affirm that the relation of master and slave regards the slave as a brute, and not as an accountable man. “The blind passivity of a corpse, or the mechanical obedience of a tool,” which Channing and Whewell regard as constituting the essential idea of slavery, seems never to have entered the minds of the apostles. They considered slavery as a social and political economy, in which relations involving reciprocal rights and duties subsisted, between moral, intelligent, and responsible beings, between whom, as between men in other relations, religion held the scales of justice. The right of property in man, as man, is nowhere taught in Scripture, although it distinctly recognizes the relation of master and slave. The right which the master has in the slave, according to the Scriptures, is, _not to the man_, but to so much of his time and labor as is consistent with his rights of humanity. The master who disregards these claims, denies his slave that which is “just and equal.” The duty which the slave owes, is the service which, in conformity with these rights, the master exacts. A failure in either party is a breach of Scripture. The only difference between free and slave labor is, that the one is rendered in consequence of a contract, and the other in consequence of a command. Each is service rendered according to the will of another; and each may, or may not, be according to the consent of the party rendering service. The former is often as _involuntary_, in point of fact, as the latter. Hirelings _assent_ to it, in most cases, as a necessity of their condition. They do not _consent_ to it--they are far from choosing it. A few persons reach that high attainment of a pure Christianity, in which they learn in every state in which they are placed, in the providence of God, “therewith to be content”--they choose it. But in the general, hired service is, in point of fact, as involuntary as slave labor. A right, therefore, to the time and labor of another to a definite extent, by no means involves the right to his humanity. Such right is a mere fiction, to which even the imagination can give no significance or consistency. “It is the miserable cant of those who would storm by prejudice what they cannot demolish by argument.”