No wonder that the new religion was welcome to the slaves of the Pagan cities, and that they flocked into the Church. Welcome to them was the voice that said: “Come unto me, all ye that are burdened and heavy laden”; welcome the proclamation that made them Christ’s freedmen, “brethren beloved” where they had been “animated tools” (Philem. 16). In the light of such teaching, slavery was doomed. Its re-adoption by Christian nations, and the imposition of its yoke on the negro race, is amongst the great crimes of history,--a crime for which the white man has had to pay rivers of his blood. The social fabric, as it then existed, was so entirely based upon slavery, that for Christ and the apostles to have proclaimed its abolition would have meant universal anarchy. In writing to Philemon about his converted slave Onesimus, the apostle does not say, “Release him,” though the word seems to be trembling on his lips. In 1 Corinthians vii. 20-24 he even advises the slave who has the chance of manumission to remain where he is, content to be “the Lord’s freedman.” To the Christian slave what mattered it who ruled over his perishing body! his spirit was free, death would be his discharge and enfranchisement. No decree is issued to abolish bond-service between man and man; but it was destroyed in its essence by the spirit of Christian brotherhood. It melted away in the spread of the gospel, as snow and winter melt before the face of spring. “Ye slaves, obey your lords according to the flesh.” The apostle does not disguise the slave’s subservience; nor does he speak in the language of pity or of condescension. He appeals as a man to men and equals, on the ground of a common faith and service to Christ. He awakens in these degraded tools of society the sense of spiritual manhood, of conscience and loyalty, of love and faith and hope. As in Colossians iii. 22-iv. 1, the apostle designates the earthly master not by his common title (_despotēs_), but by the very word (_kyrios_) that is the title of the _Lord_ Christ, giving the slave in this way to understand that he has, in common with his master (ver. 9), a higher Lord in the spirit. “Ye are slaves to the Lord Christ!” (Col. iii. 24). St Paul is accustomed to call himself “a slave of Christ Jesus.”[153] Nay, it is even said, in Philippians ii. 7, that Christ Jesus “took the form of a slave!”