property of God: and God no more gave him up to be the property of the executioner of his wrath, than the people of the State of New York give up the offender against public justice to be the property of the ministers of that justice. God never suspends the accountability of his rational creatures to himself: and his rights to them, He never transfers to others. He could not do so consistently with his attributes, and his indissoluble relations to man. But slavery claims, that its subjects are the property of man. It claims to turn them into mere chattels, and to make them as void of responsibility to God, as other chattels. Slavery, in a word, claims to push from his throne the Supreme Being, who declares, "all souls are mine." That it does not succeed in getting its victim out of God's hand, and in unmanning and _chattelizing_ him--that God's hold upon him remains unbroken, and that those upward tendencies of the soul, which distinguish man from the brute, are not yet entirely crushed in him--is no evidence in favor of its nature:--it simply proves, that its power is not equal to its purposes. We see, then, that the Jews--if it be true that they reduced their fellow men to involuntary servitude, and did so as the Heaven-appointed ministers of God's justice,--are not to be charged with slaveholding for it. There may be involuntary servitude where there is no slavery. The essential and distinguishing feature of slavery is its reduction of man to property--to a thing. A tenant of one of our state prisons is under a sentence of "hard labor for life." But he is not a slave. That is, he is not the _thing_ which slavery would mark its subject. He is still a man. Offended justice has placed him in his present circumstances, because he is a man: and, it is because he is a _man_ and not a _thing_--a responsible, and not an irresponsible being, that he must continue in his present trials and sufferings. God's commandments to the Jews, respecting servants and strangers, show that He not only did not authorize them to set up the claim of property in their fellow men, but that He most carefully guarded against such exercises of power, as might lead to the assumption of a claim so wrongful to Himself. Some of these commandments I will bring to your notice. They show that whatever was the form of servitude under which God allowed the Jews to hold the heathen, it was not slavery. Indeed, if all of the Word of God which bears on this point were cited and duly explained, it would, perhaps, appear that He allowed no involuntary servitude whatever amongst the Jews. I give no opinion whether he allowed it or not. There are strong arguments which go to show, that He did not allow it; and with these arguments the public will soon be made more extensively acquainted. It is understood, that the next number of the Anti-Slavery Examiner will be filled with them.