A SERMON OF SLAVERY.[1]
DELIVERED JANUARY 31, 1841, REPEATED JUNE 4, 1843.
In our version of the New Testament the word servant often stands for a word in the original, which means slave. Such is the case in this passage just read, and the sense of the whole verse is this:—"If a man yields unconditional service to sin, he is the slave of sin, and gets death for his reward." Here, however, by a curious figure of speech, not uncommon in this apostle, he uses the word slave in a good sense—slave of obedience unto righteousness. I now ask your attention to a short sermon of slavery.
A popular definition has sometimes been given of common bodily slavery, that it is the holding of property in man. In a kindred language it is called body-property. In this case, a man's body becomes the possession, property, chattel, tool, or thing of another person, and not of the man who lives in it. This foreign person, of course, makes use of it to serve his own ends, without regard to the true welfare, or even the wishes, of the man who lives in that body, and to whom it rightfully belongs. Here the relation is necessarily that of force on one side and suffering on the other, though the force is often modified and the suffering sometimes disguised or kept out of sight.
Now man was made to be free, to govern himself, to be
- ↑ Reprinted from the Boston edition of 1843.
