Referring to Ephesians vi. 6:
Approaching the words in their connexion, we find a most remarkable and suggestive connexion indeed. Whom is he addressing specially here? It is the Christian slave; the man who has found Christ, or rather has been found of Him, while being the absolute property of a human owner, under the then laws of society and the state. This man had had no voice, not the faintest, in the choice of his service, of his duties, of his burthens, of his residence, of his surroundings of any sort. His purchaser might be the best of men, or the worst; he might be Philemon, he might be Felix, or Nero. He might be a believer, or a persecutor. He might be just and generous by natural character, or capricious and unfair to the last degree. The tasks he imposed upon his slave might be well adapted to the strength and character of the worker, or extremely uncongenial, trying, and exhausting. Most assuredly the Master in heaven would take account of the unfairness or cruelty, and deal with the offender in due time. But meanwhile the slave of man who was also the believing bond-servant of the Lord Jesus, was to leave that wholly to his own and his human master’s Master, and to accept the conditions of his servitude, however uneasy, as the conditions under which he was to do the will of God from the soul. Doubtless occasions for disobedience might arise; for the earthly master might possibly order him to sin. But this was a matter by itself; this would be a question not of the pleasantness or bitterness of his surroundings, the weight or lightness of his yoke, but of right and wrong, of the will and preferences not of self but of Jesus Christ. As regarding everything else that fell in his way in slavery, as regarded caprice and violence, tasks beyond his strength, uncongenial to his nature, tasks never raised perhaps above the lowest or apparently most useless level, he was to recognize in it the will of God, and do it from the soul.
The abstract question whether slavery was right or no was never presented by the Gospel to the slave, though the precepts addressed to the master must often have suggested the question to him. No, the Gospel never taught revolution, though its inmost principles were pregnant with peaceful and just reform. It at once contented and ennobled the slave-convert by glorifying the actual conditions of his life with the surprising truth that, as the world stood then, they were for him the will of God, and that in accepting and fulfilling them he was serving in blessed truth the eternal Master.
It is plain from the New Testament that in countless cases this was grasped, welcomed, and lived out by human souls, through grace. Though the Apostles said not one word about emancipation, they made great multitudes of converts among the slaves. We infer with wonder and joy, from the Epistles, that the life of God, the life lived by faith in the Son of God, the life of peace, and purity, and heavenly love, was lived in the slave-circle of many a household, large and small, in that corrupted classic world.
Not merely in the gaps and breathing-times of their servile duties, but in the duties and through them, multitudes of saints supernaturally saw the will of Him who had shone upon their darkness, and transfigured them into His own children.
Dwelling where an apparent iron Destiny had fixed them, they yet found in it liberty and choice, for it was to them no longer fate but the will of God. Moving up and down in their compulsory surroundings, they found themselves abiding in Jesus Christ. Taking the orders of their Greek or Latin owner, or those of his underlings, they heard through them the voice of the will of God. Were they instructions for honourable occupation, and kindly given? This was well, and welcome. Were the orders vexatious in matter, or manner, or both? Here indeed was call for the miracle of grace and power; but a call never in vain, if the heart was indeed given up to God and abiding in His Son. “His grace was sufficient for them.” He shone as the First Cause through the cloud of the second. The mistakes of man were but the vehicle for the unerring touch of the love of God. Through man’s unkindness, or positive malevolence, He who “loveth righteousness and hateth wickedness” was however carrying out nothing but His will through and on His saint. The soul which, by the Spirit, recollected and rested upon that truth might tabernacle in the body of the most oppressed of bondmen, but it was possessed of a peace and liberty undreamed of by the serene Stoic. For its refuge was not in itself but in Jesus Christ; in His power, not in his own; in His will, not in its own.
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