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unedifying. How they mistook the meaning and importance of it! To them, the battle of the creeds, as Bishop Lightfoot said, was of more importance than the fate of a single slave. Those were the days of slavery, and these Christian Fathers could hardly conceive how the apostle could have taken so much interest in the fate of a man so far beneath him in social standing. We do not need to go back to antiquity to find illustrations of the indifference of prominent Christians to the wants and woes of the illiterate and the poor. In the last century, Whitefield, the great evangelist, did not hesitate to be the owner of slaves, even at the time when he was preaching the gospel of Christ with the greatest power and success. It took a great while to convince Christendom that to have a fellow man your chattel and property is inconsistent with the equal brotherhood of the gospel of Christ. History has justified the position and rank of this Epistle in the New Testament, and I think there are two respects in which it is exceedingly instructive to us.

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In the first place, it gives us a beautiful example of the proper spirit and method of Christian intercourse. This private letter of one Christian to another, preferring a request which seems to him of importance, has a spirit and method in it that is of very great value. The apostle had the right to command, but he does not command at all. How humble, how unpretentious, how quiet, how kindly, how pleading is the tone! Everything is put on the ground of Christian love, and of Christian love alone.

If we Christians would bring over our brethren to any project of ours, if we would persuade them to do

what we wish, the proper tone on our part is not the tone of command, nor the tone of threatening, nor the tone of remonstrance, but rather the tone of entreaty and persuasion. Christ's method is the quiet and humble method of Christian love. An appeal to the heart, which puts everything upon the basis of love to Christ, will accomplish wonders; when the other way, the hard way, the remonstrating way, the threatening way, will accomplish nothing. Paul gives us in this letter, first of all, a model of the methods of influencing Christian friends and of doing Christian work in the church of Christ.

As a second and last piece of instruction, this Epistle shows us how Christianity undermines and finally does away with the great organized wrongs of human society. It has been said that the word "emancipation" was trembling upon the apostle's lips; and yet he does not utter it. Christianity does not aim to accomplish sudden social revolutions. Christianity does not begin from the outside and work inward; it begins within and works outward. It does not begin with the mass of men and then come to the individual; it begins with the individual and so spreads to the mass. does not take the great institutions of the world, those creations of organized iniquity, and by one fell swoop destroy them in an instant; it infuses into them a new spirit and temper, and that new spirit and temper permeates them like leaven in the meal. You look, and this great organization of iniquity is a thing of the past. So it was with the despotism of the Cæsars. The apostle Paul did not fulminate against the Roman Empire, with its wickedness and tyranny. The powers

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that be are ordained by God; so long as human government exists he urges us to obey the government; but he puts the spirit of love into human hearts, so that, little by little, it does away with this system of despotism. So he did not utter any denunciation of slavery. Denunciation would have accomplished little. Paul preached Christ; and when people saw that Christ loved the meanest slave so much that he gave his very life to save him, the master could no longer tread that slave under his feet. Among the Hebrews, slavery was not so great an evil, because they themselves had been slaves in times past, and that gave them a feeling of compassion for those who were in bonds to them. Slavery among the Jews could last only six years with any individual. The seventh year was the day of redemption, and the slave was set free. The number of slaves among the Jews was very small; and, where that is the case, the master does not fear the slave, and is not called upon to use measures of cruelty.

How different from the Athenians and Romans! In Athens and Rome, in the days of power and splendor, the number of slaves and freemen was four to one; and in order to keep that vast mass of slaves under the yoke, there were cruelties and restrictions such as were never known among the Hebrews. The slave could be given away; he could be sold; he could be bequeathed by will; he could be put to death; and no one could call his master to account. It was not so among the Hebrews. Slavery had the whole Roman Empire at its back. It would have been useless for Paul to urge its destruction, or to speak against it; he preached Christ and him crucified; he brought men to Christ

and filled men's hearts with the love of Christ; and, with that love of Christ within, they became patient and tender toward their slaves, and counted them their brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus; so there was a new spirit infused into society, which gradually led to the liberation of the slave. We see the fruits in these Christian times, in the liberating of two hundred millions of serfs by the Czar in Russia, and in the emancipation of three million slaves in the Southern States of America. The day will come when there will not be one single slave upon this footstool. We see the dawning of that day already. Slavery still exists in Africa, but all the civilized nations of the world are banded together to put it down. When slavery has vanished from the face of the earth, its disappearance will be the result of the preaching of Christ's gospel, and of that era of human liberty and equality this Epistle to Philemon is the prelude and prophecy.

THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS

THE Epistle to the Hebrews presents more enigma than does any other Epistle of the New Testament. The origin of it and the destination of it are uncertain. We are not sure whether it is a treatise or an Epistle. It takes the Old Testament itself to prove the insufficiency of the Old Testament, and to show that the Old Testament economy is to vanish away. The form of doctrine which we find in it is intermediate between that of Paul and John, and this suggests questions as to authorship which are difficult to answer. Although it is written in the purest and most elegant Greek of any writing of the New Testament, it was written, not to Greek or Gentile Christians, but to Hebrews; and it appears before us, like that Melchisedec who makes so great a figure in the Epistle itself, “without father or mother, without beginning of days or end of years," yet shows forth the Lord Jesus Christ, and the glory of the new covenant in some aspects which are not elsewhere revealed. It is not necessary to the inspiration of a New Testament document that we should be able to tell the precise source or author of it; it is only necessary that it should come from God and should be adapted to the religious instruction of mankind. The history of its reception in the Christian church is itself very peculiar. It was a stormy history through which it passed. During the first century after it was written we do not know that

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