I believe that God withholds from them a spirit and temper suited for freedom till he shall have finished his marvellous designs.
His destiny with the Jew, as a nation, to the present day, is another illustration of his mysterious providence with regard to a people.
"As to the enactment which made the Hebrew servant a slave for life, thus dooming even one of the covenant people to perpetual bondage, if he had married in slavery, I see in it several things most clearly.
"You will have noticed that in every case in which a Hebrew was made a servant, poverty was the ground of it.

'If thy brother be waxen poor,' he could sell himself, either to a Hebrew or to a resident alien.

He and his children could also be taken for debt.

This seems to us oppressive.
"Let a family among us be reduced, from any cause, to a condition in which they cannot maintain themselves, and what follows?
The children find employment, some of them in families, in various kinds of domestic service.

Indented apprenticeships in this commonwealth are within the memory of all who are forty or fifty years of age.