I SEIZE the opportunity which is afforded me by this beautiful little Epistle (the preservation of which in the canon, when so many that must have looked so much more plausible and important to the Church were rejected, is to me a wonderful proof of the divine care that was exercised over its judgment), to make two or three observations, which I believe show how the doctrine of the New Testament has borne upon the history of later ages. “Christianity,” said Mr. Canning, in one of the debates upon the emancipation of the West Indian slaves, “grew up amidst the scenes of tyranny which are described in the sixth Satire of Juvenal. It recognized the institution of slavery. How can it be said to be essentially adverse to that institution?” This question ought to be fairly met. What is the answer? The Epistle to Philemon, I think, supplies it. St. Paul, in his letters to the Churches, had not proclaimed that slaves were free from their masters, had not insisted on masters dismissing their slaves; he had simply said that they were brothers. Here he explains that position. He calls upon a master to receive back a runaway slave, as both a servant and a brother. He might, he says command him to do this as an Apostle; but he begs it for the love of Christ, and for the love which Philemon bears to him, the bondsman of Christ, because such entreaties are mightier than commands. Here is the method of the Apostle and of the Church for destroying slavery. They strike at the root of it, by proclaiming that a man can never be a thing, a chattel. But they strike not merely at a particular arrangement which has introduced that accursed notion and canonized it, but at every other which interferes with the recognition of God’s Fatherhood, and Christ’s Brotherhood, and with the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ in men, to the end that their true manhood may be called forth in them.
And thus we see how the principle which we have traced through all the Epistles of St. Paul, “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles,” is the law of this Epistle also. And we see, how every theory which limits this doctrine to the Church, and so prevents the Church from being the witness of it to the world, destroys its meaning and effect. If Christ is not in every man, Christians can, Christians will, treat all as chattels, or worse than chattels, who do not bear their name. Very soon they will feel they have a right to treat men as chattels, or worse than chattels, if they do bear their name. 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? Thus we proceed, in our zeal for Christ, to destroy all the life and morality which He has brought into the world, and we are obliged to invent a new morality of our own to supply that we have lost. May God grant that the earnest and faithful study of St. Paul’s Epistles, and the discovery in what perfect harmony they are with every part of the New Testament, may deliver us and our children from this unspeakable danger, and strengthen us in the true faith of God’s elect!