Further, when _property_ was stolen, the whole of 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 the intolerable aggravations of supreme insult and impiety. Compute the value of a MAN in _money!_ Throw dust into the scale against immortality! The law recoiled from such outrage and blasphemy. 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 from the guilty wretch the utmost possibility of reparation. It wrung from him, as he gave up the ghost, a testimony in blood, and death groans, to the infinite dignity and worth of man,--a proclamation to the universe, voiced in mortal agony, that MAN IS INVIOLABLE,--a confession shrieked in phrenzy at the grave's mouth--"I die accursed, and God is just."
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 did he punish with _death_ for stealing a very little, perhaps not a sixpence worth, 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 God did by his own act annihilate the difference between man and _property_, by putting him _on a level with it_?
The atrociousness of a crime, depends greatly 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 the _nature_ of the article, but in _shifting its external relation_ from _him to me_. 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 a mere appendage. The sin in stealing a man does not consist in transferring, from its owner to another, that which is _already property_, but in turning _personality_ into _property_. True, the _attributes_ of man still remain, but the rights and immunities which grow out of them are _annihilated_. It is the first law 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 nature and value. Knowingly to treat them otherwise, is _sin_; and the degree of violence done to their nature, relations, and value, measures its guilt. When things are sundered which God has indissolubly joined, or confounded in one, which he has separated by infinite extremes; when sacred and eternal distinctions, which he has garnished with glory, are derided and set at nought, then, if ever, _sin_ reddens in its "scarlet dye." The sin specified in the passage, is that of doing violence to the _nature_ of a _man_--his _intrinsic value_ and relations as a rational being, and blotting out the exalted distinction stamped upon him by his Maker. In the verse preceding, and in that which follows, the same principle is laid down. Verse 15, "_He then smiteth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death._" Verse 17, "_He that curseth his father or his mother, shall surely be put to death._" If a Jew smote his neighbor, the law merely smote him in return. But if that same blow were given to a _parent_, the law struck the smiter _dead_. Why this difference in the punishment of the same act, inflicted on different persons? Answer--God guards the parental relation with peculiar care. It is the _centre_ of human relations. To violate that, is to violate _all_. Whoever trampled on _that_, showed that no relation had any sacredness in his eyes--that he was unfit to move among human relations who had violated one so sacred and tender.--Therefore, the Mosaic law uplifted his bleeding corpse, and brandished the ghastly terror around the parental relation to guard it from impious inroads.