# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1863_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Foreword. 39

her meaningfully: "Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou, and whither wilt thou go?" And when she answered, "I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai," he called to her: "Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hand." Gen. 16:6–9. Thus God Himself judged, when a slave sought to emancipate herself!

So we see, then, from all this, that God, according to the Holy Scripture of the Old Testament, did not originally institute civil unfreedom or servitude as He did, for instance, marriage and civil government, any more than He instituted absolute monarchy, or the condition of the poor, or any other burden of social life; but He not only threatened it Himself as a punishment for sin and ordained it among His people, but also declared it Himself, in the Fourth Commandment, to be a relation of duty, and, in the Tenth Commandment, declared manservant and maidservant to be the inviolable property of their master — and thus Himself confirmed servitude, where it exists in a state as a legally established relation, just as He confirmed all other legal provisions, ordinances, and institutions of civil government touching civil liberties, burdens, rights, duties, property, and the like.

We readily grant that, if the Old Testament alone spoke of this servitude, there would still be room for the thought that thereby the morality of this relation had not yet been placed beyond all doubt. For since the Israelite people received from God, through Moses, its civil constitution also, but the civil laws cannot punish everything that the moral law, the law of God's eternal will, punishes — rather, on account of the wickedness of men, must permit unpunished many things which, though they cannot be made moral, are nevertheless in conflict with that latter law according to its spiritual sense, so that at least outward peace might be established — according to the old axiom, "Aliud jus poli, aliud jus soli" (one law is that of heaven, another that of the earth): one might indeed suppose that the relation of master to servant, and conversely, also belonged under this category. Thus, for example, divorce by means of a bill of divorcement, when the wife "found no favor in her husband's eyes because of some uncleanness," was, under the civil law of the Old Testament covenant people, unpunishable or permitted, Deut. 24:1; and yet, when the Pharisees appealed to this, the LORD pointed them back to the first divine institution of marriage as to that which is eternally valid, and added: "Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery; and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery." Matt. 19:3–9.

Does the relation of master and servant, then, perhaps also belong among those things which in the Old Testament were, indeed, unpunishable according to the civil laws, but