bring the Levites before the tabernacle of the congregation: and thou shalt gather the whole assembly of the children of Israel together: and thou shalt bring the Levites before the Lord : and the children of Israel shall put their hands upon the Levites; and Aaron shall offer the Levites before the Lord for an offering of the children of Israel, that they may execute the service of the Lord.”” Thus the sacred tribe is ordained to its office by the laying on of the hands of the whole people. Nor is there any restriction of religious knowledge and teaching to the Levite, as there is to the Brachmans and othér priestly castes. The performance of the ritual alone is confined to the hereditary priesthood: the spiritual life of the nation is left free, and it finds its organs in the prophet and-the psalmist, not in the priest.

Yet an argument has been sought in the ordinances of the Old Law concerning the Levites for the establishment in the Church of Christ of a priestly Order, self-ordained, and invested not only with the exclusive right of performing public worship, but with the sole custody of religious truth.

So with regard to the nature of the Jewish worship. All the nations worshipped God by sacrifice and through outward forms till the mind of man had been raised high enough to worship in spirit and in truth. The Hebrew lawgiver did not originate sacrificial rites; but he elevated and purified them, and guarded them against the most horrible aberrations as to the nature of God and the mode of winning His favor and averting His wrath; as all who know the history of heathen sacrifices, Eastern or Western, must perceive. The scape-goat has been and is a subject of much mockery to philosophers. Moses did not introduce that symbolic way of relieving the souls of a people from the burden of sin and assuring them of the mercy of God: but he took care that the scape-goat should be a goat, and not, as at polished Athens and civilized Rome, a man.

AMERICAN SLAVERY 2

The religious system of the Jews was primitive, and there- to fore gross compared with Christian worship. It was spiritual § o

compared with the religious system of the most refined and ... : : cultivated heathen nations. Nevertheless, to those who did, x-, : not consider it in this comparative point of view, or with so reference to the time of its institution, it has o So ments for introducing unspiritual forms, and something resem- ** o o * bling sacrifice, into Christian worship. ... • - - c - .." o It has been said by enemies of the Bible, with some exag- ; o

geration, but also unfortunately with some truth, that modern : * fanatics “feed their pride on the language of the Chosen & . . . . People.” This is another case of the same kind. In ancient s : Q times, before Humanity was one, each nation was the “Chosen to ~s s People” of a God of its own: but the Hebrew nation was o St. the Chosen people of the true God. And as the Chosen ‘so People of the true God, the Jews were taught, compared with o s other nations, not national pride but national humility. They were taught, not that they had sprung of a divine seed and ; o won their land by their own might and valor, but that “a r Syrian ready to perish was their father”; that they had been -. * bondsmen in the land of Egypt; and that they had been o o brought out of their bondage, not by their own arm, but by . . . . . the arm of their God, to whom they owed their land and all ; o they had. “And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God * * * require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all o - o His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God * : with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the com- . mandments of the Lord, and His statutes, which I command • : . thee this day for thy good P Behold, the heaven and the "So heaven of heavens is the Lord's thy God, the earth also, with : s s all that therein is. Only the Lord had a delight in thy so, fathers to love them, and He choose their seed after them, 3 t * even you above all people, as it is this day. Circumcise, ; therefore, the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff- 3. so o necked. For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord

e o o

& S :

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of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye, therefore, the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God; Him shalt thou serve, and to Him shalt thou cleave, and swear by His Name. He is thy praise, and He is thy God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen. Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons; and now the Lord thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude.”" This, though the language of a “Chosen People,” is, compared with the self-praise of the Greeks and Romans, far from being the language of national pride. Yet there are some expressions in the passage which could not be used without fanaticism, by any nation or community, now that we know the relation in which all men alike stand to God, and to each other.

Finally, to ascend to the highest sphere of all, the Hebrews had, like other ancient nations, a national Deity, whose name was Jehovah. The national Deity of the Hebrews, unlike those of other nations, was God indeed. All His attributes were those of the true God, though but partially revealed: and His worship has consequently passed into the worship of the Universal Father without break or incongruity, as the light of dawn brightens and broadens into the light of day. But it is as God the universal Father of all that He is worshipped by Christians, not as Jehovah the Deity of the Hebrew nation.

Having thus seen the relation of the Old Testament to primitive institutions, customs, and ideas generally, we come to the particular case of Slavery.

Slavery is found existing in all barbarous nations, from the Chinese to the ancient Germans. Civilized nations have gradually emerged from it. Russia, the last-born of civilization, has just emancipated her serfs. Within the pale of Christendom, the institution now remains only in the slaveowning communities of America, and in the dependencies of Spain. And in these countries it is found in connection with a certain kind of agriculture, which is supposed to require negro laborers working in large gangs. In the Dutch dependency of Java it exists in a qualified form, and the party of humanity in Holland is now demanding its abolition.

The authors of the Declaration of Independence, on which the American Constitution for the Slave as well as for the Free States is founded, say: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the con

>sent of the governed.” Supposing the negro to be a man, the

slave-owners who have set their hands to these sentiments have pronounced the doom of their own institution and saved its adversaries further trouble. But it must, in fairness to them, be owned that they have set their hands to too much. It can scarcely be held that liberty, political or personal, is the inalienable right of every human being. Children possess neither political nor personal liberty till they arrive at

what the law, a law which they had no share in making, pronounces to be years of discretion. Women have no political liberties, and married women have personal liberties only of a very qualified kind. Under despotic governments, the immorality of which can scarcely be held to be in all cases self-evident, no one has political liberty. Even under constitutional governments, where the suffrage is limited, as it is to some extent in most of those which are commonly called free countries, the unenfranchised classes are as destitute of political liberty as the subjects of a despotism. The political power which commands their obedience is vested, it is true, in a greater number of hands, and is on that account more controlled by the influence of opinion, and less liable to gross abuse; but it commands their obedience as absolutely and as irrespectively of their own consent, as though it were that of a despotic prince. The equality between man and man on which this indefeasible claim to political and personal liberty is founded, is in truth rather a metaphysical notion than a fact. Not only children and the weaker sex, but the great mass of men, are so constituted by nature, or so circumstanced, as to be inevitably dependent upon others; and to say that they have an equal right to independence with those on whom they are necessarily dependent would be an abuse, or at least a very barren use, of words. That to which every moral being has an indefeasible right, besides life, is the “pursuit of happiness.” In other words, he has a right to have his moral interests considered and respected, and not to be treated as a being having no moral interests of his own, – a mere “living tool,” as the slave is called by Aristotle, or a “chattel personal,” as he is called by the American law. Every moral being has a right, in other words, to be treated by the community as a person, and not as a thing. And in every state of society which is sound, however primitive it may be, and however remote from our advanced ideas of political and personal liberty, these conditions of respecting the moral interests of each member, and of treating each