Goldwin Smith

“ And not merely for their rudeness and want of civilization, but for the primitive narrowness of the circle of their affections: for it is only in the course of history, and with the increasing range of man’s social vision, that his affection extends from the primæval family to the tribe, from the tribe to the nation, and from the nation to mankind. And as to the New Testament itself, it breathes in every page boundless hope for the future, together with the charity which is the source of social effort, and with the faith which carries each man beyond the sensual objects of his own short life. ”

“ And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and His statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord’s thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is. Only the Lord had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and He chose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this day. ”

“ Virginia and the Confederate States, on the other hand, of which Slavery is declared to be the fundamental principle, were assuredly not founded under the auspices of Christianity. They were founded by mere commercial adventurers of the very lowest kind. They were fostered by that darker Power which waits on the beneficent genius of commerce, and of which slave-trading Bristol was then the chosen seat. This power has been worshipped in all ages with human misery and blood. It has led men in all ages to reduce their fellow men to slavery for their own profit. ”

“ Is “that which is just and equal” given to a slave when he is forbidden to learn to read, when he is denied legal marriage, when he is separated by force from his wife and children, when his evidence is refused in a court of law, when he is made by custom, though not by law, the victim of a penal code under which a master who kills a slave goes unpunished, while a slave who kills a master may be burned alive at a slow fire? ”

“ Hope was not denied to the Roman slave. But hope is denied, or almost denied, to the American slave. In most of the Southern States the law withholds the power of enfranchisement from the master, against whose benevolence and generosity it seems the State is more concerned to guard, than against his cruelty and lust. A slave can be emancipated only by the authority of the Legislature or by a Court of Law, and upon special cause shewn; and further, the condition of a Negro when emancipated is such, as to make freedom at once a very qualified and a very precarious boon. ”

“ Channing himself says, “Slavery, in the age of the Apostle, had so penetrated society, was so intimately interwoven with it, and the materials of servile war were so abundant, that a religion, preaching freedom to the slave, would have shaken the social fabric to its foundation, and would have armed against itself the whole power of the State. Paul did not then assail the institution. He satisfied himself with spreading principles, which, however slowly, could not but work its destruction.” ”

“ It is true that the planters also claim a reputation for chivalry; and chivalry, no doubt, has its root deep in Christianity. But we must beg leave to add that a chivalry which exercises uncontrolled tyranny over defenceless victims, which flogs women naked, which buys and sells them as the wretched victims of brutal lust, which breeds human beings like cattle, which tears husbands from their wives and children from their mothers, which stands by and exults or moralizes while men are burned alive at slow fires, is a chivalry such as the Christian world has not yet seen. ”

“ Is this an exhortation to modern society to establish, or suffer to be established, in the midst of Christianity, freedom, and equal law, an institution under which men are subject to the frowardness of masters, and under which they may be buffeted and made to suffer without regard to justice? If it be, it is equally an exhortation to modern society to embrace the whole circle of institutions which persecuted the Apostles and which crucified Christ. ”

“ By Christ, the Saviour for all mankind, the differences among men resulting from sin were reconciled, by Him the original unity of the human race was restored. These facts must now operate in transforming the life of mankind. Masters as well as servants were obliged to acknowledge themselves the servants of sin, and must alike receive, as the free gift of God’s grace, their deliverance from this common bondage—the true, the highest freedom. Servants and masters, if they had become believers, were brought together under the same bond of an heavenly union, destined for immortality ”

“ For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and well shall it be with thee.” “Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase.” “And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.” Not only the honoured founders of the nation, as we have said, but its heroes, kings, and prophets were sons of labour, and had taken part in the work of that class which American Slave-owners call the fungus and cancer of society. ”

“ The woman is not to break the bond: but she is not to cling to it if separation is offered her. When we look to the general tone and tenor of St. Paul’s teaching on these matters, so far removed from enthusiasm and asceticism; when we consider that he knew the Old Testament, in which freedom is clearly treated as preferable to bondage; and when we remember that he had himself no scruple in asserting his privilege as a Roman citizen; it is difficult to believe that he can have enjoined a Christian Slave, when enfranchisement from a heathen master was offered him, to refuse the boon. ”

“ Paul, like St. Peter, in several places commands slaves to obey their masters. But St. Paul, like St. Peter, also commands the masters themselves to obey a despotic Emperor and his arbitrary satraps. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” ”

“ We have said that the founders of Christianity, when they preached political resignation as necessary for the time, did not pass on mankind a sentence of political despair. They submitted to the powers of an evil world, but they nevertheless did, and meant to do, that by which those powers would be destroyed. They bade the slave remain a slave, but it was in order that he might not imperil the sacred deposit of Christian principle which bore with it the redemption of the slave for ever. ”

“ It is the case also, as is too well known, in the Slave States of America, where in law a slave’s marriage is a nullity, and where, in practice, husbands are sold away from their wives, children from their parents: where the human cattle are bred like sheep or swine for the market: where, in shorty the whole system is a standing defiance of nature and humanity, such as it is strange to see defended or excused, under whatever stress of political passion, by English men, and still more strange to see defended or excused by English women. ”

“ The king of Israel is to reign by the will of God and the choice of the people, not like a king of the Medes and Persians by the right of his birth and the sacredness of his line: he is to be, not a human God like the monarchs on Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, but a man among his brethren, and his heart is not to be lifted up above them: unlike the neighbouring despots, he is to be beneath the law, which he is to study and keep, and upon his keeping which the continuance of his reign is to depend. ”

“ Therefore the Church, whenever she has been herself, and whenever she has acted in the spirit of her Founder, has laboured, not by inciting revolution, but by inculcating social duty and kindling social affection, to do away with all unjust and harsh distinctions between man and man, to diffuse the principles of fraternity and equality in their true sense through the world, and to make each community a community indeed. Therefore she has instinctively and steadily insisted on the education of the poor. ”

“ The sentiments of the master and bondman, and their education, in the age and country for which Moses made laws, would be much the same. No high-bred contempt therefore would be felt by the master for the slave: there would be none of the pride which breathes through the language held by the American slave-owners as to the expediency of dooming the lower class to slavery that the upper class may have leisure for higher cultivation. Nor had the slightest taint of degradation yet attached to labour, which was still the equal lot of all. ”

“ And the bondman of a priest ministering in holy things was not to be a mere “slave of the temple.” Whatever measure of sanctity attached to the rest of the priest’s household was to attach also to him. “There shall no stranger eat of the holy thing: a sojourner of the priest or an hired servant shall not eat of the holy thing. But if the priest buy any soul with his money, he shall eat of it, and he that is born in his house: they shall eat of his meat.” ”

“ If, then, we look to the records of Christianity in the Bible, we find no sanction for American Slavery there. If we look to the history of Christendom, we find the propagators and champions of the faith assailing Slavery under different forms and in different ages, without concert, yet with a unanimity which would surely be strange if Christianity and Slavery were not the natural enemies of each other. ”

“ If it was to put human society at once in a state of perfection, without further effort, political, social or intellectual, on the part of Man, the inference is irresistible that every institution enjoined in the Bible is part of a perfect scheme, and that every institution mentioned in the Bible without condemnation will be lawful to the end of time. ”

“ And when this is seen, all thought of degradation as attaching to the condition of the slave is at an end. His lot under a bad lord might be hard, and so under a bad lord might be the lot of the wife. “The institution of slavery,” says one of its eulogists, “operates by contrast and comparison.” It is most true: and there would be no contrast or comparison when a man’s bondservant stood on the same footing as the heir of his house or the wife of his bosom.
In the Southern States of America the murder of a slave, which was formerly punishable by a fine only, is now by law a capital offence. ”

“ The American Slave-owner, since he has cast off shame, and embraced as good that which he once excused as a transient evil, has borrowed the theory of the Greek; and he has so far improved upon it as to assert that a negro is not a man: [48] an assertion which, if he really believed it, would take away a shade of darkness from his cruelty only to add a deeper shade of darkness to his lust. All these theories tend to ratify the degradation of the slave, and those which describe his lot as an ordinance of nature tend to make it unchangeable and hopeless. ”

“ The free Negro is still to a great extent excluded from the rights of a citizen and a man. His evidence is not received against a white man; [18] the law does not secure to him the safeguard of a trial by a jury of his peers; he has no vote or voice in framing the laws by which he is governed, and degrading restrictions are imposed even upon his religious worship. He is liable to be brought back into slavery in many ways,—among others, by being married to a slave; and if his freedom is challenged, he must bring white witnesses to prove himself free. ”

“ In Slave States labour is always looked upon by freemen as a degradation. No Spartan would have thought of engaging in any work but war. Even at Athens, which was much less of a Slave State than Sparta, the name mechanic was, as in nations infected with feudal sentiments, a term of reproach. [74] The poor freeman at Rome despised labour, and lived by selling his suffrage at elections, by sponging on a rich patron, and by the dole which he received out of the tribute paid by the provinces to the conquering people. ”

“ The Hebrew Lawgiver founds a people of peasant proprietors, among whom the land is equally divided. Such seemed the surest way of producing a moral, religious, and patriotic nation. And the paramount object of the property law is to preserve these peasant proprietors, and prevent their homesteads from being engrossed, as the homesteads of the peasant proprietors in Italy were engrossed, by the rich capitalists, “who join house to house and lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.” ”

“ When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing. ”

“ With abundance of slave labour, the Jews would not have taken to industry, nor have acquired the virtues which industry alone can produce and guard. Their fate would have been like that of the Turks and other conquering hordes of the East, which, the rush of conquest once over, not being forced to labour, have sunk into mere sloth and abject sensuality. ”

“ When we come to the time of Moses and his laws, we find society at a more advanced stage. The families have become united in the tribe; and the tribes are fast blending into the nation. All the features of national life will now appear. Classes will be formed, and the difference between the freeman and the bondman will be distinctly felt. The State, though in a rude shape, will take the place of the head of the family as the ruler and protector of all: so that the protection afforded by his master will no longer make up to the bondman for the loss of personal liberty. ”

“ Indeed, in most cases, it would be impossible to convict the criminal, since the evidence of a slave is not received against a freeman, and slaves must commonly be the only witnesses of murders or outrages committed by planters or overseers. Severe laws may be safely passed where the only available evidence is to be rejected. In Greece and at Rome the slave lay under the same incapacity of appearing as a witness, saving that his evidence might be taken under torture, and was then regarded by the learned in the law as forming a useful supplement to the evidence given upon oath by the freeman. ”