If the Bible is really inspired, Jehovah commanded the Jewish people to
buy the children of the strangers that sojourned among them, and ordered
that the children thus bought should be an inheritance for the children
of the Jews, and that they should be bondmen and bondwomen forever. Yet
Epictetus, a man to whom no revelation was ever made, a man whose soul
followed only the light of nature, and who had never heard of the Jewish
God, was great enough to say: "Will you not remember that your servants
are by nature your brothers, the children of God? In saying that you
have bought them, you look down on the earth and into the pit, on the
wretched law of men long since dead,--but you see not the laws of the
Gods." We find that Jehovah, speaking to his chosen people, assured them
that their bondmen and bondmaids must be "of the heathen that were
round about them." "Of them," said Jehovah, "shall ye buy bondmen
and bondmaids." And yet Cicero, a pagan, Cicero, who had never been
enlightened by reading the Old Testament, had the moral grandeur to
declare: "They who say that we should love our fellow-citizens, but not
foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which
benevolence and justice would perish forever."