If a man has an exclusive right to property, he can alienate it; he may sell, give, and bequeath it to others. If a man is the property of himself, suppose he shall choose to sell himself to another, and deliver himself in full possession to the purchaser, as he had before been in the full possession of himself—whose property will he be then? See a case in point in _Deut._ xv. 12–17; see also _Exod._ xxi. 1–7. His fifth argument is that, “if a human being cannot without infinite injustice be seized as property, then he cannot, without equal wrong, be held and used as such.” If a human being shall be found a nuisance to himself and others in a state of freedom, then there will be no injustice in his being subjugated, by law, to such control as his qualities prove him to require in reference to the general good; even if the subject shall not choose such control as a personal benefit to himself. The sixth argument is, that a human being cannot be held as property, because, if so held, “the latter is under obligation to give himself up as a chattel to the former.” “Now,” he says, “do we not instantly feel, can we help feeling, that this is false?” And that “the absence of obligation proves the want of the right.” We suppose all acknowledge God as the author of the moral law. The moral law forcibly inculcates submission to the civil or political law, even independent of any promise to do so. Now, no one can have a right to act in contradiction to law. The absence of this right, then, proves the existence of the obligation. For his seventh argument, he says—“I come now to what is, to my mind, the great argument against seizing and using a man as property. He cannot be property in the sight of God and justice, because he is a rational, moral, immortal being; because created in God’s image, and therefore in the highest sense his child; because created to unfold godlike faculties, and to govern himself by a Divine law, written on his heart, and republished in God’s word.” Dr. Channing adds a page or two in the same impulsive strain, of the same enthusiastic character. We may admire his style, his language, the amiable formation of his mind, but we see nothing like precision or logical deduction in support of his proposition. We see nothing in it but the declamation of a learned, yet an over-ardent, enthusiastic mind. His whole book is but a display of his mental formation. He could love his friends; yea, his enemies. He could have rewarded virtue, but he never could have punished sin. He could have forgiven the greatest outrage, but he never could have yielded a delinquent to the rigid demands of justice. He was a good man, but he never could have been an unbending judge.