" In that last day, the mayors, recorders, sheriffs, and others,
who have been engaged, whether in their official or individual capacity,
in slave-catching and man-stealing, will find human laws but a flimsy
protection against the wrath of Him, who judges his creatures by his own
and not by human laws. In that "last day," all who have had a part, and
have not repented of it, in the sin of treating man as property; all, I
say, whether slaveholders or their official or unofficial assistants,
the drivers upon their plantations, or their drivers in the free
States--all, who have been guilty of throwing God's "image" into the
same class with the brutes of the field--will find, that He is the
avenger of his poorest, meanest ones--and that the crime of transmuting
His image into property, is but aggravated by the fact and the plea that
it was committed under the sanction of human laws.
But, to return--wherein does the letter of Paul to Philemon justify
slaveholding? What evidence does it contain, that Philemon was a
slaveholder at the time it was written? He, who had been his slave "in
time past," had, very probably, escaped before Philemon's conversion to
Christ.
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