christ to study his doctrine, precept, and examples, to search the Scriptures,' and 'to give attendance to reading.' One of the slave laws of North Carolina decrees death for the third offence of teaching a slave to read.' Here, then, is the law of slavery making impossible obedience to the laws of God. The genius of slavery is always the same, and no men better know than slave-dealers that knowledge is power, and that ignorance is weakness, by the continuance of which alone can the vassal population be subjugated. Slavery never was, and never can be, co-existent with mental cultivation. Christianity, on the other hand, enjoins it, raises a thirst for knowledge, fosters the spirit of inquiry, and makes incumbent on its disciples to judge ye what I say,' to *prove all things,' and to compare spiritual things with spiritual,' that ye may he wise.' The gospel of Christ clears the intellectual atmo

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sphere, expands the range of thought, kindles imagination, creates a world of new sentiments and divine emotions in the hearts of its followers, and ever urges them to follow on that they may know the Lord.' The two systems, therefore, are antagonistic. Either slavery must prevail, and establish by force and terror its reign of ignorance necessary to its pepetuation, or Christianity, with its light and absolute theory of justice, must predominate and destroy bondage. The two elements have a different origin and ultimatum; the one being divine love, attended with truth and justice; the other selfishness, having in its train the gangs of Mammon, and the hideous forms of every vice. If slavery could be made a permanent constituent of nations, their speedy decline would be an absolute certainty: if Christianity triumph, it will only be when 'knowledge shall cover the earth, as waters do the deep.' Let us suppose Onesimus took such a view of slavery as this, who would forbid his flight from the state that abhors truth to that which welcomes and cherishes it?

The Christian records require the disciples of Jesus to perform various duties which the fugitive slave might very justly object. slavery makes impossible. The laws of Christ enjoin frequent attendance in the Christian assembly; visitation of the sick, the poor, the prisoner, and the friendless; going about to do good;' to lay up every week a portion of our earnings for Christian uses; frequent retirement for thought, prayer, and communion with God; evangelistic labours; reconciliation of disputes; visiting offenders, and reclaiming the backslider, and so forth. These duties imply spontaneity, and control of a portion of one's time, neither of which does a state of slavery tolerate. How can a slave, who has nothing, give, or be expected to feel becoming sympathies with others who are enjoying all the advantages of freedom, while he is himself a serf, who may not even claim the property in his own fingers, or the free use of his eyes, his ears, or his feet? To talk of the possibility of being a Christian and a slave, and to hawk about extraordinary incidents of slaveChristianity, is mockery, and only akin to that hideous political economy that contemplates without indignation human beings feeding on carrion, and huddling in putrid dens, strangers alike to water, light, and air. It is not a question how far Christianity, by its miraculous forces, can triumph over civil or physical obstacles; but whether any man has a right to place his brother or sister in such circumstances, as will determine the lowest possible quality of his religion, if it do not prevent it altogether; and whether a slave so situated may not boldly take his stand on the great charter of Christ, and abscond from the tyranny of a servitude that is condemned alike by natural reason, the laws of civil life, and the express authority of the Christian covenant.

If nature, society, and the Divine Being, thus require from man services which slavery makes it impossible to render, we infer that the slave who takes his ground on the three-fold rights thus secured to him is justified in obtaining his liberty by flight. The man who steals his brother is a robber of the deepest criminality; and his accomplices

are those who protect his fraud, justify his violence, or share his spoil; and we refuse to reason with him who parades a putrid honour of not escaping from the robber's gang. We hold the laws of society sacred, except they be clearly subversive of those of nature and of Heaven. Such cases are very rare indeed; but slavery is one of them; and if the slave chooses to submit or wait for the progressive influence of time to work his liberation, we admire his patience more than his logic; but, in the meantime, we cannot be brought to condemn the more resolute and intelligent vassal who is determined to wrest by flight from his master that liberty which society may have connived at, but could never give the right of, invading. It is clearly a perversion of reason to claim the sanction of social laws for ill-gotten property, and to repudiate it when it applies to eternal rights anterior to all society. We are free to confess that we should not advise slaves to fly from their masters generally, but would rather help them to demand an honourable emancipation by a change of the law. But who, with a pretence to any decent conceptions of justice, or that carries a heart of generous fraternities with the human race in his bosom, would arrest the young slave fugitive from her paramour owner; or the intense mother in search of her long-lost child; or the husband in pursuit of his wife; or the Christian seeking the freedom of worship; or the thinking slave who burns with a passion for liberty; or the poor lacerated victim who flies from his tormentor; or the sable sister" yearning to see her brother; or the inexperienced, but ill-used youth on a journey of exploration to discover his father, who was sold from his side years before? In the name of Heaven, let them go, they should have our hearty' speed,' as they fled to the mountains.

The slave and his friends are frequently told that the Bible is not the antagonist of slavery, for the Jews are said to have observed the institution of slavery, and Christianity does not condemn it. As it has been often disingenuously brought against the Mosaic institute that it encouraged slavery, the reader will pardon us for drawing his attention to the two extracts of the Divine Law on the subject of slave-dealing, which are to be found in Exod. xxi. 16 and Deut. xxiv. 7, where we find He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hands, he shall surely be put to death.' For other robbery Jehovah decreed various compensatory penalties, but for any of the three degrees of the sin-procuring, traffic, or POSSESSION of slaves-the law was death. It is altogether impertinent to plead the subsequent practice of the Jews, for whom this law was issued. But even if this practice were granted, it must be remembered that Jewish servitude only continued six years, and not that when the Jubilee occurred in any of the sexennial periods. And there is no proof that the Israelites ever trafficked in slavery as such, or that Judea, in the time of Christ, contained any other slaves than had been introduced by its Egyptian, Grecian, or Roman conquerors. We think it unnecessary to repel the other accusation; for if Christianity have spoken little on the subject, that little is clearly to denunciate the slave-master, and even to countenance the fugitive slave in its' If thou mayest be free, use it rather.”

We have hitherto supposed our slavery is no greater an evil than it was among the Grecian isles, or in the imperial cities of Rome, or the provinces. To be just, however, we must remember, that in three important particulars, modern slavery is an oppression of far greater magnitude and crime than any form of obligatory servitude that ever existed. Harsh as the pagan slavery appeared, and really was, emancipation was more easily attainable, both legally and by custom, than it is with us; no man became a slave on account of the colour of his skin; and the nations that practised slavery had no such a knowledge of revelation as to enable them to form sound theories of the rights of mankind. And we might mention as a fourth apologetic for ancient slavery, the circumstance, that notions of liberty were, even among the greatest thinkers, very indistinct; while history had presented to the mind of Rome few or none of those various experiments of the universal tendency of slavery with which modern history teems. If slavery could ever be exculpated, it would be only when found in alliance with paganism with a period of non-education, and semibarbarism with absolute despotisms, and an age singularly deficient in the science of nature and political economy; and such was the condition of its existence on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, or the Tiber. But the nation that most obnoxiously retains slavery, in modern times, is a Christian republic, whose citizens are foremost in the study of every useful art, of profound and elegant scholarship, and of philosophical science, and which yet has outraged all the severe decrees of the ruthless monsters of antiquity, by publishing its most inhuman and impolitic Fugitive Slave Law, the ultimate effect of which will be to break slavery's bow.

The philosophy of duties is a very difficult science; but, through the goodness and wisdom of God, all the ordinary duties and rights of men are clearly discernible. This is as it should be: for even if every hundredth man could reason, the masses would be lost if duties were not written in large. And who can deny-even if he do not believe that Christianity has spoken on the subject of the fugitive slave-that it has met his case in its memorable and all-comprehensive, Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them, for this is the law and the prophets?' For what vehement abettor of slavery, if reduced to a bondman, and in the act of escaping from a master, who had no moral right to his services, towards liberty, which the Act of Independence declares to be the birthright of all, would be able to feel that his captor was doing only right? Try the fugitive slave by reason, natural law, the civil compact, political economy, Christianity, or even the ordinary selfishness implied in the above precept, and he must be acquitted. Onesimus was a fugitive slave, but he had complicated his case by other misdemeanours; but complicated as it is, the apostle procured his enlargement, without appealing to the rights of nature or the policy of states, on the ground of his being a Christian brother

alone.

Some of the Christian writers in behalf of slavery have alleged, that even if the Scriptures did not otherwise countenance slavery, they forbid

the escape of the slave by their principles of non-resistance to evil! This is searching for a precedent with a vengeance; and akin to the notion of one of our preachers, that Satan is the most diligent student of the Book of Revelation.' We believe in the unsearchable wisdom of the non-resistance doctrine of Christ; but it is only incumbent on his disciples, and applicable to the cases, or the class of cases, to which the Divine Teacher referred. Can the advocate of slavery prove that the fugitive slave is one of those cases? Will he affirm that five per cent. of the slave population is Christian? and even were it all so, is he prepared to enforce by law the non-resistance doctrine on men, all whose rights have been annihilated by their captivity? Yes, the spirit that advertises for a fugitive, dead or alive, is prepared to set fire to the world, to leap from Niagara, or to fall like Phaeton, in the cause of Mammon; and so it will fall.

R. S. B.

Biblical compared with other Ancient Bistories.

II.-CHRONOLOGY SPECIFICALLY CONSIDERED.

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IN critical judgments, as in physics, action and reaction induce one another, and, viewed in long bearings of mutual influence, are found at last pretty nearly equal. For a considerable period the current of literary fashion ran strong against the credibility of the biblical history. Its more ancient portions were accounted little else than a tissue of fable and fabulous history. Imitating the superficial scepticism of the French philosophism, ponderous Germans, literary sons of Anak,' applied a certain sledge-hammer power to dash in pieces. the stout edifice of biblical history, which had survived many an assault, and seemed destined for an earthly deathlessness. The noise and the confusion consequent on those blows resounded over Europe, and made men believe that verily the old house had fallen. When the delusion began to prevail, it was unexpectedly augmented and impelled by the enthusiasm called forth by the decyphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Certain results, too, of that unveiling, seemed at first to swell the adverse tide. In chronology, at any rate, the Bible was wrong, grossly wrong, and its history was far inferior to the trustworthy disclosures of the valley of the Nile. Nay, had the Bible anything which deserved the name of history? What in courtesy or in ignorance had been called history, was little else than sacerdotal figments begotten on credulity by the love of power. Bold statements of this nature commanded silence when they did not conciliate belief. By the force of repetition, assailants of the biblical history created a popular sentiment in their favour. Soon the din