sin, and must alike receive, as the free gift of God’s grace, their deliverance from this common bondage—the true, the highest freedom. Servants and masters, if they had become believers, were brought together under the same bond of an heavenly union, destined for immortality; they became brethren in Christ in whom there is neither bond nor free, members of one body, baptized into one Spirit, heirs of the same heavenly inheritance. Servants were often the teachers of their masters in the Gospel, after having, first of all, in their lives and actions exhibited before them the loftiness of a divine life, which must be shewn forth even under the most painful of relations, and shine forth the more brightly by the contrast.”[1]
Not only did St. Paul and the other Apostles spread principles and ideas which were sure to work the destruction of Slavery and of the other political and social wrongs of which that corrupt and unjust world was full; but they embodied these principles and ideas in an institution, founded by their Lord, of which it may be said that though so little revolutionary in appearance that the most jealous tyranny might have received it into its bosom without suspicion, it exceeded in revolutionary efficacy any political force which has ever been seen in action among men. At the Supper of the Lord the conqueror was required, on his allegiance to Christianity, to partake in the holy meal with the conquered, the master with the slave; and this in memory of a Founder who had died the death of a slave upon the Cross, and who at the institution of the rite
- ↑ Church History, vol. i., p. 372. Eng. trans.
