CHAPTER VI.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ARGUMENT.

Inspiration always represents the New Testament as its final teaching. Revelation is there completed; and all the instruction concerning right and wrong which man is ever to ask from God, must be sought in this book. We have done, then, with all sophistical pleas concerning the twilight of revelation: for we have come now to the meridian splendour. If slaveholding was allowed to the Old World for the hardness of its heart, here we may expect to see it repealed. Wherever the New Testament leaves the moral character of slavery, there it must stand. What, then, is its position here?

§ 1. _Definition of_ Δουλος.

The word commonly translated servant in the authorized version of the New Testament is Δουλος, (_doulos_,) which is most probably derived from the verb δεω, (_deo_,) 'I bind.' Hence the most direct meaning of the noun is 'bondsman.' Many Abolitionists, with a reckless violence of criticism which cannot be too sternly reprobated, have endeavoured to evade the crushing testimony of the New Testament against their dogma, by denying that this word there means slave. Some of them would make it mean son, some _hired servant_, and some _subject_, or dependent citizen. Even Mr. Albert Barnes, in his Commentaries on the Epistles, denies that the Word carries any evidence that a servile relation, proper, is intended by the sacred Writers. Every honest and well-informed biblical scholar feels that it would be an insult to his intelligence to suppose that a discussion of this preposterous assertion was needed for him: but as our aim is the general reader, we will briefly state the evidence that δουλος, when not metaphorical, means in the mouth of Christ and his apostles a literal, domestic slave.

Judea and the Roman Empire in their day were full of domestic slaves, so that in many places they were more numerous than the free citizens. Δουλος is confessedly the Word used for slave by secular writers of antiquity, in histories, statutes, works on political science, such as Aristotle's, in the allusions of Greeks to the Roman civil law, where they make it uniformly their translation for _Servus_, so clearly and harshly defined in that law as a literal slave. Did apostles and evangelists use the Greek language of their day correctly and honestly? And if δουλος in them does not mean slave, there is no stronger word within the lids of the New Testament that does; (nor in the Greek language;) so that there is in all the apostolic histories and epistles, no allusion to this world-wide institution which surrounded them! Who believes this? Again: The current Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, whose idioms are more imitated in the New Testament than any other book, uses δουλος, as in Leviticus xxv. 44, for translation of the _Ebed_, bought with money from the Gentiles. The places where the New Testament writers use δουλος metaphorically imply the meaning of _slave_ as the literal one, because the aptness of the trope depends on that sense. Thus, Acts iv. 29, xvi. 17, Romans i. 1, apostles are called God's δουλοι, servants, to express God's purchase, ownership and authority over them, and their strict obedience. Make the literal sense any thing less than slave proper, and the strength and beauty of the trope are gone. Again, the word is often used in contrast with _son_, and _political subject_, so as to prove a different meaning. Thus, John