# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S109
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Dr. Hengstenberg on the Slavery Question. 109

Let us turn from Holy Scripture to history, and there too we find a striking contrast to the restless activity of the abolitionists in North America, which has at last made the proverb true: he who blows his nose too hard forces out blood. The Council of Gangra pronounces the ban against anyone who teaches slaves, under religious pretense, to despise their masters, abandon their service, and not serve with goodwill and all reverence. The Council of Chalcedon forbids monasteries to receive slaves who have not obtained permission from their masters, and threatens excommunication, so that the name of God not be dishonored — that is, so that Christianity not be accused of occasioning disobedience. With regard to the Middle Ages, Möhler says: "The Christian spirit created for itself, of its own accord, the form corresponding to it, and shed the foreign form without revolution, indeed without any external and coercive law; for such a law was applied only here and there against the last remnants of slavery."

Is the great work, which was begun in the spirit within the Christian church and carried forward through so many centuries, now to be completed in the flesh? Does one wish to overhear the word: the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds? We do not fail to recognize that in the southern slave states there are abuses which must deeply grieve the heart of the Christian friend of humanity. But one ought not to have let oneself be driven by such grief to pressing and storming, which can only bring about still greater evils, but rather to redoubled zeal in the preaching of the Gospel generally, and namely of those truths which it preaches in the face of slavery: that all men, masters and slaves, have One Lord, Creator, and Redeemer, with whom is no respect of persons, who does not know the rich before the lowly, because they are all the work of his hands; who is a Judge over all the harshness and injustice of the rulers against those who serve; who loves all with equal love, before whom there is neither slave nor free, Galatians 3:28, Philemon 16, who has wound the holy bond of love about all. The preaching of the Gospel is the only means by which the grievous wounds of these conditions can be healed. Where this means does not take effect, one must, even though with a bleeding heart, leave the matter to God for the time being, and wait until his hour comes — and meanwhile work all the more earnestly at removing the intolerable conditions in one's own heart, one's own house, and one's nearest surroundings, which is admittedly harder than, in the Northern states, working oneself up over the removal of slavery in the Southern states and agitating for it. "The Gospel," aptly says Dr. von Harless, "does not abrogate the outward consequence and punishment of sin, so that it should first wait and see whether some good can still be made of the now unfettered, perverse heart; indeed, even to the Christian as a slave it does not say: break your chains, but rather it breaks the chains, in that it takes away the harshness of the masters in the fear of a higher Lord, that