# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S144
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

144 The Old Lutheran Teachers on Slavery.

not by words, but precisely by the works and the life of men. Of servants Homer writes in the Odyssey that half their virtue is lost to them, and for the most part servants are malicious and cunning people of the first order and are held to be so, whence among the nations gruesome punishments were once devised, to check the outbreak of inflamed wickedness and the growing insolence. When, therefore, the heathen notice, says Chrysostom in the fourth Homily on the Epistle to Titus, that a shameless, so insolent a kind of people has become, through the influence of our religion, as it were tamed, more honorable and more modest than all others, then the masters — however ignorant and unreasonable they themselves may be — will certainly think highly of the articles of faith of our religion. Obedient servants can therefore be of great use to the Church, for, as Chrysostom adds in the same place, the worse such people were, the more, once instructed, the power of preaching to improve them will shine forth.

The other rule for servants is this: "And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them (with a pretense that they are brethren), but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort." This rule is added here by way of an anticipation (a forestalling in advance). For servants converted to the Christian faith might have objected that all Christians are bound together through Christ, and that it was therefore unfair that one should assume lordship over another, or that one should subject himself to another. The Apostle answers that to despise one's masters is a thing that ought to be far from Christians. For that bond which they have in Christ concerns the soul, the faith, the word, and the sacraments, and finally salvation itself, in which there is no distinction between a free man and a servant, Gal. 3:28. But as regards station and calling they are distinguished, and for that very reason those who are in the servile state ought, toward masters whom they know to be believers, to fulfill their duties all the more willingly. These believers he calls the "brethren" of the Church. Here it is to be noted what Jerome remarks, against Helvidius, rather toward the end — that in holy Scripture "brethren" is spoken of in a fourfold way: by nature, by descent, by kinship, by affection. By nature those are called brothers who have the same parents, as Esau and Jacob; by descent, all Jews, Deut. 15:12, etc.; by kinship, all who belong to the same family, as Abraham is called Lot's brother, Gen. 13:8; brothers by affection are divided into two kinds, the spiritual and the general — the spiritual, because all Christians are called brothers, as Ps. 133:1: "Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity"; and in this sense the servants are, in our text, called the brothers of their believing masters; in general, because we