13 vidual heart and life, and therefore had nothing to do with corporations or political ordinances. He belonged to a conquered and subject race, itself under the curse of the Almighty; whatever reformation he desired to make in governments or political institutions must be done by first reforming the individuals controlling them. And this was what actually took place. His silence on the subject of slavery as an institution^vas no more an approval of it in general, than it was of the oppression and abominations connected with it; the application of torture in an Athenian court, which always accompanied the testimony of a slave; putting to death the slaves of a master who had been murdered; the barbarities of the amphitheatre; crucifixion for the most trifling misconduct (such as speaking disrespectfully, Blair’s Roman Slavery, p. Ill), and the oriental practice introduced into Greece and Rome of making- eunuchs, to whose condition our Saviour incidently refers without censuring it. Did he therefore approve of this practice, and would it be justifiable by Biblical arguments ? But let us look at the result that soon flowed from the lessons of humility, love, and human brotherhood, which form the teachings of the meek and lowly Jesus. “ Who is my neighbor ?” Not the favored Jew, not the self-sufficient Levite, but the despised and hated Samaritan. “ A new commandment give I you, that ye love one another?" “And whosoever will be chief among you let him be your servant (doulos}’’ Christ came on one occasion into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and read from Esaias : “ The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; .... to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised"’ (St. Luke, iv. 18); and he began to say to them, “ This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (21). Bishop Hopkins tells us, quoting Gibbon’s authority, that in our Saviour’s time the Roman empire contained sixty millions of slaves. What became of them ? In the course of centuries all those provinces of this same Roman empire, which adopted Christianity, abolished slavery. Slavery only continued in those provinces of the old empire, which were overrun and subdued by Oriental and non-Christian races.
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