Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

and its spirit and teachings must be learned directly from the New Testament.

Thus placing Slavery and Christianity side by side, I affirm, that neither in the New Testament nor in the Old, neither by precept nor by example, neither by precedent nor by indirection, does the Bible sanction slavery; but that the religion of the Bible is thoroughly hostile to slavery, in spirit and in principle, in precept and in practice.

The evidence upon this point is both critical and historical. The critical inquiry must embrace an analysis of the Mosaic laws of servitude, and the attitude of Christianity toward slavery, in the teachings of Christ and his apostles, or in the Apostolic age. The historical inquiry, starting from the age of the New Testament, will, for convenience, trace the influence of Christianity upon slavery :

(1.) From the time of the Apostles to the time of Constantine; when the new religion, struggling for its own life, first came into contact with the organized iniquities of the pagan world.

(2.) Its influence upon slavery from Constantine till the Reformation; and,

(3.) The relations of the gospel to slavery in modern Christendom.

IV.

THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST.

WHAT was the attitude of Christianity toward slavery in the apostolic age? For the answer, we go directly to the New Testament. When our Lord began his ministry, whatever kind of bond-service had formerly existed among the Jews, servitude had ceased to be an institution of Hebrew society. There was then no such thing as a system of slavery in Judea. Here and there, a Roman officer appears to have had a few house or body slaves. Herod, the Idumean, had such servants. Possibly some of the wealthier Jews, also, had servants over whom they claimed the right of control. "But in the time of the second temple, we know that no slaves were held by the Essenes, or by the Therapeutæ ; for these sects rejected all slavery, as in contravention with the natural equality of men. The Pharisees, too, were, on moral grounds, opposed to the holding of many slaves, and recommended instead, for household service, the employment of indigent Hebrews."* In the time of Christ, the Jews, to whom our Lord addressed his personal ministry, were not, in any proper sense, a slave-holding people; and though there were occasional traces of the old Mosaic code of servitude, this was fast

*Mielziner, translated in Am. Theol. Review, Vol. III., p 426. of the original, Die Verhältnisse der sklaven bei den alten Hebräern.

See also p. 52

dying out under the combined influence of Roman subjugation and domestic poverty; so that there was nothing in the immediate sphere of Christ's labors to call forth a discussion upon the specific evil of slavery. No such case appears in the gospel history.*

But the principles laid down by Christ in his discourse at Nazareth, and in the sermon on the mount, are conclusive against the claim of property in man. No man would dream of framing a slave-code out of the words of Christ; of buying or selling a human being by a warrant from the lips of Jesus, or of quoting anything that Christ said as a justification of slavery. Had Jesus of Nazareth excepted the seed of Ham, or the negro, or any class or race, from his proclamation of grace and deliverance, he could not have commanded our homage as the Redeemer of mankind. Every slaveholder knows that an honest application of Christ's golden rule would compel him to relinquish all pretense to property in his fellow-man. Not the most profane audacity of the advocates of slavery, nor the most malignant ingenuity of infidels, has ever attempted to fasten upon Christ himself the sanctioning of slavery by word or deed. The utmost that has been alleged on this_ point is that he uttered nothing directly against it. Neither did Christ say anything against the tyrannous family laws of the Romans, or the brutal gladiatorial shows. But there is strong presumptive evidence that

* See the author's "Teachings of the New Testament on Slavery" (1856), pp. 15 and 50.

in the limited sphere of his ministry, slavery did not come before him for judgment either in fact or in theory; and he did lay down principles that make it impossible for a man to hold his fellow as a slave. Would slaveholders consent to have their claims determined by the teachings of Christ, or to put these into the hands of slaves as a manual of their duties?

The apostles, especially Paul, in going forth from Judea to propagate Christianity, came in contact with Roman slavery as I have just described it; and the apostolic letters contain several allusions to this system. As Jews versed in the old Testament, the apostles were familiar with the laws of Moses in regard to master and servant. Now, the recognition of slavery, in the sense that our usage and Southern laws attach to the word, cannot be found in the institutes of Moses.

V.

SERVITUDE AMONG THE HEBREWS.

IN discussing the nature of Hebrew servitude, it is unnecessary to go back of the time of Moses. Abraham, like the Arab sheikh of to-day, had around him a body, not of chattel slaves, but of household retainers, owing fealty to their lord; men whom he trusted with the stewardship of all his property; whom he armed for the rescue of Lot, and led into battle; to one of whom he committed the delicate office of seeking a bride for

Isaac, sending him with a tempting dowry into a distant land.

As to the "seed of Ham," our Sabbath schools have made this generation sufficiently familiar with the Bible to know that Noah's curse was definitively pronounced___ upon Canaan, Ham's youngest son, and was accomplish-. ed when the Israelites subdued the Canaanites. But if any still insist upon applying it perpetually to the whole posterity of Ham, I must remind them that the grandold empires of Egypt, Chaldea, and Assyria, were all founded by immediate descendants of Ham, and that_ these Hamitic nations successively enslaved the Israel-ites, the posterity of Shem. I must remind such, also,that the descent of the negro race from Ham has never been satisfactorily established, upon grounds either of physiology, of history, or of philology. Indeed, the evidence rather preponderates in the opposite scale. Moreover, Aben Ezra and Mendelssohn, two of the greatest names in Hebrew philology, maintain that the expression "servant of servants" in Genesis ix. 25, does not describe the abjectness of the condition, but simply the relative condition in the family, whether of the individual or of nations. The Hebrew idiom is literally servant, servants, which, according to these philologers, merely designates the class without stigmatizing or aggravating the condition: "He shall be [not the slave of slaves, but] a servant-belonging to the class of servants." The learned authors of the Septuagint version point the verse differently, and come at the same

« AnteriorContinuar »