# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1856_S229
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Slavery and the Bible. 229

—caution in the application of abstract principles to concrete cases; but we cannot find in those examples any justification of slavery in itself. Examples without a clear word of God form no sure foundation for doctrine or for life; for even holy people were sinners and could err and fail, notwithstanding their state of grace. God has held it to His servants' credit — even though He did not thereby approve it — that they introduced into their own households the slavery customary among their heathen neighbors; the more so did God tolerate it, since, according to His merciful design, the life of menservants and maidservants in the houses of the holy patriarchs was meant to become for them a way to attain the saving knowledge of the true God. We must indeed confess that God also tolerated polygamy in the holy patriarchs, even though this was not in accordance with the original institution of marriage. What hinders us from assuming such a divine toleration in the case of slavery as well? As for the Mosaic ordinances concerning menservants and maidservants, they too are by no means a compelling proof of a divine right of slaveholding. If our assertion above is true, that slavery is not a normal condition of man willed and instituted by God, then we are compelled to seek, in the Mosaic slave-ordinances, some other divine purpose than that of a sanction and approval of slavery. For God cannot possibly contradict Himself in His will. No other interpretation, therefore, will remain to us but this: that God regulated, but did not sanction, this evil which had once, against His will, penetrated into the people of Israel, in order to prevent still greater evils. We find an analogy in the Mosaic ordinance of the bill of divorce. Did God thereby sanction divorce? By no means! He gave these laws concerning the bill of divorce on account of the hardness of heart of the Jewish people; from the beginning it was not so. Matthew 19:7–9. In a similar way, in order to protect menservants and maidservants from imminent violence and arbitrariness, and masters from the unfaithfulness of their servants, God gave such laws as restrain despotic arbitrariness and willful running away, and in several instances mitigate the lot of the bondsmen — as indeed the service of a Hebrew servant, through his appointed release in the seventh year, was the mildest kind of bondage. But that these laws subjected foreign servants to a harsher servitude than the native-born lay, without doubt, in the judgment of God which He intended to execute, through the hand of Israel, upon the heathen peoples. These are purely particular laws for the people of Israel and give no rule of analogous procedure for other peoples, no more than God's commands to Joshua to ban with the edge of the sword the men, women, and children of the Amorites are authoritative for other warring peoples. We will not deny, indeed, that those Mosaic ordinances may afford a model, to Christian authorities who cannot immediately abolish slavery without the danger of the total ruin of the civil commonwealth,