give unto your servants that which is just and equal: knowing that ye also have a Master in Heaven.” Is “that which is just and equal” given to a slave when he is forbidden to learn to read, when he is denied legal marriage, when he is separated by force from his wife and children, when his evidence is refused in a court of law, when he is made by custom, though not by law, the victim of a penal code under which a master who kills a slave goes unpunished, while a slave who kills a master may be burned alive at a slow fire?
No doubt many American masters are better than the system. Many Roman masters were better than the system. But is it possible to believe that the system is one which, when carried on by Christians against Christians, can be said to have had its prototype in the relations between a Christian master, in Apostolic times, and his slave, or to be sanctioned by the teaching of the Apostles?
In a religious community so bound together in life and death as that of the early Christians, the relation between Master and Slave, though it was not formally dissolved, must have been completely transfigured, and virtually exchanged for a relation between brethren in Christ. The clearest proof of this is found in that very Epistle of St. Paul to Philemon which those who defend Slavery on Scriptural grounds regard as their sheet anchor in the argument. St. Paul sends back the fugitive slave Onesimus to his master Philemon. Therefore, we are told, slavery and fugitive slave laws have received the sanction of St. Paul. This it seems is so
