This beautiful little Epistle gives me a chance to make a few remarks about how the teaching of the New Testament has shaped later ages. That such a short letter was kept in the canon, when so many others that must have looked more important to the Church were left out, seems to me a striking proof of the divine care watching over the Church’s judgment. Mr. Canning, in one of the debates on freeing the West Indian slaves, said that Christianity grew up amid the tyranny described in Juvenal’s sixth Satire, that it accepted the institution of slavery, and therefore could not be called essentially opposed to it. That challenge deserves a fair answer, and I think the Epistle to Philemon supplies one. In his letters to the Churches, Paul had not declared slaves free of their masters, nor demanded that masters dismiss their slaves; he had simply said they were brothers. Here he explains what that means. He asks a master to take back a runaway slave, as both a servant and a brother. He says he could command this as an Apostle, but instead he begs it for the love of Christ and for the love Philemon bears him, Christ’s prisoner — because such pleading is stronger than commands. This is how the Apostle and the Church destroy slavery: they strike at its root by declaring that a man can never be a thing, a piece of property. And they strike not only at that one arrangement which produced and sanctified that hateful notion, but at every arrangement that stands in the way of recognizing God’s Fatherhood, Christ’s Brotherhood, and the dwelling of Christ’s Spirit in men, so that their true manhood may be drawn out.
So we see that the principle I have traced through all Paul’s Epistles — “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles” — is the law of this Epistle too. And we see how any theory that confines this teaching to the Church, and so keeps the Church from witnessing it to the world, destroys its meaning and effect. If Christ is not in every man, then Christians can and will treat as property, or worse, all who do not bear their name. And soon they will feel entitled to treat men as property, or worse, even if they do bear it. No faith will be kept with heretics — for what has a heretic to do with Christ? No faith will be kept with those we think ungodly or who differ from us — for what have they to do with Christ? So, in our zeal for Christ, we end by destroying all the life and morality He brought into the world, and we have to invent a new morality of our own to replace what we have lost. May God grant that earnest, faithful study of Paul’s Epistles, and the discovery how perfectly they agree with every part of the New Testament, may save us and our children from this terrible danger and strengthen us in the true faith of God’s elect.