"Thus saith the Lord, the God of
Israel; I made a covenant with your fathers in the day that I brought them
forth out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondmen, saying, At the end
of seven years let ye go every man his brother an Hebrew, which hath been sold
unto thee; and when he hath served thee six years, thou shalt let him go
free." - Jer. 34:13, 14,
F.R.A. Glover: Another footfall by which the path of the prophet Jeremiah is to be
tracked in his sojourn in Ireland, is to be seen in the Law of Release of the
Slave after seven years of bondage: a law in common acknowledgment in Ireland
even down to the days of St. Patrick. That illustrious personage having claimed
freedom, from his bondage after seven years of service, according to it, from
the master, to whom he had been sold by the pirates who bad seized him from his
paternal home, on a raid into Brittany; this master refusing like the Jews in
the time of Jeremiah, to fulfil the will of God in this wise, the saint was
compelled to have recourse to gold to obtain that which the tyrant refused to
accord to right and law. But so the fact comes out: viz., that the law, more
Hebraico, s the Annalist intimates, en passant, set up by the
"Prophet to the Nations," if by him, had abided in full repute, for
800 years, the Law of the Land; a law which, we may well believe, the Prophet
would have bad it much in his mind to insist upon to his new people, in the
recollection of the woe which its neglect and denial had wrought upon that
elect nation, of whose small remnant he had been, partly on this very account
(Jer. 34), the leader from an earthly paradise to the wild wastes of Crioch
Fuiniab, "the ends of the earth," - Emerald Isle though they be!
It is said in some of the Lives of St.
Patrick, that there was a law in Ireland, according to which slaves should
become free in the seventh year; and that it was under this law he gained his
liberty. The same writers add, that this was conformable to the practice of the
Hebrews, more Hebraeorum, (Lev. 25:40). See on this point Dr. Lani,
chap iv. From Moore's Ireland, vol. i. p. 219, note.
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