Slavery. By William E. Channing [pp. 268-306]

Slaverry.
that if the apostles had pursued the opposite plan of denouncing slavery as a crime, the Christian religion would
have been ruined; its very name would have been forgotten.
Then how can the course of the modern abolitionists, under
circumstances so nearly similar, or even that of these reverend gentlemen themselves be right? Why do not they
content themselves with doing what Christ and his apostles
did? Why must they proclaim the unlawfulness of slavery?
Is human nature so much altered, that a course, which would
have produced universal bloodshed, and led to the very destruction of the Christian religion, in one age, is wise and
Christian in another?
Let us, however, consider the force of the argument as
stated above. It amounts to this. Christ and his apostles
thought slaveholding a great crime, but they abstained from
saying so for fear of the consequences. The very statement
of the argument, in its naked form, is its refutation. These
holy men did not refrain from condemning sin from a regard
to consequences. They did not hesitate to array against the
religion which they taught, the strongest passions of men.
Nor did they content themselves with denouncing the general principles of evil; they condemned its special manifestations. They did not simply forbid intemperate sensual
indulgence, and leave it to their hearers to decide what did
or what did not come under that name. They declared that
no fornicator, no adulterer, no drunkard could be admitted
into the kingdom of heaven. They did not hesitate, even
when a little band, a hundred and twenty souls, to place
themselves in direct and irreconcilable opposition to the whole
polity, civil and religious, of the Jewish state. It will hardly
be maintained that slavery was, at that time, more inti
mately interwoven with the institutions of society, than
idolatry was. It entered into the arrangements of every
family; of every city and province, and of the whole Roman
empire. The emperor was the Pontifex Maximus; every
department of the state, civil and military, was pervaded by
it. It was so united with the fabric of the government that
it could not be removed without effecting a revolution in all
its parts. The apostles knew this. They knew that to de nounce polytheism was to array against them the whole
power of the state. Their divine Master had distinctly ap prized them of the result. Ie told them that it would set
the father against the son, and the son against the father; the
mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the
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