II. IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. It is still accepted al! a fact. But: 1. A principle is laid down, which, like leaven leavening the whole i nmp, could not but cause its destruction. "Ye masters ••. your Master also" ( or, as it would be better translated, " your and their Master") "is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him" (Eph. vi. 9). "Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you" (John xiii. 13-15). "Art thou called being a servant (slave)? ea.re not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather. For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant (slave), is the Lord's freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free is Christ's servant (slave)" (1 Cor. vii. 21, 22). "There is neither ••. bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all" (Col. iii. 11). 2. An example is given. St. Paul tbus speaks of Onesimus, the runaway slave, now converted to Christianity: "I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds: ••. thou therefore receive him, that is, mine own bowels..•• For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldest receive him for ever; not now as a servant (slave), but above a servant (slave), a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord? If thou count me therefore a partner, receive him as myself" (Philem. 10-17). Contrast the feeling entertained contemporaneously towa,ds slaves in the Roman Empire. "Their growing power was sometimes restrained by legalized murder; they were sold without remorse; they were tortured and beaten and crucified without pity. Even Cicero apologizes to Atticus for being affected by the death of his slave" (Words- worth, • Church History,' eh. xxii.i.). III. TEACHING IN THE SECOND OENTUBY. "We ought," says Clement of Alexandria, "to treat our slaves as ourselves. They are men as we are; and there is the same God of bond and free; and we ought not to punish our brethren when they sin, but to reprove them. Whatever we do to the lowest and meanest of Christ's brethren, we do to him"(' Pmdag.,' p. 307, as quoted by Wordsworth). IV. SLOW BOT CERTAIN EXTINCTION OF BLAVEBY. There was a long battle to be fought between the selfish and the Christian instinct; but slavery could not coexist with Christianity, and wherever Christianity now stretches, slavery, though it may still linger here 1111d there, is condemned by public sentiment and doomed to extinction.
HOMILIES BY VARIOUS AUTHOUS. The/a.Tf,ow year. Ch. xxv.1-7; cf. Deut.xx:xi.10-13. We have here a ceremonial appendix to the fourth commandment. 'l'he land must have its sabbath as well as man, and so every seventh year was to be fallow year for the ground. The necessi~y of giving land rest is recognized still in agriculture. Continual cropping impovenshes a soil, and reduces it eveutually to barrenness. This was one of ~he grave ~barges made by political economists against the slavery of North America, that, in con- sequence of the inefficiency of slave labour, the land was subjected to a monotonous proce6s of cropping, and in consequence killed. The finest virgin soil 'l'.l'as being reduc~d to wilderness, for the land was allowed neither variety nor rest.1 ThlS arrangement ID Israel, therefore, was economically most wise. But "the sabbath o~ the fields " ~~d a wider basis than this mere natural one. lt was attended by most important religious results. . I THE FALLOW YEAB PROCLAIMED TBAT THE LAND BELONGED TO THE LORD. For if the• fourth commandment really implies that the people, called fr?m ~heir own wor:1'- to do God's work on God's day, belong to him, and so are under obhg!lt1on to obey this call in the very same way the claim that the land should rest proclaims that the land is bis. What was thus claimed in Canaan is only part of a still wider claim ; for " t~e earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell tbercm. For he bath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods" (Ps. xxiv. 1, 2). The demand for "a sabbath of rest unto the land" is for "a sabbath for the ~ Cf. Cairnes' 'Slave Power,' p. 116, eto. 398 THE BOOK OF LEvrncus. [en. XXV, 1-66.