double of the same kind—­two men, or if he had sold him, five men?  Do you say that the man-thief might not have them?  So the ox-thief might not have two oxen, or if he had killed it, five.  But if God permitted men to hold men as property, equally with oxen, the man-thief, could get men with whom to pay the penalty, as well as the ox-thief, oxen.  Further, when property was stolen, the legal penalty was a compensation to the person injured.  But when a man was stolen, no property compensation was offered.  To tender money as an equivalent, would have been to repeat the outrage with intolerable aggravations.  Compute the value of a MAN in money! Throw dust into the scale against immortality!  The law recoiled from such supreme insult and impiety.  To have permitted the man-thief to expiate his crime by restoring double, would have been making the repetition of crime its atonement.  But the infliction of death for man-stealing exacted the utmost possibility of reparation.  It wrung from the guilty wretch as he gave up the ghost, the testimony of blood, and death-groans, to the infinite dignity and worth of man,—­a proclamation to the universe, voiced in mortal agony, “MAN IS INVIOLABLE.”—­a confession shrieked in phrenzy at the grave’s mouth—­“I die accursed, and God is just.”

[Footnote A:  “Those are men-stealers who abduct, keep, sell, or buy slaves or freemen.”  GROTIUS.]

If God permitted man to hold man as property, why did he punish for stealing that kind of property infinitely more than for stealing any other kind of property?  Why punish with death for stealing a very little of that sort of property, and make a mere fine the penalty for stealing a thousand times as much, of any other sort of property—­especially if by his own act, God had annihilated the difference between man and property, by putting him on a level with it?

The guilt of a crime, depends much upon the nature, character, and condition of the victim.  To steal is a crime, whoever the thief, or whatever the plunder.  To steal bread from a full man, is theft; to steal it from a starving man, is both theft and murder.  If I steal my neighbor’s property, the crime consists not in altering the nature of the article, but in taking as mine what is his.  But when I take my neighbor himself, and first make him property, and then my property, the latter act, which was the sole crime in the former case, dwindles to nothing.  The sin in stealing a man, is not the transfer from its owner to another of that which is already property, but the turning of personality into property.  True, the attributes of man remain, but the rights and immunities which grow out of them are annihilated.  It is the first law both of reason and revelation, to regard things and beings as they are; and the sum of religion, to feel and act toward them according to their value.