For, first, the precepts addressed to servants convey no authority to national rulers or to private individuals to set aside the institution of Jehovah by reducing men to the condition of slaves. These precepts simply enjoin the conduct which Christianity required in their actual situation. They do not vindicate the law and usage by which they were held as property. This is abundantly evident in the texts themselves, and more emphatically, when they are compared with the parallel cases. Christ promulgated these rules. "I say unto you that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also." Does this empower States to legalize fraud and violence? Does it transmute all the _evil_ which Jesus' disciples have endured into _righteousness_ of those who have inflicted the evil? Does it wash the crimsoned hands of persecutors in innocency? Does it justify the wilful smiter? All men know better. No one contends for such exposition. Yet it is indispensable to the interpretation which finds a justification of slavery in precepts which enjoin obedience on slaves. That obedience is required on other grounds. Another example. The New Testament explicitly commands citizens to submit to the civil power. Does this sanctify the tyranny of a Nero or a Nicholas? In the enjoined submission of subjects, has the despot, or the state, full license for edicts and acts of oppression and iniquity? Yet they are logically compelled to admit this, and thus, in theory at least, banish freedom from the whole earth, who find in commands addressed to servants power conferred on legislators and masters to make them slaves; that is, to hold them as property. Instead of this, the rights and obligations of rulers, and of those who claim to be owners of their fellow men, are defined in a very different class of instructions.