45. XLIII. The Rights of Man

XLIII. The Rights of Man The glorious and happy lot which in the purpose of God (See Section XXXVII.) has been set before man as the end of his being has not been attained. Paul charges the whole blame upon man, who has deliberately gone wrong, preferred self to God, and as far as possible wrecked for himself and those who came under his influence the Divine plan and intention. Man could not wholly ruin the purpose and thwart the will of God; but he has done all in his power to attain this result; and his best endeavours are often mistaken and injurious. In one respect the Apostle runs contrary to the general course of European thought and feeling and history. The development of European history is almost always explained by philosophic historians as the result of a struggle for rights or of a passionate revolt on the part of the oppressed against injustice and wrongs. Paul would reply that man has no rights except the right of helping to realise the purpose of God: he would assert that no one can honestly dare to ask for justice, because man has deserved even less than he has got, and that men are deceiving themselves when they speak about their wrongs. He would maintain with Dante in his treatise De Monarchia that justice should not be regarded as the getting of one’s rights from others, but as the giving of their rights to others. He would probably not regard the revolt against Charles I or any other of the violent actions through which the “freedom” of modern Britain has been attained, as specially honourable episodes in the history of the country, or as even consistent with true Christianity; and he would doubtless declare that the price for all this error had to be paid by the children and children’s children of the original actors in those great scenes, since they were responsible for beginning, or for fomenting, a spirit of violence and wrong, and turning the people to a mischievous method. The kind of resistance to oppression which was commended both by Paul and by John was endurance; and the victory over tyranny and compulsion was gained through death. But in Paul there appears little or no sympathy with the tendency to resist the minor injustices and inequalities of an unfair social organisation, and to devote to the task of protesting and to the meaner business of political conflict the time and energy which ought to be spent in seeking the true object of life.

Even in the case of slavery the Apostle has been sharply criticised by many for acquiescing in it as a social institution. That he did think the slave wrong who ran away from his master, that he did think the right conduct for a slave was to perform as well as possible the work that was imposed on him by the custom of society and of the law, that he directed the runaway slave to return to a Christian master — all that is quite true. Whether he would have directed the Christian slave to return to a master who had announced that he would not permit his slaves to practise the duties of the Christian religion is perhaps doubtful; but it seems to be in keeping with his doctrine that he would have bidden the runaway slave go back and endure bonds and stripes. Whether he would have directed the slave to return to a master that constrained his slaves to minister to vice and to give up their children to vice — all which was sanctioned by common custom and by law — remains more doubtful. The evidence does not prove it; the case did not present itself; nor do we know anything that can fairly be construed as evidence of Paul’s judgment in regard to such a case. We do know that, if a master had ordered his slave to offer sacrifice to the gods and to curse Christ, Paul would not have permitted the slave to obey the command. There was a point at which, in Paul’s judgment, the right of the master to command was forfeited and the duty of the slave to obey ceased. The attitude of Paul towards slavery is a difficult subject for us in modern times; and yet the principle on which it rests is simple and clear. His expressed opinions seem almost to mediate between two different forces, or to be a mean between two extremes. On the one hand, there shall be in the perfect Church no distinction of slave and free; all are free, all are on an equal footing in the religion of Christ. “There can be no distinction of nationality nor of sex: there can be neither bond nor free; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28;Colossians 3:11.) On the other hand, the established social system must not be hastily altered. After all, such a matter as employment of slaves in the household and even (what in practice was much worse) in labour on great estates (which is part of an evanescent and transitional state) should not be regarded as if it were an absolute end in itself. The slave according to Paul can live a life as truly Christian as the freeman can; he can attain the one great aim of man; and it is infinitely more important for him to live his own life well than to seek for emancipation in the present world. Paul’s whole teaching on the subject is an expansion of the Saviour’s principle: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you”. The development of the Church, the conquest of the world for Christ: that was the present and instant duty. For that every Christian must work: having wrought out his own salvation, he must work out the salvation of others. To seek to revolutionise the existing system of Roman society could not conduce to that end, but might on the contrary seriously imperil it, and indefinitely postpone it.

Moreover, for a slave to make emancipation and freedom his first aim was a false system of action. To seek to get one’s rights is not so important as to learn and to perform one’s duties: the former is a narrower and a more selfish aim: the latter is as wide as the universe. The world in which the Christian has to live is evil: his life must always be encompassed with evils: it is of little or no importance to diminish those evils by one. Let him seek the Kingdom of God, and the evils will be eliminated as that Kingdom is realised on earth. He that loses his life shall gain it: he that sacrifices his freedom for the moment shall gain it in the long run.

Hence the tone of Paul’s counsel both in the earlier letters and to Timothy. Not a word is said about the wrongs of slavery, or the right of man to be free. The omission is undoubtedly disappointing at first sight to our modern taste; and the advice given is apt to appear rather temporising, as if Paul were making terms with evil. Yet, when one takes a dispassionate view of the whole situation, one recognises that the spread of Christianity produced gradually a higher atmosphere of thought, in which slavery cannot live. The more fully Christianity is realised in any society, the more thoroughly will slavery be destroyed. It is not yet destroyed anywhere in all its forms; but its worst forms have been eradicated in the most Christian lands, and lessened over the whole world. The duty of seeking to establish equality of opportunities and rights is more generally recognised and admitted than it was in former ages. “’Tis something: nay, ’tis much.” Above all, it is now fully recognised that the Church should be the champion of freedom; and it is expected that teachers in the Church should preach freedom and discountenance slavery in every form. The platform on which human society moves and thinks is now higher and nobler.

One difficulty lies in this. Paul emphatically advises Timothy (1 Timothy 3.) to teach that in ordinary life the Christian slave of a pagan master should honour, obey and respect his master. Apart from the infinitely higher and more compelling reasons which have just been stated, (In writing to Timothy Paul has in view the practical possibilities of Timothy’s situation as a working minister and teacher amid a pagan society and Empire.) it would bring discredit on the Church, and cause ill-feeling against the Church in the society of the Roman Empire, if Christian slaves were found to be discontented or disobedient. The slave must cheerfully sacrifice his freedom, reconcile himself to his lot, and do the work that is ordered; the Name and the Teaching will thus be saved from discredit and vilification. The next part of the advice causes even more difficulty to our modern view. Timothy is not directed to preach that a Christian master should wholly discountenance slavery in his own household, or even that he should set free a slave who is a Christian. One may at first be disposed to think that Mohammed’s teaching was better, because Mohammed laid down the principle that a slave who embraces Islam gains his freedom from a Moslem master. But Paul only advises that the Christian slave of a Christian master should serve all the more gladly, because he is doing service and giving help to a Christian; and strongly discourages the slave from showing any insolence, or presuming on the fact that master and slave meet together in the same assembly for common worship. It is an opinion too widely spread to be altogether without justification, that mission training of converts in modern times has often tended to produce this temper in subject classes (objectionable in the higher point of view as the very idea of subject classes is); and the impression has been distinctly prejudicial to the cause of missions.

We must, however, bear in mind that, practically, Mohammed gave to the slavery of non-Moslems a religious sanction by enacting that slaves were only set free if they adopted the religion of Islam. Mohammedanism has been a power that strengthened the hold of slavery on society by formally limiting the right of freedom. The Christian teaching always emphasises the duties, and discourages the seeking after rights. Cheerful service, renunciation, self-sacrifice, form the lesson that it drives home into the minds of men. All else is secondary. That is primary, for it realises the kingdom of God. The Christian must trust to the future.

There is, of course, no question as to any discrepancy between the teaching of the earlier and the later Epistles about slavery. The passages quoted from Colossians and Galatians express the consummation of the perfect Church. But in Ephesians 6:5-9 the same practical advice as in 1 Timothy is given in even more emphatic terms. Again, in Philemon Paul sends a fugitive slave home to his master with an apology for his misconduct. He does indeed hint very delicately that the slave might gracefully be set free, but he does not suggest that freedom is his right, or that Philemon should set Onesimus free as a matter of duty. Rather, he puts as a personal favour to himself his hope that Philemon will receive the runaway kindly. The “rights of man” are not a Pauline idea; he urges only the duties of man.

One thing we can say with confidence as we look back over nearly nineteen centuries of history. Let us suppose that Christian teaching had made it a prime object to redress, either by active refusal or by passive resistance, the superficial evils and even the graver social injustices of Roman law and rule: let us suppose that it had made the Kingdom of God its secondary and merely ultimate aim, and had begun by insisting on the right of every man to be free, as if this were the primary condition for establishing the Kingdom of God, what would have been the result? Assuredly the issue would have been that Christianity would long ago have passed away or sunk to the level of the dead religions that still cumber the world, while slavery would remain the universal rule. It was by disregarding all merely superficial and less important facts in society and by concentrating the efforts of all on the great and real things of life, that the Christian faith succeeded in keeping its place above the level of common life, as a power and an inextinguishable torch to quicken the minds and fire the best emotions of men.

Paul did not approve of the Roman social system and the Roman government. It was evil, and it must pass away. But it had its purpose in the Divine plan. It was granted a time in which to work. The Christians must temporarily accept it and acquiesce in it, and must obey its laws in so far as these did not order them to curse God or actively to do evil to man. Passively they might have to look on, while the law ordered evil: in the lapse of time, with the elevation of public opinion, the law would be raised to the higher standard. The raising of public opinion is an object to work for; that is the Kingdom of God; but public opinion can only be degraded and deteriorated, as a rule, by war. There are some cases, which Paul had no occasion to treat, in which national existence and ideas may call for defence by war; but these are rare and exceptional. Not merely was such an aim as the abolition of slavery in the Empire impossible of realisation at the time; not merely would the striving after it have sacrificed purposes that were even more noble and more immediately pressing: it could not have been brought about without fighting; and the Christian teaching is against the pursuit of any object which is attainable only through war, especially civil war. The European idea that the man who rebels against what he considers to be the unfairness of established society is the man to be praised and admired as a hero has not yet justified itself by its results. That the world is better than it was, and that progress has been achieved, is true; but no proof has yet been furnished that the tendency to rebellion against injustice in the existing social and political system (wrong and unfair as it always is), and the habit of claiming so-called rights by violent means, have played a beneficial part in forwarding this progress; and the teaching of Paul even in this respect has not been disproved. On the contrary, it might reasonably be argued that the lesson of history has demonstrated the wrong and the falseness of violent methods. Europe is now engaged in an orgy of insane preparation for war; it is (it might almost be said) parcelled out into a series of great standing armies and permanent camps with entire populations as soldiers in one army or another: the countries are wasting their substance and their opportunities in making engines to kill one another; and there is no end to war and to civil strife. This situation is the logical issue and the reductio ad absurdum of the principle that one is justified in seeking to attain by violence the ends which one believes to be right. That is the principle of the Mohammedan “Holy War”: it is diametrically opposed to the teaching of Paul and of Jesus. Europe has gone on a false course when it has carried out so completely the method of violence, and is now finding itself in a cul de sac: he who admits the method for himself, cannot condemn it when others practise it. There is no way out, except to retrace the path backwards, and find a new course in the teaching of Christianity.

Paul taught in great principles, and does not descend to legislation about details. Even the veiling of women he attempts to enforce on grounds as wide as the universe and as high as the angels; but in this perhaps for once he may have condescended to legislation about a detail. (See Section XXXVI.) His guiding principle, however, always is that man must seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness; and all the details will gradually be moulded into conformity with that Kingdom. What we call the growth of true education and the raising of public opinion and social judgment to a higher level are simply the slow, gradual approach of the Kingdom of Heaven, which, as it approaches, remakes human life. But the attempt to re-make human life except through the Kingdom of God must fail. The violence, the vulgarity and the pretentiousness of much that has masqueraded under the show of resistance to wrongs and demand for justice did not raise the social standard, or promote the Kingdom of Heaven; and it is a false judgment that sees in things like this the cause of human improvement. The true cause lay deeper, and was sometimes concealed and impeded by the noise and the ostentation of those who stood prominent in the public eye.

Man has the right to save his own soul; and in saving himself he will save society. The rest will be added, if he seeks after this until he has attained it.