(_See Key, pp. 241._) If slaveholding is an illustration of what St. Paul meant by justice and equality, who can tell what is injustice and inequality? Let it be understood that a slaveholder cannot give to a slave, _while he holds him as a slave_, that which is _just_ and _equal_, because the greatest injustice and inequality enters into the very nature of the relation of slaveholder. Could a man be a _just_ robber or an _honest_ thief? No, because injustice and dishonesty enter necessarily into the business of robbing and stealing. Even so is it impossible for justice and equality to enter into slaveholding, because, it is in its very nature, robbery, theft, extortion, oppression, and a complication of almost all villainies. It is clear from the examination of all the passages in the New Testament relating to masters and servants, that those masters were not slaveholders and that those servants were not slaves. But it will be asked did not slavery exist in the apostles' days? We answer it did exist. The Roman government tolerated chattel slavery. Why then did not the apostles regulate it by prescribing the duties of slaveholders and slaves? It has been assumed, and justly too, that "slavery no more than murder _can_ be regulated. That which is essentially and eternally wrong has nothing in it on which the claim of morality can rest. Morality requires its destruction, not its regulation."[13] The law of God does not point out the duties of liars, adulterers and thieves, because as such, they can have no duties. So God did not attempt to regulate Roman slavery which was a most vile and crushing despotism. He did not intend that SLAVERY should be continued, and hence it was not to be regulated but destroyed. We have no evidence in the above passages that SLAVEHOLDERS were admitted into the church of Jesus Christ by the apostles. Slaveholders and the upholders of the infamous Fugitive Slave Law, lay the case of Onesimus to their consciences as a healing unction when dogging down the fugitive slave. In their blindness they assume that Philemon was a slaveholder, Onesimus a slave, and St. Paul a slave-catcher. But not a word of this is true. 1. Onesimus was a SERVANT and not a SLAVE, and Philemon was not a SLAVEHOLDER. The assumption that the one was a slave and the other a slave-owner is altogether without support. 2. Onesimus was not _forcibly_ sent back. St. Paul did not arrest him, and send him in chains to Philemon, charging the expense to the government.