_THE MORAL CONDITION OF SLAVES.--THEIR ADORNMENT OF THE DOCTRINE OF
GOD._
"Exhort servants to be in subjection to their own masters, and to be
well-pleasing to them in all things; not gainsaying; not purloining,
but showing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of
God our Saviour in all things."--TITUS ii. 9, 10.
Something has already been said in a previous discourse (on 1 Tim. vi.
1, 2) respecting the institution of slavery in the Roman Empire in the
first age of Christianity. It was not only unchristian but inhuman; and
it was so widespread that the slaves outnumbered the freemen.
Nevertheless the Apostles and their successors taught neither to the
slaves that they ought to resist a dominion which was immoral both in
effect and in origin, nor to the masters that as Christians they were
bound to set their servants free.[78] Christianity did indeed labour for
the abolition of slavery, but by quite other methods. It taught masters
and slaves alike that all men have a common Divine parentage and a
common Divine redemption, and consequently are equally bound to show
brotherly love and equally endowed with spiritual freedom. It showed
that the slave and his master are alike children of God, and as such
free; and alike servants of Jesus Christ, and as such bondmen,--bondmen
in that service which is the only true freedom. And thus very slowly,
but surely, Christianity disintegrated and dispersed those unwholesome
conditions and false ideas, which made slavery to be everywhere
possible, and to seem to most men to be necessary. And wherever these
conditions and ideas were swept away, slavery gradually died out or was
formally abolished.[79]
As the number of slaves in the first century was so enormous, it was
only in accordance with human probability that many of the first
converts to Christianity belonged to this class; all the more so, as
Christianity, like most great movements, began with the lower orders and
thence spread upwards. Among the better class of slaves, that is those
who were not so degraded as to be insensible of their own degradation,
the Gospel spread freely. It offered them just what they needed, and the
lack of which had turned their life into one great despair. It gave them
something to hope for and something to live for. Their condition in the
world was both socially and morally deplorable. Socially they had no
rights beyond what their lord chose to allow them. They were ranked with
the brutes, and were in a worse condition than any brutes, for they were
capable of wrongs and sufferings of which the brutes are incapable or
insensible. And St. Chrysostom in commenting on this passage points out
how inevitable it was that the moral character of slaves should as a
rule be bad. They have no motive for trying to be good, and very little
opportunity of learning what is right. Every one, slaves included,
admits that as a race they are passionate, intractable, and indisposed
to virtue, not because God has made them so, but from bad education and
the neglect of their masters. The masters care nothing about their
slaves' morals, except so far as their vices are likely to interfere
with their masters' pleasures or interests. Hence the slaves, having no
one to care for them, naturally sink into an abyss of wickedness. Their
chief aim is to avoid, not crime, but being found out. For if free men,
able to select their own society, and with many other advantages of
education and home life, find it difficult to avoid the contact and
contaminating influence of the vicious, what can one expect from those
who have none of these advantages, and have no possibility of escape
from degrading surroundings? They are never taught to respect
themselves; they have no experience of persons who do respect
themselves; and they never receive any respect from either their
superiors or their fellows. How can virtue or self-respect be learnt in
such a school? "For all these reasons it is a difficult and surprising
thing that there should ever be a good slave." And yet this is the class
which St. Paul singles out as being able in a peculiar way to "_adorn_
the doctrine of God our Saviour in _all_ things."
"To _adorn_ the doctrine of God." How is the doctrine of God to be
adorned? And how are slaves capable of adorning it?
"The doctrine of God" is that which He teaches, which He has revealed
for our instruction. It is His revelation of Himself. He is the author
of it, the giver of it, and the subject of it. He is also its end or
purpose. It is granted in order that men may know Him, and love Him, and
be brought home to Him. All these facts are a guarantee to us of its
importance and its security. It comes from One Who is infinitely great
and infinitely true. And yet it is capable of being adorned by those to
whom it is given.
There is nothing paradoxical in this. It is precisely those things which
in themselves are good and beautiful that we consider capable of
adornment and worthy of it. To add ornament to an object that is
intrinsically vile or hideous, does but augment the existing bad
qualities by adding to them a glaring incongruity. Baseness, which might
otherwise have escaped notice, becomes conspicuous and grotesque. No
person of good taste and good sense would waste and degrade ornament by
bestowing it upon an unworthy object. The very fact, therefore, that
adornment is attempted proves that those who make the attempt consider
the object to be adorned an object worthy of honour and capable of
receiving it. Thus adornment is a form of homage: it is the tribute
which the discerning pay to beauty.
But adornment has its relations not only to those who bestow, but to
those also who receive it. It is a reflexion of the mind of the giver;
but it has also an influence on the recipient. And, first, it makes that
which is adorned more conspicuous and better known. A picture in a frame
is more likely to be looked at than one that is unframed. An ornamented
building attracts more attention than a plain one. A king in his royal
robes is more easily recognized as such than one in ordinary clothing.
Adornment, therefore, is an advertisement of merit: it makes the adorned
object more readily perceived and more widely appreciated. And,
secondly, if it is well chosen and well bestowed, it augments the merit
of that which it adorns. That which was fair before is made still fairer
by suitable ornament. The beautiful painting is still more beautiful in
a worthy frame. Noble ornament increases the dignity of a noble
structure. And a person of royal presence becomes still more regal when
royally arrayed. Adornment, therefore, is not only an advertisement of
beauty, it is also a real enhancement of it.
All these particulars hold good with regard to the adornment of the
doctrine of God. By trying to adorn it and make it more beautiful and
more attractive, we show our respect for it; we pay our tribute of
homage and admiration. We show to all the world that we think it
estimable, and worthy of attention and honour. And by so doing we make
the doctrine of God better known: we bring it under the notice of others
who might otherwise have overlooked it: we force it upon their
attention. Thus, without consciously intending to be anything of the
kind, we become evangelists: we proclaim to those among whom we live
that we have received a Gospel that satisfies us. Moreover, the doctrine
which we thus adorn becomes really more beautiful in consequence.
Teaching which nobody admires, which nobody accepts--teaching which
teaches nobody, is a poor thing. It may be true, it may have great
capabilities; but for the present it is as useless as a book in the
hands of an illiterate savage, and as valueless as treasures lying at
the bottom of the sea. Our acceptance of the doctrine of God, and our
efforts to adorn it, bring out its inherent life and develop its natural
value, and every additional person who joins us in doing this is an
augmentation of its powers. It is within our power not only to honour
and make better known, but also to enhance, the beauty of the doctrine
of God.
But slaves,--and such slaves as were found throughout the Roman Empire
in St. Paul's day,--what have they to do with the adornment of the
doctrine of God? Why is this duty of making the Gospel more beautiful
specially mentioned in connexion with them? That the aristocracy of the
Empire, its magistrates, its senators, its commanders,--supposing that
any of them could be induced to embrace the faith of Jesus
Christ,--should be charged to adorn the doctrines which they had
accepted, would be intelligible. Their acceptance of it would be a
tribute to its dignity. Their loyalty to it would be a proclamation of
its merits. Their accession to its ranks would be a real augmentation of
its powers of attraction. But almost the reverse of all this would seem
to be the truth in the case of slaves. Their tastes were so low, their
moral judgment so debased, that for a religion to have found a welcome
among slaves would hardly be a recommendation of it to respectable
people. And what opportunities had slaves, regarded as they were as the
very outcasts of society, of making the Gospel better known or more
attractive?
So many a person, and especially many a slave, might have argued in St.
Paul's hearing; and not altogether without reason and support from
experience. The fact that Christianity was a religion acceptable to
slaves and the associates of slaves was from very early times one of the
objections made against it by the heathen, and one of the circumstances
which prejudiced men of culture and refinement against it. It was one of
the many bitter reproaches that Celsus brought against Christianity,
that it laid itself out to catch slaves, women, and children, in short
the immoral, the unintellectual, and the ignorant classes. And we need
not suppose that this was merely a spiteful taunt: it represented a
deep-seated and not altogether unreasonable prejudice. Seeing how many
religions there were at that time which owed much of their success to
the fact that they pandered to the vices, while they presumed upon the
folly and ignorance of mankind, it was not an unjustifiable presumption
that a new faith which won many adherents in the most degraded and
vicious class of society, was itself a degrading and corrupting
superstition.
Yet St. Paul knew what he was about when he urged Titus to commit the
"adorning of the doctrine of God" in a special manner to slaves: and
experience has proved the soundness of his judgment. If the mere fact
that many slaves accepted the faith could not do a great deal to
recommend the power and beauty of the Gospel, the Christian lives, which
they thence-forward led, could. It was a strong argument _à fortiori_.
The worse the unconverted sinner, the more marvellous his thorough
conversion. There must be something in a religion which out of such
unpromising material as slaves could make obedient, gentle, honest,
sober, and chaste men and women. As Chrysostom puts it, when it was seen
that Christianity, by giving a settled principle of sufficient power to
counterbalance the pleasures of sin, was able to impose a restraint upon
a class so self-willed, and render them singularly well-behaved, then
their masters, however unreasonable they might be, were likely to form a
high opinion of the doctrines which accomplished this. So that it is
neither by chance, nor without reason, that the Apostle singles out this
class of men: since, the more wicked they are, the more admirable is
the power of that preaching which reforms them. And St. Chrysostom goes
on to point out that the way in which slaves are to endeavour to adorn
the doctrine of God is by cultivating precisely those virtues which
contribute most to their masters' comfort and interest,--submissiveness,
gentleness, meekness, honesty, truthfulness, and a faithful discharge of
all duties. What a testimony conduct of this kind would be to the power
and beauty of the Gospel; and a testimony all the more powerful in the
eyes of those masters who became conscious that these despised Christian
slaves were living better lives than their owners! The passionate man,
who found his slave always gentle and submissive; the inhuman and
ferocious man, who found his slave always meek and respectful; the
fraudulent man of business, who noticed that his slave never pilfered or
told lies; the sensualist, who observed that his slave was never
intemperate and always shocked at immodesty;--all these, even if they
were not induced to become converts to the new faith, or even to take
much trouble to understand it, would at least at times feel something of
respect, if not of awe and reverence, for a creed which produced such
results. Where did their slaves learn these lofty principles? Whence did
they derive the power to live up to them?
The cases in which masters and mistresses were converted through the
conduct of their own slaves were probably by no means rare. It was by
the gradual influence of numerous Christian lives, rather than by
organized missionary effort, that the Gospel spread during the first
ages of the Church; and nowhere would this gradual influence make itself
more strongly and permanently felt than in the family and household.
Some slaves then, like some domestic servants now, stood in very close
relations with their masters and mistresses; and the opportunities of
"adorning the doctrine of God" would in such cases be frequent and
great. Origen implies that it was no uncommon thing for families to be
converted through the instrumentality of the slaves (Migne, _Series
Graeca_, xi. 476, 483). One of the grievous moral defects of that most
immoral age was the low view taken of the position of women in society.
Even married women were treated with but scant respect. And as the
marriage-tie was very commonly regarded as an irksome restraint, the
condition of most women, even among the free-born, was degraded in the
extreme. They were scarcely ever looked upon as the social equals and
the necessary complement of the other sex; and, when not required to
minister to the comforts and pleasures of the men, were often left to
the society of slaves. Untold evil was the natural result; but, as
Christianity spread, much good came out of the evil. Christian slaves
sometimes made use of this state of things to interest their mistresses
in the teaching of the Gospel; and when the mistress was converted,
other conversions in the household became much more probable. Another
grievous blot on the domestic life of the time was the want of parental
affection. Fathers had scarcely any sense of responsibility towards
their children, especially as regards their moral training. Their
education generally was left almost entirely to slaves, from whom they
learnt some accomplishments and many vices. They too often became adepts
in wickedness before they had ceased to be children. But here again
through the instrumentality of the Gospel good was brought out of this
evil also. When the slaves, who had the care and the training of the
children, were Christians, the morals of the children were carefully
guarded; and in many cases the children, when they came to years of
discretion, embraced Christianity.
Nor were these the only ways in which the most degraded and despised
class in the society of that age were able to "adorn the doctrine of
God." Slaves were not only an ornament to the faith by their lives; they
adorned it also by their deaths. Not a few slaves won the martyr's
crown. Those who have read that most precious relic of early Christian
literature, the letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne to the
Churches of Asia Minor and Phrygia, will not need to be reminded of the
martyrdom of the slave Blandina with her mistress in the terrible
persecution in Gaul under Marcus Aurelius in the year 177. Eusebius has
preserved the greater portion of the letter at the beginning of the
fifth book of his Ecclesiastical History. Let all who can do so read it,
if not in the original Greek, at least in a translation. It is an
authentic and priceless account of Christian fortitude.
What slaves could do then we all of us can do now. We can prove to all
for whom and with whom we work that we really do believe and endeavour
to live up to the faith that we profess. By the lives we lead we can
show to all who know anything of us that we are loyal to Christ. By
avoiding offence in word or in deed, and by welcoming opportunities of
doing good to others, we can make His principles better known. And by
doing all this brightly and cheerfully, without ostentation or
affectation or moroseness, we can make His principles attractive. Thus
we also can "adorn the doctrine of God in all things."
"In all things." That all-embracing addition to the Apostolic
injunction must not be lost sight of. There is no duty so humble, no
occupation so trifling, that it cannot be made into an opportunity for
adorning our religion. "Whether ye eat, or drink, or _whatsoever ye do_,
do all to the glory of God" (1 Cor. x. 31).
FOOTNOTES:
[78] The stories told in Bollandus of Roman converts under Trajan and
Diocletian, who at their baptism manumitted their slaves, are not very
credible. Such things, if they happened at all, were very exceptional.
[79] Pagan inscriptions carefully distinguish between freemen and
slaves; Christian inscriptions seldom or never. There seems to be no
well-ascertained instance in the Roman catacombs. _Dict. of Christ
Ant._, Vol. ii. p. 1904.