Patience under Undeserved Wrong.
I. St. Peter teaches that suffering is thankworthy, a gift from God, and acceptable in turn to Him, if it be accompanied by two conditions. (1) It must be undeserved. A slave, too, might be punished for doing what would merit punishment in a free man; a slave, too, might be violent, or abusive, or careless about that which belonged to others, or intemperate, or dishonest, or treacherous. If punished for offences of this kind, he might not complain. "What glory is it," asks St. Peter, "if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently?" The law, the eternal law, that punishment follows wrong-doing, is not suspended in the case of the slave. (2) And such suffering must be for conscience toward God. It must be borne for God's cause and sake, and with a good hope of God's approval. This it is which makes pain at once bearable and bracing, when the conscience of the sufferer can ask the perfect moral Being to take note of it, just as David does in so many of his psalms. "Look Thou upon me, and be merciful unto me. Lord, be Thou my Helper." Mere suffering which a man dares not offer to God, though it be borne patiently through physical courage, through "pluck," as we term it, has no spiritual value. "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." This is the Consecration Prayer, uttered on the cross, uttered, if in other language, wherever men suffer for conscience toward God; and by it suffering is changed changed assuredly into moral victory.
II. And here it may be asked, "Why did not the Apostles denounce slavery as an intolerable wrong? Why did they trifle with it, and allow the Church which succeeded them to trifle with it? Why did they seem, indirectly at least, to sanction it by advising slaves to honour and obey their owners? Was not this of the nature of a compromise between good and evil between the high principles of Christian morality on the one hand and the debased institutions of heathen life on the other? Would it not have been better to break with slavery at once and altogether, better for the honour of the Christian revelation, better for the best interest of man?" Certainly, nothing can well be more antipathetic than the spirit of the Gospel and the spirit of slavery; for slavery postulates an essential distinction between man and man, which is unknown to the Gospel. The Gospel proclaims the unity of the human race and the equality of all its members before God. The Gospel is based upon, and it consecrates, the laws of God in nature; and slavery, on the other hand, is distinctly unnatural: it is a rejection of the fundamental equality of man. It often, and very consistently, professes to reject belief in the unity of the human race. To slavery the deepest of all distinctions between human beings is the distinction between the man who is his own owner and the man who is owned by another. "In Christ Jesus," exclaims the Apostle, "there is neither bond nor free." But the exact question which the Apostles had to consider was not whether slavery was a bad social institution or theoretically indefensible, but this: whether slavery necessarily ruined the prospects of the human soul. A slave might be a Christian he might be the best of Christians easily enough. If he were harshly treated, that was not peculiar to his condition of life; it might even promote his sanctification. If he were tempted to do wrong, St. James would tell him that he should count this all joy, knowing that the trial of his faith worked endurance. If he had to choose between sinful compliance with a master's will and punishment, though that punishment were death, he, with his eyes fixed on the Divine Sufferer, would know his part. The grace of God may make the soul of man independent of outward circumstances; and there is no real slavery when the soul is free. At the same time, although the Apostles were working, as I have said, for another world, in the course of doing so, and, as it were, incidentally, they were destined to be, from the nature of the case, great social reformers in this. They could not but detest slavery, but how was it to be done away with? Was it to be by some sudden revolutionary effort, supposing the thing to be possible? Was it to be by the influence of new principles first upon the opinions of men, and then upon the structure of society? The Apostles chose the latter method, but it was a method which took time. The Apostles trusted to the infiltration of new principles into the thoughts and actions of men, and not to those violent and tragical catastrophes which, even when they succeed, succeed amid ruins. It was not the duty of the Gospel to proclaim a social war. There were sects at that time nearly related to Judaism. The Essenes and Therapeutæ they were called, and their teaching was certainly very familiar to St. Paul sects which held that the slave should at once refuse all obedience to his master, in the name of human rights. But slaves, maddened by oppression into rebellion against order, would not, in that age at least, have put an end to slavery. It was better to teach a higher ideal of life, both to the slave and to the master, and meanwhile to proclaim the truth, "This is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully." In Christian households, a hundred courtesies softened the hardship of the legal relation between master and slave. The sense of a common brotherhood in Christ had already sapped the idea of any radical inequality between them.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,New Series, No. 943.