"Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again; not purloining, but showing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things."—Titus ii., 9, 10.
"Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward."—I. Pet. ii, 18.
The advocates of slavery maintained that Christ approved the calling as a slaveholder as well as the faith of the Roman centurion, whose servant, "sick of a palsy," Christ miraculously healed by saying: "I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel."—Matt. viii., 10.
They also cited Dr. Adam Clark, the great Bible commentator; Dr. Neander's work, entitled Planting and Training the Church, and Dr. Mosheim's Church History, as evidence that the Bible not only sanctioned slavery but authorized its perpetuation through all time.( 2) In other words, pro-slavery advocates in effect affirmed that these great writers:
"Torture the hollowed pages of the Bible,
To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood,
And, in oppression's hateful service, libel
Both man and God."
While the teachings of neither the Old nor the New Testament, nor of the Master, were to overthrow or to establish political conditions as established by the temporal powers of the then age, yet it must be admitted that large numbers of people, of much learning and a high civilization, believed human slavery was sanctioned by divine authority.
The deductions made from the texts quoted were unwarranted. The principles of justice and mercy, on which the Christian religion is founded, cannot be tortured into even a toleration (as, possibly, could the law of Moses) of the existence of the unnatural and barbaric institution of slavery, or the slave trade.
Slavery was wrong per se; wholly unjustifiable on the plainest principles of humanity and justice; and the consciences of all unprejudiced, enlightened, civilized people led them in time to believe that it had no warrant from God and ought to have no warrant from man to exist on the face of the earth.
The friends of freedom and those who believed slavery sinful never for a moment assented to the claim that it was sanctioned by Holy Writ, or that it was justified by early and long-continued existence through barbaric or semi-barbaric times. They denied that it could thus even be sanctified into a moral right; that time ever converted cruelty into a blessing, or a wrong into a right; that any human law could give it legal existence, or rightfully perpetuate it against natural justice; they maintained that a Higher Law, written in God's immutable decrees of mercy, was paramount to all human law or practice, however long continuing; that the lessons taught by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount and in all his life and teachings were a condemnation of it; and that an enlightened, progressive civilization demanded its final overthrow.
In America: Slavery is dead. We return to its history.