We have some evidence that Dr. Paley did, at a later period of his life,
adopt a more consistent view of the Christian Scriptures, touching the
subject of this inquiry. In his “Horæ Paulinæ,” a work of exceeding
great merit, on the subject of Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church,
he enumerates and classifies the subjects of Paul’s instruction, among
which slavery is conspicuously mentioned, and then says—“That though
they” (the subjects) “be exactly agreeable to the circumstances of the
persons to whom the letter was written, nothing, I believe, but the
existence and reality of the circumstances” (subjects) “could have
suggested them to the writer’s thought.”
In all Christian love and charity, we are constrained to believe that he
had discovered his error; and that, had his life been spared longer, he,
with diligence and anxiety, would have expunged from his works charges
so reflecting on himself, and contrary to the character of the God of
our hope.
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LESSON XIII.
Slavery existed in Britain when history commenced the records of that
island. It was there found in a state and condition predicated upon the
same causes by which its existence is now continued and perpetuated in
Africa. But as early as the year 692–3 A.D., the Witna-Gemot, convoked
by Ina, began to manifest a more elevated condition of the Britons.
Without abolishing slavery, they regulated its government, ameliorated
the old practice of death or slavery being the universal award of
conquest; by submission and baptism the captive was acknowledged to
merit some consideration; life, and, in some cases, property were
protected against the rapacity of the conqueror; the child was secured
against the mere avarice of the savage parent, and heavy punishment was
announced against him who should sell his countryman, whether
malefactor, slave, or not, to any foreign master.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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