might have bought a servant according to the law, was immediately exposed, by the same law, to lose his money — a regulation to which no community would submit in any age.
Thus we have shown, that St. Paul understood what he did, when he sent again the slave of Philemon to his owner, from Rome, in Italy, to Colosse, a city in Asia Minor, and belonging to the Romans at that time by conquest, as did all the countries of those regions in the time of St. Paul. Had Onessimus been a white man, or an individual of the race of Abraham, St. Paul never would have arrested him as a slave, to return to his master, except the man was in debt to Philemon — as no other race but that of Ham, was ever judicially doomed by the Creator to absolute slavery; and this was as well known to St. Paul, as it is to all who read the Bible with a view to understand this thing.
Surely, had the apostle felt about the enslaving of Ham's race, as many seem to feel now-a-days, he would not only have told the slave to run for it, and to steal a horse, or anything else to aid his flight — as do abolitionists — but would have made the subject the occasion of a special treatise to the churches, as he did other matters of great importance, and would have denounced it as a horrible sin against God and human nature. Had not the notion among the converted slaves been entertained that their religion made them equal with, and as free as were their masters, it is not likely that we should ever have heard a word on the subject from the pen of St, Paul, more than from the other writers of the New Testament. But,
