The text that I took, as the best to be found in such a hurry, was the following:--"Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." I took an opportunity of showing, from these words, that Moses, in endeavouring to promote among the children of Israel a tender disposition towards those unfortunate strangers who had come under their dominion, reminded them of their own state when strangers in Egypt, as one of the most forcible arguments which could be used on such an occasion.

For they could not have forgotten that the Egyptians "had made them serve with rigour; that they had made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field; and that all the service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour." The argument, therefore, of Moses was simply this:--"Ye knew well, when ye were strangers in Egypt, the nature of your own feelings.
Were you not made miserable by your debased situation there?
But if so, you must be sensible that the stranger, who has the same heart, or the same feelings with yourselves, must experience similar suffering, if treated in a similar manner.

I charge you, then, knowing this, to stand clear of the crime of his oppression." The law, then, by which Moses commanded the children of Israel to regulate their conduct with respect to the usage of the stranger, I showed to be a law of universal and eternal obligation, and for this, among other reasons, that it was neither more nor less than the Christian law, which appeared afterwards, that we should not do that to others which we should be unwilling to have done unto ourselves.
Having gone into these statements at some length, I made an application of them in the following words:-- "This being the case, and this law of Moses being afterwards established into a fundamental precept of Christianity, I must apply it to facts of the present day, and I am sorry that I must apply it to--ourselves.
"And first,--Are there no strangers whom we oppress?
I fear the wretched African will say, that he drinks the cup of sorrow, and that he drinks it at our hands.

Torn from his Native soil, and from his family and friends, he is immediately forced into a situation, of all others the most degrading, where he and his progeny are considered as cattle, as possessions, and as the possessions of a man to whom he never gave offence.
"It is a melancholy fact, but it can be abundantly proved, that great numbers of the unfortunate strangers, who are carried from Africa to our colonies, are fraudulently and forcibly taken from their native soil.

To descant but upon a single instance of the kind must be productive of pain to the ear of sensibility and freedom.