# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1856_S227
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Slavery and the Bible. 227

—heaven, and over all that creeps on the earth, and let all the fish in the sea be given into your hands. Through the Fall, indeed, the divine image in man — innocence and the immortality of the body — was lost; but that original prerogative of man over the animals God has, out of grace, left remaining to fallen man. It can and may, accordingly, nevermore be wrested from him. Slavery, the direct opposite of this prerogative, is therefore against the will of God, not only before but also after the Fall. Slavery in the passive sense, as a suffered condition, does indeed stand in a series with all the evils and plagues to which fallen man is now subjected; it is a dispensation of God upon the sinner, like poverty, sickness, pain, and so forth. But God has nowhere instituted any class of men privileged above others, to whom He would have given authority to rule over men as over animals, or to possess men as one possesses living or lifeless things. It is consequently a total inversion and confusion of divine orders when slavery is placed in the same category with estates directly instituted by God — for example, marriage, the magisterial estate, the relation of parents to their children. These institutions can boast a divine origin both before and after the Fall; slavery has this glory neither before nor after the Fall.

Whether the antediluvian world already knew slavery, we do not know, though it is more than probable that fallen, proud, self-seeking man, who would not let himself be chastised by the Spirit of God, abused his gifts and his power to subjugate his weaker fellow man. All the clearer traces of a rapid spread of slavery we find among the postdiluvian generation. Already in Abraham's time it had become so universally prevalent that it had even penetrated into the house of this father of all believers. Throughout the entire pre-Christian age, from the Flood onward, it was reckoned among all peoples a lawful, rightful possession; trading in menservants and maidservants was reckoned a lawful trade; in particular the principle of international law held good, that those who had fallen into the hands of the victor in war might be used as slaves. So universal was the dominion of slavery that we find it, even among the people of Israel, as an adopted custom, to possess menservants and maidservants after the manner of their heathen neighbors. Yet in the case of the people of Israel we must take into account the circumstance that here an extraordinary judgment of God prevailed over the heathen peoples of Canaan, according to which the Lord had given them into the hands of Israel. When at last the Gospel appeared in the world and brought forth a new spiritual order of things among the nations, it did not find slavery only just arising, but as a phenomenon already existing for thousands of years, permeating all of state and family life.