The attempt is made to argue, that if this were correct, then the holy apostles would be implicated in a connivance at the excesses and barbarities which, the history of the times tells us, often attached to the servile condition. The answer is: that they condemn and prohibit all the wrongs, as criminal, and leave the relation itself as lawful. No other defence can be set up for their treatment of the conjugal and parental relations. Antiquarians tell us they also were then deformed by great abuses. The wife and child were no better than slaves. Over the latter the father had the power of life and death, and of selling into bondage. From the former he divorced himself at pleasure, and often visited her with corporal punishment. How do the apostles treat these facts? They recognize the relation and forbid its abuses. Shall any one say that because these abuses were current, therefore they should have denounced the domestic relations, and invented some new-fangled communism? Or shall it be said that, because they have not done this, they wink at the wife-beatings, the child-murders, and the other barbarities so common in Greek and Oriental families? We trow not. Why then should these absurd inferences be attached to their treatment of domestic slavery? But the favourite evasion of these Scriptures is that of Dr. Wayland: "The scope of these instructions to servants is only to teach patience, fidelity, meekness, and charity, duties which Christians owe to all men, even their enemies." In like strain, Mr. Albert Barnes, in his 'Notes on Ephesians,' vi. 7, writes: "But let not a master think, because a pious slave shows this spirit, that therefore the slave feels the master is right in withholding his freedom; nor let him suppose, because religion requires the slave to be submissive and obedient, that therefore it approves of what the master does. It does this no more than it sanctions the conduct of Mary and Nero, because religion required the martyrs to be unresisting, and to allow themselves to be led to the stake. A conscientious slave may find happiness in submitting to God, and doing His will, just as a conscientious martyr may. But this does not sanction the wrong, either of the slave-owner or of the persecutor." It is difficult to restrain the expression of natural indignation at so shameless a sophism as this, which outrages at once the understanding of the reader and the honour of Christ. It represents the pure and benign genius of Christianity as walking abroad, and finding oppressor and oppressed together, the oppressor avowedly within her reach, as well as his victim, as a subject of her spiritual jurisdiction and instruction. To the one she is represented as saying: "Oh, injured slave! glorify thy meek and lowly Saviour under this unrighteous oppression, by imitating His patience." Turning then to the other, who is present, and equally subject to her authority, must she not, of course, give the