Let me be spared
from the sin of reducing a brother man to such a lot. Your doctrine,
therefore, that the Apostles addressed slaves only, and not servants in
general, would not, were its correctness admitted, lift you out of all
the difficulties in your argument.
Again, does it necessarily follow from this admission, that the relation
of slaveholder and slave is sinless? Was the despotism of the Roman
government sinless? I do not ask whether the _abuses_ of civil
government, in that instance, were sinless. But, I ask, was a
government, despotic in its constitution, depriving all its subjects of
political power, and extending absolute control over their property and
persons--was such a government, independently of the consideration of
its _abuses_, (if indeed we may speak of the abuses of what is in itself
an _abuse_,) sinless? I am aware, that Prof. Hodge says, that it was so:
and, when he classes despotism and slavery with _adiaphora_, "things
indifferent;" and allows no more moral character to them than to a table
or a broomstick, I trust no good man envies his optics.
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