“Quasi vero curent divina de servis!”—MACROB. Sat. i. 11.
“In servos superbissimi, crudelissimi, contumeliosissimi sumus.”—SEN. Ep. xlvii.
“Aequalitas naturae et fidei potior est quam differentia statuum.”—BENGEL.
“Through the vista of history we see slavery and its Pagan theory of two races fall before the holy word of Jesus, “All men are the children of God.”—MAZZINI, Works, vi. 99.
“‘The story is too rare to be true.’ Christian faith has answered that. ‘It is too suggestive to be true.’ Christian science has answered that.”—LANGE, Apostol.Zeitalt. i. 134.
IN the Epistle to the Colossians, St. Paul had sent no greeting to Philemon—who was a prominent member of that Church—because he purposed to write him a separate letter. A man like St. Paul, whose large and loving heart had won for him so many deeply–attached friends, must have often communicated with them by brief letters, but the Epistle to Philemon is the only private letter of this correspondence which has been preserved for us—the only private letter in the canon of the New Testament, with the exception of the brief letter of St. John to the well–beloved Gaius.1 We cannot but regret the loss. Hundreds of letters of Cicero, of Seneca, and of Pliny have come down to us, and, though some of them are models of grace and eloquence, how gladly would we resign them all for even one or two of those written by the Apostle! In style, indeed, his letter is quite careless and unpolished; but whereas the letters of the great Romans, with all their literary skill and finish, often leave on us an involuntary impression of the vanity, the insincerity, even in some instances the entire moral instability of their writers, on the other hand, this brief letter of St. Paul reveals to us yet another glimpse of a character worthy of the very noblest utterances which we find in his other Epistles. These few lines, at once so warm–hearted and so dignified, which theological bigotry was once inclined to despise as insignificant, express principles of eternal applicability which even down to the latest times have had no small influence in the development of the world’s history. With all the slightness of its texture, and the comparative triviality of the occasion which called it forth, the letter is yet a model of tact, of sympathy, and of high moral nobleness. This little “idyl of the progress of Christianity”2 shows that under the worn and ragged gabardine of the wandering missionary there beat the heart of a true gentleman, whose high–bred manners would have done honour to any court.3
We have seen that during his imprisonment St. Paul was, by “that unseen Providence which men nickname Chance,” brought into contact with a runaway slave from Colossæ, whose name was Onesimus, or “Profitable.” He had fled to Rome—to Rome, the common sentina of the world4—to hide himself from the consequences of crimes for which a heathen master might without compunction have consigned him to the ergastulum or the cross; and in the basement of one of the huge Roman insulae, or in the hovel of some fellow–child of vice and misery in that seething mass of human wretchedness which weltered like gathered scum on the fringe of the glittering tide of civilisation, he was more secure than anywhere else of remaining undetected. What it was that rescued him from the degradations which were the sole possible outcome of such an ill–begun career we cannot tell. He would soon exhaust what he had stolen from his master; and as Rome was full to overflowing of slaves and idlers—as the openings for an honest maintenance even in the barest poverty were few—it is hard to see what resource was left to him except a life of villany. Perhaps in this condition he was met by his fellow– Colossian, Epaphras, who as a Presbyter of Colossæ would be well known to Philemon. Perhaps Aristarchus, or any other of those who had been St. Paul’s companions at Ephesus, had come across him, and recognised him as having been in attendance on Philemon at the time of his conversion by St. Paul. Perhaps he had himself been present at some of those daily addresses and discussions in the school of Tyrannus, which, though at the time they had not touched his heart, had at the least shown him the noble nature of the speaker, and revealed to the instinctive sense of one who belonged to an oppressed class, the presence of a soul which could sympathise with the suffering. How this may have been we do not know, but we do know that his hopes were not deceived. The Apostle received him kindly, sympathetically, even tenderly. The Rabbis said, “It is forbidden to teach a slave the Law.”5 “As though Heaven cared for slaves!” said the ordinary Pagan, with a sneer.6 Not so thought St. Paul. In Christianity there is nothing esoteric, nothing exclusive. Onesimus became a Christian. The heart which was hard as a diamond against Pharisaism and tyranny, was yet tender as a mother’s towards sorrow and repentant sin. Paul had learnt in the school of Him who suffered the penitent harlot to wash His feet with her tears and wipe them with the hair of her head; of Him who had said to the convicted adulteress, “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.” Paul in no wise shared the anti–Christian respect of persons which made some people in St. Jerome’s days7 argue that it was beneath his dignity to trouble himself about a runaway slave. He understood better than the Fathers that the religion of Christ is the Magna Charta of humanity. The drag–net of His “fishers of men” was dropped to the very depths of the social sea. Here was one whose position was the lowest that could be conceived. He was a slave; a slave of the country whose slaves were regarded as the worst there were; a slave who had first robbed a kind master, and then run away from him; a slave at whom current proverbs pointed as exceptionally worthless,8 amenable only to blows, and none the better even for them.9 In a word, he was a slave; a Phrygian slave; a thievish Asiatic runaway slave, who had no recognised rights, and towards whom no one had any recognised duties. He was a mere “live chattel;”10 a mere “implement with a voice;”11 a thing which had no rights, and towards which there were no duties. But St. Paul converted him, and the slave became a Christian, a brother beloved and serviceable, an heir of immortality, a son of the kingdom, one of a royal generation, of a holy priesthood. The satirist Persius speaks with utter scorn of the rapid process by which a slave became a freeman and a citizen: “There stands Dama—a twopenny stable–boy, and a pilfering scoundrel; the Prætor touches him with his wand, and twirls him round, and
“Momento turbinis, exit
MARCUSDama! … Papae! Marco spondente recusas
Credere tu nummos? Marco sub judice palles?”12
But the difference between Dama the worthless drudge and Marcus Dama the presumably worthy citizen was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the real and unsurpassable difference which separated Onesimus the good–for–nothing Phrygian fugitive from Onesimus the brother faithful and beloved.
And thus the Epistle to Philemon becomes the practical manifesto of Christianity against the horrors and iniquities of ancient and modern slavery.13 From the very nature of the Christian Church—from the fact that it was “a kingdom not of this world”—it could not be revolutionary. It was never meant to prevail by physical violence, or to be promulgated by the sword. It was the revelation of eternal principles, not the elaboration of practical details. It did not interfere, or attempt to interfere, with the facts of the established order. Had it done so it must have perished in the storm of excitement which it would have inevitably raised. In revealing truth, in protesting against crime, it insured its own ultimate yet silent victory. It knew that where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty. It was loyal to the powers that be. It raised no voice, and refused no tribute even to a Gaius or a Nero. It did not denounce slavery, and preached no fatal and futile servile war. It did not inflame its Onesimi to play the parts of an Eunus or an Artemio. Yet it inspired a sense of freedom which has been in all ages the most invincible foe to tyranny, and it proclaimed a divine equality and brotherhood, which while it left untouched the ordinary social distinctions, left slavery impossible to enlightened Christian lands.14
This delicate relation to the existing structure of society is admirably illustrated by the Letter to Philemon. The tension always produced by the existence of a slave population, vastly preponderant in numbers, was at that moment exceptionally felt. Less than two years before St. Paul wrote to Philemon, a Consular, a Præfect of the city, named Pedanius Secundus, had been murdered by a slave under circumstances of infamy which characterised that entire epoch. In spite of the pity of the people, the Senate had decided that the old ruthless law, re–established by the Silanian decree under Augustus, should be carried out, and the entire familia of slaves be put to death. Regardless of the menaces of the populace, Nero ordered the sentence to be executed by military force, and four hundred human beings of every age and of both sexes had been led through lines of soldiers to their slaughter in spite of the indubitable innocence of the vast majority. This horrible event, together with the thrilling debate to which it had given rise in the Senate, had made the subject of slavery a “burning question” at Rome, and deepened the general feeling which had long found proverbial expression, that “the more slaves the more enemies.” In that memorable debate, it had been asserted by C. Cassius Longinus that the only way in which the rich could live in Rome—few amid multitudes, safe amid the terrified, or, at the worst, not unavenged among the guilty—would be by a rigid adherence to the old and sanguinary law.
Such, then, was the state of things in which St. Paul sat down to write his letter of intercession for the Phrygian runaway. He could not denounce slavery; he could not even emancipate Onesimus; but just as Moses, “because of the hardness of your hearts,”15 could not overthrow the lex talionis, or polygamy, or the existence of blood–feuds, but rendered them as nugatory as possible, and robbed them as far as he could of their fatal sting, by controlling and modifying influences, so St. Paul established the truths that rendered slavery endurable, and raised the slave to a dignity which made emancipation itself seem but a secondary and even trivial thing. A blow was struck at the very root of slavery when our Lord said, “Ye all are brethren.” In a Christian community a slave might be a “bishop,” and his master only a catechumen; and St. Paul writes to bid the Corinthians pay due respect and subjection to the household of Stephanas, though some of the Corinthians were people of good position, and these were slaves.16 Onesimus repaid by gratitude, by affection, by active and cherished services to the aged prisoner, the inestimable boon of his deliverance from moral and spiritual death. Gladly would St. Paul, with so much to try him, with so few to tend him, have retained this warm–hearted youth about his person,—one whose qualities, however much they may have been perverted and led astray, were so naturally sweet and amiable, that St. Paul feels for him all the affection of a father towards a son.17 And had he retained him, he felt sure that Philemon would not only have pardoned the liberty, but would even have rejoiced that one over whom he had some claim should discharge some of those kindly duties to the Apostle in his affliction which he himself was unable to render.18 But Paul was too much of a gentleman19 to presume on the kindness of even a beloved convert. And besides this, a fault had been committed, and had not yet been condoned. It was necessary to show by example that, where it was possible, restitution should follow repentance, and that he who had been guilty of a great wrong should not be irregularly shielded from its legitimate consequences. Had Philemon been a heathen, to send Onesimus to him would have been to consign the poor slave to certain torture, to possible crucifixion.20 He would, to a certainty, have become henceforth a “branded runaway,” a stigmatias,21 or have been turned into the slave–prison to work in chains. But Philemon was a Christian, and the “Gospel of Christ, by Christianising the master, emancipated the slave.”22 Paul felt quite sure that he was sending back the runaway—who had become his dear son, and from whom he could not part without a violent wrench—to forgiveness, to considerate kindness, in all probability to future freedom; and at any rate right was right, and he felt that he ought not to shrink from the personal sacrifice of parting with him. He therefore sent him back under the kind care of Tychicus, and—happily for us—with a “commendatory Epistle” which even Baur apologises for rejecting, and which all the world has valued and admired.23 It has been compared by Grotius and others with the graceful and touching letter written by the younger Pliny to his friend Sabinianus to intercede for an offending freedman, who with many tears and entreaties had besought his aid. That exquisitely natural and beautifully–written letter does credit both to Pliny’s heart and to his head, and yet polished as it is in style, while St. Paul’s is written with a sort of noble carelessness of expression, it stands for beauty and value far below the letter to Philemon. In the first place, it is for a young freedman who had been deeply beloved, and not for a runaway slave. In the next place, it is purely individual, and wholly wanting in the large divine principle which underlies the letter of St. Paul. And there are other marked differences. Paul has no doubt whatever about the future good conduct of Onesimus; but Pliny thinks that the young freedman may offend again. Pliny assumes that Sabinianus is and will be angry; Paul has no such fear about Philemon. Paul pleads on the broad ground of Humanity redeemed in Christ; Pliny pleads the youth and the tears of the freedman, and the affection which his master had once felt for him. Paul does not think it necessary to ask Philemon to spare punishment; Pliny has to beg his friend not to use torture. Paul has no reproaches for Onesimus; Pliny severely scolded his young suppliant, and told him—without meaning to keep his word—that he should never intercede for him again. The letter of Pliny is the letter of an excellent Pagan; but the differences which separate the Pagan from the Christian stand out in every line.24