Bible.
I. IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. It is accepted as a fact, not denounced or approved, but recognized and gradually ameliorated.
1. Hebrew slaves are not to be treated with rigour (Leviticus 25:43, Leviticus 25:53), but as hired servants. How different from the state of slaves in the workshops of Greece and Rome!
2. In the ease of Hebrew slaves, the duration of slavery was not to be perpetual. At the end of six years every slave was to be restored to liberty, and at the end of fifty years at the utmost he was to be replaced in a social position which might equal his master's (Leviticus 25:28, Leviticus 25:54).
II. IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. It is still accepted as a fact. But:
1. A principle is laid down, which, like leaven leavening the whole lump, could not but cause its destruction. "Ye masters … your Master also" (or, as it would be better translated, "your and their Master") "is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him" (Ephesians 6:9). "Ye call me Master and Lord: and say ye well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you" (John 13:13-15). "Art thou called being a servant (slave)? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather. For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant (slave), is the Lord's freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ's servant (slave)' (1 Corinthians 7:21, 1 Corinthians 7:22). "There is neither … bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all" (Colossians 3:11).
2. An example is given. St. Paul thus speaks of Onesimus, the runaway slave, now converted to Christianity: "I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds:… thou therefore receive him, that is, mine own bowels.… For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldest receive him for ever; not now as a servant (slave), but above a servant (slave), a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord? If thou count me therefore a partner, receive him as myself" (Philemon 1:10-17). Contrast the feeling entertained contemporaneously towards slaves in the Roman Empire. "Their growing power was sometimes restrained by legalized murder; they were sold without remorse; they were tortured and beaten and crucified without pity. Even Cicero apologizes to Atticus for being affected by the death of his slave" (Wordsworth, 'Church History,' Leviticus 23:1-44).
III. TEACHING IN THE SECOND CENTURY. "We ought," says Clement of Alexandria, "to treat our slaves as ourselves. They are men as we are; and there is the same God of bond and free; and we ought not to punish our brethren when they sin, but to reprove them. Whatever we do to the lowest and meanest of Christ's brethren, we do to him".
IV. SLOW BUT CERTAIN EXTINCTION OF SLAVERY. There was a long battle to be fought between the selfish and the Christian instinct; but slavery could not coexist with Christianity, and wherever Christianity now stretches, slavery, though it may still linger here and there, is condemned by public sentiment and doomed to extinction.
HOMILIES BY R.M. EDGAR