nizes the institution, it is not to be forgotten that the other and earlier charter opens with the annunciation, as of an elementary truth, of the great principle, that all men, be they of what hue or what lineage they may, are entitled to freedom. There is here, then, a necessary altercation amongst the muniments and title-deeds of our Republic; and a Senator from the North who construes the first, as in his mind overruling the last, is not so easily proved guilty to the allegiance he has vowed the Republic and the Union. The Declaration constituted the swathings, so to speak, of that infant Hercules of Freedom, for whom the Constitution supplied but at most a cradle and a go-cart. Or if the Constitution resembled rather the lion-skin on which the sturdy infant rolled, in his first gambollings, the other and earlier lay yet nearer-it was the very cuticle the creating hand drew over the nerves and veins of the child. Or to borrow an illustration from our own denominational usages, if the instrument of the Constitution resembles the Ordination Creed, the symbol of the political faith we are to promulge, full and studied, the other and earlier is not less binding and solemn-it is the baptismal confession, the profession of our national birth, and entrance into the commonwealth of nations, when, baptized into colonial death, we emerged to a new life of corporate independence. They bind alike.

But, in carrying out the Constitutional requisition, our brethren at the South should remember, that, whatever burdens this provision in the Constitution may impose on legislators and judges, it cannot come, with an equal stress, upon those who have not taken an explicit oath to the Constitution, except in the following shape. If a man, from conscientious convictions, believe certain statutes of the land to impose on him requirements which he cannot discharge and remain innocent before God, such citizen may, with equal patriotism and piety, bear meekly the full fine and imprisonment such laws enact as the penalty of disobedience, and having done this, hold himself clear, before God and man, of all further obligation. We speak of an ordinary citizen who has not, by oath voluntarily taken, pledged or seemed to pledge himself to more than such obedience. The Nonconformist history in England illustrated this, and often. Those confessors scrupled, many of them, to take the Et cætera oath, as it was called, binding them not only to conformity with present and existing forms, but with such others, and so forth, as might yet be enacted in addition. Yet the law of the land required the magistrate to tender, and them to assume the engage

ment, and annexed grave penalties to the refusal. They refused, and so far disobeyed law: but they endured the fine and incarceration, and so far fully cleared their consciences, and yielded to Cæsar all the obedience he could rightfully ask. There are, we believe, at the North, men, and God-fearing men, not a few, who, not because they "despise dignities,' but because they do supremely revere the Potentate, supremest in dignity, would confront and endure the strictest and heaviest incarceration and amercement which the laws, new or old, might devise for harborers of the fugitive slave. Let but a few such instances of the punishment rigorously exacted and meekly endured occur; and it would be enough. He knows not the slow but sturdy North, hardly kindled, but long retentive of its fires, like its own Anthracite; he knows not human nature, who does not believe, that, if convictions were had under some stringent law, against a few Northern martyrs of humanity, it would soon raise a storm of sympathy and indignation, which would make the further enforcement of the law an impossibility. The Quakers, under the restored Stuarts in England, extorted from a profligate and callous government the retractation of its own penal statutes, by the meek resolution with which they confronted the penalty, until they had glutted the gaols, and disheartened the judges. And a law of extradition, severe in its sanctions, and rigorously enforced, could at the North, we firmly believe, provoke but one result-its own practical repeal, if it did not rend beyond repair the bands of the Union. In the days of Rehoboam, the strong-handed attempt to convert the whips of Solomon into stinging scorpions, served to exasperate rather than to intimidate; and the sceptre which it was thus sought to harden was only left the more brittle by the process, to be shattered in the grasp of the popular fury.

But why should religious men feel thus? There are, then, at the North many, not sympathizing in the Anti-slavery movement, who would quietly withstand such attempt to enhance the stringency of laws for extradition. We know one who has held, for years, that the Scriptures did not sanction the saying that slaveholding was in itself sin; but who has held, as long and as firmly, that the fugitive slave is not, at least in many cases, to be restored to his pursuers. We suppose such opinions would, on examination, be found common. Individuals belonging to this class would not join the Vigilance Committees, to organize a regular line of refuge, relief and guidance, for the escape of the Southern bondsman; nor when a Christian slave, kindly treated and trusted by a

Christian master, asked their advice, counsel him to abscond. But when a slave, not counselled by them, and fleeing on his own responsibility, sought at their hands food and concealment, in his perilous flight from an incensed owner, these men would, in all good conscience, feel themselves bound not to close the door, and would gird themselves to defy the statutory consequences, far as the meek endurance of penalties could be deemed defiance. They love their country and its laws, and believe them wise and good; but they do not believe their wisdom or their goodness perfect. They see, as they suppose, an older and an unerring statute, the enactment of a Ruler to whom they have vowed an entire and unquestioning and perpetual allegiance, prescribing, as they suppose, that an unhappy fugitive, who may be the slave of an unjust and oppressive master, shall find shelter and defense, nor be yielded to his master, until at least that proprietor shall have proved his gentleness and equity, and the causelessness of the slave's flight and complaint. True, indeed, it was part of God's civil jurisprudence, for the limited and transitory dispensation, the Levitical, under which the Jews were placed in Palestine. But these reasoners suppose this, like many other portions of that civil code, inspired in authorship, though meant for a certain region and age mainly, to refer to certain great and elementary principles of humanity and justice, which reason and natural right made binding, in regions for which that national code was not given, and in the centuries that elapsed before the promulgation, as in those that have ensued since the abolition of that code. Humanity to the brute beast, for instance, prescribed in the Mosaic law, was a duty, and will remain a duty, in times and in lands which the Mosaic economy was not intended to reach. And so humanity to man, much more. The mode of expressing that tenderness and sympathy to one fleeing, in certain circumstances, from a heavy yoke and the house of a cruel bondage, is given in Deuteronomy: "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him." The germs of national well-being, disclosed in the old Hebrew polity, were long overlooked by philosophers, disdainful only because of their own heedlessness and shallowness. The tendency of later times is most evidently and rapidly, to restore the name of the Pentateuch to a high place among civil codes, were it regarded merely on

*Chap. xxiii. 15, 16.

that side, and apart from the divinity of its origin, and its place in the great and unfolding scheme of Providence for the preparation, manifestation and diffusion of Messiah's one and immutable kingdom. The law of Homestead Exemption, for instance, now caught from the legislation of one State to that of another, with contagious speed, is but a fragment and reminiscence of Hebrew polity. So there may be truths of world-wide applicability, and permanent value and permanent obligation, in the precept above quoted. For the wise and safe exposition of its language it may, perchance, be advisable to go back to earlier times, and other lands, where the excited controversies of our own age and country were unknown, and could not therefore lend an unconscious bias to the mind of the interpreter. We turn to Dom Augustin Calmet, the learned Benedictine scholar, whose Dictionary on the Bible is universally known, and whose Commentary on the Scriptures Adam Clarke deemed, "without exception, the best comment ever published on the sacred writings, either by Catholics or Protestants," and as displaying in its appended dissertations, "immense learning, good sense, sound judgment, and deep piety invariably." If this be large praise, yet much of it, at least, is not unmerited. Calmet's remarks on our portion of Scripture are, then, these :†

"v. 15. Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant, when he shall have fled unto thee. The law of nature itself requires, that we receive and protect those, who betake themselves to us for refuge. The laws themselves provide that, in certain cases, servants might abscond from their masters. They prescribe it also as a thing settled, that we may rightly harbor such fugitives, lest such laws should seem but to grant a permission that was in practice valueless. Nay, even the manslayer himself was allowed refuge and protection. Philo‡ observes as to the injustice of restoring to his master the slave seeking an asylum with us; and that endeavors should rather be used to reconcile the master to him, or at least to procure his sale to some new owner, the former master receiving the purchase money. If, in the latter event, the slave could have no certainty of securing an owner better than the first, he escapes one unquestionable danger, in shielding himself from the vengeful passions of the former proprietor. The Rabbins

* Commentary by Adam Clarke. General Preface.

We translate from the Latin version of J. D. Mansi, published at Wurtzburgh, 1781-1793, in 18 vols. quarto. Calmet's original French was not accessible to us at the time. Mansi was the learned Italian scholar, Archbishop of Lucca, who published the celebrated collection of Councils.

Philo, lib. De Humanitate.

The Chald. Paraphrast, and other Rabbinical writers.

restrict this privilege, on the part of the slave, of escaping from a master. So also they limit his right to find shelter with some other person, holding the latter bound only to show the slave the kindness of keeping him out of the reach of his first owner. They hold, therefore, that the right extends to those slaves who have sold themselves for a stipulated price, or who escape out of a neighboring (and pagan) country, or from a Gentile master have fled into Canaan, to become there proselytes to Judaism. The initiatory rite of circumcision became the inviolable stamp and badge of freedom. Some believe that the former owner was repaid, out of the public treasury, the price of the fugitive, thus to compensate for his pecuniary loss. In this manner Judæa became a land of asylum and freedom for those renouncing idolatry. The privilege did not include, however, the case of slaves sentenced to bondage for crime, or who were so bound, either until their service had made equivalent recompense for a theft committed, or in discharge of a debt they were unable otherwise to pay, or again those whom the judges had sentenced to slavery." (Calmet, Tom. ii., p. 742.)

If Calvin be consulted, in his exposition of the Pentateuch, he will be found perhaps from a dread of seeming, in the fugitive from slavery, to favor the doctrine of the Romish" Church, that made temples sanctuaries for the criminal fleeing only from justice; or it may be from his position in Geneva, a city whose relations made it much a shelter and resort for exiles, alike the worthiest and the vilest-leaning to a narrowed application of the precept, yet seeming to rest in the construction, "that when it was once ascertained (by course of law) that the slaves fled, not because of crime done, but from a master's excess of cruelty, the people were forbidden to repel them, to have done which would virtually have been flinging them into the shambles. And it may be certainly, inferred that a legal examination was had, from the election given them, as to the city of their abode." The illustrious scholar and jurist, Selden, in one of his great works,‡ adverts to this same passage in Deuteronomy, with the remark, after having stated that the Jews held under it the right of a Hebrew slave to abscond from a master who should carry him out of the Holy Land: "Which text is also applied to the slave who is a fugitive into the land of Israel from a Gentile

* See Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis, lib. iii., c. 7, § 8.

Or, as Matthew Henry has it: "In that case to deliver him up is to throw a lamb into the mouth of a lion."

De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebræorum, lib. vi., cap. 8 pp. 745-6, ed. Argentorati, 1665.