4. That which constitutes the grand fountain of slavery,--the forcible, stealthy seizure of a man, for the purpose of holding or selling him as a slave,--was, under the Mosaic dispensation, punishable with death; and is, in the New Testament, named in connection with the most heinous crimes. "He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death." What could more forcibly exhibit God's disapprobation of one of the distinctive features of slavery,--compulsion? What more impressively show the value that he puts upon a man's personal independence,--his right to himself? Now if God doomed that man to die a felon's death who should steal and sell a fellow man, can it be that he would hold him guiltless who should buy the stolen man, knowing him to have been stolen? God's people were, indeed, allowed to "buy bondmen and bondmaids" of the strangers that dwelt among them, and of the surrounding heathen. But were they ever allowed to buy persons whom they knew to have been unlawfully obtained, and offered for sale in manifest opposition to their own wishes? If they were not,--and, from the statute just referred to, it seems certain that they were not,--does American slavery derive countenance from that which was tolerated in the Jewish church and nation? True, the slaves now held as such among us were not themselves feloniously seized on a foreign soil, torn away from kindred, homes, and country, and sold into hopeless bondage in a strange land; but their sires and grandsires were. Man-stealing is confessedly the stock out of which has sprung, and grown to its present dimensions, the vast and overshadowing Upas of American slavery; and if the Bible brands that stock as pestiferous, must not the entire tree partake of the noxious influence? Again: if, as competent critics assert, the popular sense of the word rendered "men-stealers," in 1 Tim. i. 10, be "those who deal in men--literally, slave-traders," then trafficking in slaves for mercenary ends is, by Paul, ranked among vices the most abominable; and American slavery is, if possible, more pointedly condemned by that passage than by the statute found in Ex. xxi. 16. For who does not know that trading in "the persons of men" has ever been, and yet is, a main pillar in the fabric of slavery? Indeed, man-stealing and slave-trading are to slave-holding precisely what the business of the distiller and of the vendor is to the vice of intemperance. There is, in either case, a trio of associated evils; and it is difficult to say which member of either trio is the most repulsive and harmful.