THE GOSPEL AND SLAVERY.
How did they set to work to preach
this? I will answer this question by two others:
How did Bossuet set to work to write his Politique
tiree de l’Ecriture, to proclaim in the
name of the Bible obligatory monarchy, divine right,
the absolute authority of kings, the duty of destroying
false religion by force, the duty of officially sustaining
the truth, the duty of having a budget of modes of
worship, the duty of uniting Church and State, without
speaking of his Biblical apology for war, for the
use of Louis XIV.? How did certain doctors among
the Roundheads, in their turn, set to work to proclaim
the divine right of republics, and to ordain the massacre
of the new Amalekites? The method is very simple:
it consists only in confounding the law with the Gospel.
This confusion once wrought, the political and civil
institutions of the Old Testament lose their temporary
and local character, and we go to the New Testament
in search of what is not there: namely, political
and civil institutions.
Though the Gospel is not the law, it is a truth which has been making its way
since the seventeenth century, and which seems to be no longer contested to-day,
except in the camp of the champions of slavery. The Gospel, which addresses
itself to all nations and all ages, does not pretend to force them into the
strait vestments of the ancient Jewish nation; no more does it pretend to sew a
piece of new cloth on an old garment, else the new cloth taketh away from the
old, and the rent is made worse. I speak here with a view to those who, in the
law as in the Gospel, in the New Testament as in the Old, venerate the
infallible word of God. A revelation, to be divine, does not cease to be
progressive, and nothing exacts that all truths should be promulgated in a
single day. If God deemed proper to give to his people, so long as they needed
it, a legislation adapted to their social condition, this legislation, divinely
given at that time, may be also divinely abrogated afterward. And this is what
has taken place. Those who quote to us texts from the Old Testament concerning
slavery, appear to have forgotten the saying of Jesus Christ in reference to
another institution, divorce: It was on account of the hardness of your
hearts. Yes, on account of the hardness of their hearts, God established among
the Israelites, incapable, at that time, of rising higher, provisory
regulations, perfect as regards his condescension,
but most imperfect, as he declares himself, as regards
the absolute truth. He who makes no account of
this great fact will find in the books of Moses, and
in the Prophets, pretexts either for practising to-day
what was tolerated only for a time, or for attacking
the Scriptures, indignant at what they contain.
It was Jesus Christ himself, therefore,
who drew the line of demarcation between the law and
the Gospel who announced the end of local
and temporary institutions. Has he revealed other
institutions, this time definitive? To form such
an idea of the Gospel, we must never have opened it.
The Gospel is not a Koran. In the Koran, we doubtless
find both civil and criminal laws, and the principles
of government; the Apostles did not once tread on
this ground. Fancy what their work would have
been, had they substituted a social for a spiritual
revolution had they touched, above all,
the question of slavery, which formed part of the
fundamental law of the ancient world. And here
I wish my thought to be clearly comprehended:
I do not pretend that the Apostles were conscious
of the unlawfulness of slavery, and that they avoided
pointing it out through policy, for fear of compromising
their work. No, indeed, this happened unconsciously.
According to all appearances, they held the opinions
of their times, and God revealed nothing to them on
the subject, wishing that the abolition of slavery,
like all the social results of the Gospel, should
be produced by moral agency, which works from within
outward, which changes the heart before changing the
actions.
At the time of the Apostles, there
were many other abuses than slavery; they never wrote
a word in their condemnation. They make allusions
to war, yet say nothing of the nameless horrors which
then attended it; they speak of the sword placed in
the king’s hands to punish crime, yet say nothing
of those atrocious tortures, in the first rank of which
must be cited crucifixion; they make use of figures
borrowed from the public games, yet say nothing either
of the combats of the gladiators, or of the abominations
which sullied other spectacles; they unceasingly call
to mind the reciprocal relations of husbands and wives,
of parents and children, yet say nothing of the despotic
authority which the Roman law conferred upon the father,
or of the debasement to which it condemned the wife.
The evangelical method is this: it has not occupied
itself with communities, yet has wrought the profoundest
of the social revolutions; it has not demanded any
reform, yet has accomplished all of them; the atrocities
of war and of torture, the gladiatorial combats and
immodest spectacles, the despotism of fathers and the
debasement of women, all have disappeared before a
profound, internal action, which attacks the very
roots of the evil.
Not only does the Gospel forbear to
touch on social and religious problems, but, even
on questions of morals, it refuses to furnish detailed
solutions. Its system of morality is very short;
and in this lies its greatness, through this it becomes
morality instead of casuistry. Cases of conscience,
special directions, a moral code, promulgated article
by article you will find in it nothing of
this sort. What you will find there, and there
alone, is a growing morality, which passes my expression.
Two or three sayings were written eighteen centuries
ago, and these sayings contain in the germ a series
of commandments, of transformation, of progression,
which we have not nearly exhausted. I spoke a
moment since of the progress of revelations; I must
speak now of the progress which is being wrought in
virtue of a revelation constantly the same, but constantly
becoming better understood, which multiplies our duties
in proportion as it enlightens our conscience.
With the one saying: “What ye would that
men should do unto you, do ye also to them,”
the Gospel has opened before us infinite vistas of
moral development.
Before this one saying, the cruelties
and infamous customs of ancient society, not mentioned
by the Apostles, have successively succumbed; before
this one saying, the modern family has been formed;
before this one saying, American slavery will disappear
as European slavery has disappeared already.
With this saying, we are all advancing, we are learning,
and we shall continue to learn. Yes, the time
will come, I am convinced, when we shall see new duties
rise up before us, when we cannot with a clear conscience
maintain customs, what, I know not, which we maintain
conscientiously to-day.
This carries us somewhat further,
it must be granted, than a list of fixed duties ne
varietur; it opposes slavery in a different manner
than a sentence pronounced once for all. The Gospel
took the surest means of overthrowing it when, letting
alone the reform of institutions, it contented itself
with pursuing that of sentiments; when it thus prepared
the time when the slaveholder himself would be forced
to ask what is contained in the inexhaustible saying:
“What ye would that men should do unto you,
do ye also unto them.” Even in the heart
of the Southern States, despite the triple covering
of habits, prejudices, and interests, this saying
is making its way, and is disturbing the consciences
of the people much more than is generally believed.
And the work that it has begun it will finish; it
will force the planters to translate the word
SLAVERY, to consider one by one the abominable practices
which constitute it. Is it to do to others as
we would that they should do to us, to sell a family
at retail? To maintain laws which give over every
slave, whether wife or maiden, to her owner, whatever
he may be, and which take away from this maiden, from
this wife, the right of remembering her modesty
and her duties what do Christians call
this? To produce marketable negroes, to dissolve
marriages, to ordain adulteries, to inflict ignoble
punishment, to interdict instruction is
this doing to others what we would that they should
do to us?
The Christian sense of right is relentless,
thank God; it does not suffer itself to be deceived
by appearances; where we dispute about words, it forces
us to go to facts. Now, look at the facts which
are really in question in America, when the great
subject of slavery is discussed there theoretically.
Against the great evangelical system of morality,
the Judaical interpretations of such or such a text
have little chance. The epistle of Paul, sending
back to Philemon his fugitive slave Onesimus, is quoted
to us. Assuredly, the Apostle pronounces in it
no anathema against slavery, nor does he exact enfranchisement;
these ideas were unknown to him; but he says:
“I beseech thee for my son whom I have begotten
in my bonds, whom I have sent again: thou therefore
receive him, that is my own bowels. Without thy
mind would I do nothing; that thy benefit should not
be as it were of necessity, but willingly. For
perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou
shouldest receive him forever; not now as a servant,
but above a servant, a brother beloved. Having
confidence in thy obedience I wrote unto thee, knowing
that thou wilt do also more than I say.”
Does any one fancy Philemon treating
Onesimus, after this epistle, as fugitive slaves are
treated in America, putting up his wife and children
directly after for sale, or delivering him, over to
the first slave merchant that was willing to take
charge of him, and carry him a hundred leagues away?
It is so certain that Philemon did more than had been
told him, that the Epistle to the Colossians shows
us the “faithful and well-beloved brother Onesimus”
honorably mentioned among those concerned about the
spiritual interests of the church.
Do what one will, there is an implied
abolition of slavery (implied but positive) at the
bottom of that close fraternity created by the faith
in the Saviour. Between brethren, the
relation of master and slave, of merchant and merchandise,
cannot long subsist. To sell on an auction-block
or deliver over to a slave-driver an immortal soul,
for which Christ has died, is an enormity before which
the Christian sense of right will always recoil in
the end. “In this,” it is written,
“there is neither Greek nor Jew, nor circumcision
nor uncircumcision, nor barbarian nor Seythian, nor
bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all.”
Let slaveholders put to themselves the question what
they would say to-day if the epistle to Philemon were
addressed to them; and it is addressed to them; the
Onesimuses of the South and such there are are
thus thrown upon the conscience of their masters, their
brothers.
I have said enough on the subject
to dispense with examining very numerous passages
in which slavery is supposed by the writers
of the New Testament. The duties of masters and
of slaves are laid down by them without doubt, and
the existence of the institution is not contested for
a moment; only, it is brought face to face with that
which will slay it: the doctrine of salvation
through Christ, of pardon, of humility, of love, is,
in itself, and without the necessity of expressing
it, the absolute negation of slavery.
It has fully proved so, and the early
ages of Christianity leave no doubt as to the interpretation
given by Christians to the teachings of the Apostles.
Despite the rapid corruptions introduced into
the churches, we see one brilliant fact shining forth
in them: émancipations becoming more frequent,
slaves, as well as free men, succeeding to ecclesiastical
offices, spiritual equality producing the fruit which
it cannot help producing, namely, legal equality.
Observe, too, how the edicts of the emperors multiplied
as soon as the influence of Christianity was exerted
in the Roman world. And all these edicts had
but one aim: to sweeten servitude, to increase
affranchisement by law, to facilitate voluntary emancipation.
What the Gospel did then against European
slavery, it is doing now against American slavery.
Its end is the same; its weapons are the same; they
have not rusted during eighteen centuries. Those
planters of the English islands were not mistaken,
who, instinctively divining where lay their great
enemy, had recourse to every measure to expel missionaries
from among them. Neither were those Texan executioners
mistaken, who lately put to death the missionary Bewley,
a touching martyr to the cause of the slaves.
I ask, in the face of the gallows of Bewley, what
we are to think of that prodigious paradox according
to which the Gospel is the patron of slavery.
To those who mistake its meaning on this point, the
Gospel replies by its acts; it replies also by the
unanimous testimony of its servants. What is
more striking, in fact, than to see that, apart from
the country in which the action of interests and habits
disturbs the judgment of Christians, there is but one
way of comprehending and interpreting the Scripture
on this point? Consult England, France, Germany;
Christians everywhere will tell you that the Gospel
abolished slavery, although it does not say a single
word which would proclaim this abolition. Why,
if the doubt were possible, would not diversity of
opinions be also possible among disinterested judges?
To speak only of France, see the synods of our free
churches, which continually stigmatize both Swedish
intolerance and American slavery; see an address signed
three years ago by the pastors and the elders of five
hundred and seventy-one French churches, which has
gone to carry to the United States the undoubted testimony
of a conviction which in truth is that of all.
It seems to me that our demonstration
is complete. What would it be if I should add
that American slavery, which its friends so strangely
claim to place under the protection of the Apostles,
has nothing in common with that of which the Apostles
had cognizance. The thing, however, is certain.
Slavery, in the United States, is founded on color,
it is negro slavery. Now, this is a fact
wholly new in the history of mankind, a monstrous
fact, which profoundly modifies the nature of slavery.
Before Las Casas, that virtuous creator of the slave
trade, the name of which comprises to him alone a
whole commentary on the maxim “Do evil that
good may come,” before Las Casas, no one had
thought of connecting slavery with race. Now,
the slavery connected with race is that of all others
most difficult to uproot, for it bears an indelible
sign of inequality, a sign which the law did not create,
and which it cannot destroy.
Such was not the slavery that offered
itself to the eyes of the Prophets and Apostles; a
normal servitude, of right, based upon a native and
indestructible inferiority was not then in question,
but an accidental servitude among equals, to which
the chances of war had given birth, and which emancipation
suppressed entire. Quite different is the slavery
which depends on race, and which, it may be said, supposes
a malediction; do what one will, this latter will
subsist, it will, in a manner, survive itself; it
will find, besides, in the idea of a providential
dispensation, the natural excuse for its excesses.
This slavery the Bible condemns in the most explicit
manner. If its champions dare suppose two species,
the book of Genesis shows them all mankind springing
from one man, and the Gospel recounts to them the redemption
wrought in behalf of all the descendants of Adam; if
they argue from the curse pronounced against Canaan,
the Old Testament presents to them the detailed enumeration
of the Canaanites, a vast family, in which the whites
figure as well as the blacks.
In short, there is a deadly struggle
between the Gospel and slavery under all its forms,
and particularly under the odious form which the African
slave trade has given it in modern times. The
Gospel has been, is, and will be, at the head of every
earnest movement directed against slavery. It
is important that it should be so; it is the only means
of avoiding the acts of violence, the revolts, the
extreme calamities from which the whites and the blacks
would equally suffer. The Gospel is admirable,
inasmuch as by the side of the duties of masters, it
proclaims those of slaves; as in the time of the Apostles,
it does not hesitate to recommend to them gentleness,
submission, scrupulous fidelity, love for those who
maltreat them, the practice of difficult virtues;
it makes them free within, in order to render them
capable of becoming free without.
To judge of this method, we have only
to compare the miserable population of St. Domingo
with the beautiful free villages which cover the English
islands. How true the saying: “The
wrath of man never accomplishes the justice of God.”
Wherever the wrath of man has had full sway, even
to chastise abominable abuses, it has remained a curse.
I tremble when I think of the revolts which may break
out at any moment in the Southern States. Bloodshed,
let us not forget, would sully our banner; to the
right of the slaves, such a crisis would be forever
opposed, and who knows whether a terrible return might
not burst upon them?
The mind becomes troubled at the mere
image of the horrors that would ensue from civil war.
May the Christians of America comprehend, at length,
in a more perfect manner, the greatness of the part
that God reserves for them, and the extent of the
responsibilities that are weighing upon them.
To take a stand frankly against slavery; to remove
their last pretexts from sincere men who seek to reconcile
it with the Gospel; to organize in the North the action
of a vast moral power; to address to the South words
breathing forth truth and charity; to appeal without
wearying to the hearts of masters and slaves; to prepare
for trying moments that guarantee which nothing can
replace, the common faith of the blacks and the whites;
to keep courage even when all seems lost; to practise
the Christian vocation, which consists in pursuing
and realizing the impossible; to show once more to
the world the power that resides in justice this
is to accomplish a noble task.