# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S143
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Old Lutheran Teachers on Slavery. 143

believing masters. The first is this: "Servants, who are under the yoke, are to count their own masters worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the doctrine be not blasphemed." Servants are distinct from hired laborers. Hired laborers serve the public, many at once. They are otherwise called banausi, and also thêtes, whence among the Athenians thessae were women of lower rank, because they served for wages. Among the same Athenians the thetic order was the fourth according to the census, by which term craftsmen and day-laborers were understood, who were excluded from holding public office and free from taxes. Servants, however, are those who have become the property of another for that other's service; and of these it is said that they either are born to it or are made so — born, namely, of bondwomen; made, however, by the law of nations, that is, through captivity, or by the civil law, when a free person over twenty years old sold himself to obtain a certain price. Of hired laborers the Apostle does not speak, because they are bound to no fixed master, and because that general rule applies to them, 1 Thess. 4:6: "That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in business." He deals here, rather, with servants, of whom he says that they are "under the yoke"; for they are not their own master, but bound to masters. Servitude is in itself a yoke, under which one has a hard time of it, as in a low and wretched condition — for nothing is more wretched and lowly than to be given over as another's property, and, when one acquires something, to acquire it for one's master. Now "yoke" (zygos or zygon) is a pair of oxen yoked together. By a metaphor it is transferred to servile duties, which is why Plato too speaks of a servile yoke in the 8th Epistle, by which the toil and misery of servitude is indicated. Those, then, who are under the servile yoke, these the Apostle bids "count their own masters worthy of all honor." By "their own masters" he understands those private masters into whose power they have come, of whatever rank or religion they may be, so long as they are the masters who have legal right over the servants. These he wishes not merely to be honored — which often happens even against one's will — but to be held worthy of honor, because God has deemed them worthy of this honor; from him comes the distinction between masters and servants, and he it is who in the Fourth Commandment has commanded father and mother to be honored, under which name masters also, and whoever is set over us, are understood. And indeed "all honor," namely that which servants owe their masters; for there is also an honor belonging to God alone, which we naturally regard as excepted here. Under this honor owed to masters he understands not merely deference, but also all offices of love and compliance in everything that is not against God. The reason for this rule is: "so that the name of God and the doctrine be not blasphemed," namely among the unbelievers. For, as we have said above, the heathen are accustomed to judge doctrines