# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S108
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

108 Dr. Hengstenberg on the Slavery Question.

"Let as many servants as have believing masters not despise them, because they are brethren, but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort." Peter exhorts: "Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully."

How far one has departed in America from the ground of Holy Scripture becomes especially plain when one compares the practice customary there with the procedure of the Apostle Paul in this very matter. The slave Onesimus has run away from his master and, having become free, has found the Gospel. Paul, who brought it to him, does not leave him in the state of freedom in which he found him — a state he might well have regarded as a given fact — but sends him back, inwardly born anew, to his master Philemon, and asks only that he receive him lovingly again and treat him as a brother in Christ. If Philemon wishes to do more than the Apostle says, let him follow the impulse of his own heart; but the general Christian duty is only what the Apostle expressly demands of him.

Holy Scripture knows no other way of removing the ungodly element in slavery than the inward one: that it teaches the masters that they have a Master in heaven, and fills their hearts with humility and love. And this way has proved effective as no other has. "In the Christian church," says Chrysostom, "there is no slavery in the old sense of the word; it survives only in name among the disciples of the Lord — the thing itself has ceased." Where this way does not lead to the goal, there Holy Scripture lets the relation stand, because any violent alteration of it can only make matters worse.

"Before the slaves stood on a higher level of moral culture," says Möhler*), "any outward liberation could only work ruin; and certainly, had Christianity simply preached the liberation of the slaves, and had it succeeded in carrying this through without a prior loosening of the inner fetters, it would have brought about a devastation like that which would follow if hell itself were to send out all its inhabitants at once and leave them to their own caprice upon the earth; in the general destruction thereby called forth even Christianity would have found its own ruin." Whoever wishes to see quite vividly what becomes of slaves prematurely emancipated — especially the most degraded of all, the Negro slaves, who can scarcely be compared with the slaves of the ancient world — let him read the descriptions which Count Görtz has drawn, on the basis of his own observations, in his engaging and instructive Journey around the World, in Haiti.

*) In the excellent essay: Fragments from the History of the Abolition of Slavery, Collected Writings, vol. 2.