revolutionize the world by at once authoritatively prohibiting the slavery then existing everywhere, yet His teaching tended directly to lead to its abolition by sure though slow degrees. Emancipation from the power of sin and Satan is so great a boon, that St. Paul felt it could make even slavery endurable, and yet he advises every Christian slave to seek his liberty, when he can fairly do so, as the servile state was inconsistent with his new standing as a freeman in the Lord Jesus Christ. This we learn plainly from what is written in 1 Cor. vii. 21-3, 'Wast thou called being a bondservant? care not for it: but if thou canst become free, use it rather. For he that was called in the Lord, being a bondservant, is the Lord's freedman: likewise he that was called, being free, is Christ's bondservant. Ye were bought with a price; become not bondservants of men.' This tendency of Christianity has also been manifestly unfolded in the course of history; for in whatever land the Gospel of Jesus Christ was believed and obeyed, there also slavery was first ameliorated, and then altogether abolished.

6. On Polygamy and Divorce.

Although the Law of Moses protected the rights of women more than the laws of most heathen nations, yet it left the power of divorce in the hands of the husband, who was still legally permitted to send away his wife, if she did not 'find favour in his eyes', as we read in Deut. xxiv. 1-2, 'When a

man taketh a wife, and marrieth her, then it shall be, if she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house. And when she is departed out of his house, she may go, and be another man's wife.'¹ It may also be stated in favour of the Mosaic Law, that it put some check upon the abuse of this power of the husband, by prohibiting him from taking back, under any circumstances, the wife he had divorced, after she had become the wife of another man (Deut. xxiv. 3-4). And in Mal. ii. 16 it is expressly said that divorce is contrary to the will of the Lord. So again, in Gen. ii. 24, it is plainly declared to have been the purpose of the benign Creator, that, by marrying, 'a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh' (Gen. ii. 24). But there were no legal enactments distinctly framed to carry out this purpose, by enforcing the sanctity of the matrimonial tie. The same may be said with regard to polygamy. God, in originally instituting marriage, joined only one woman with one man (see Gen. i. 27; ii. 21-5); but the law, although acquainting us with the divine institution of monogamy, and thereby representing it as best,