Every one of these bills is stolen--stolen from poor starving, sweating creatures." Now Onesimus, in the very act of taking to flight, showed that he had been submitting to servitude against his will, and that the house of his owner had previously been a prison to him.

To suppose that Philemon has a pecuniary interest in the return of Onesimus to work without wages, implies that the master habitually steals the slave's earnings; but if he loses nothing by the flight, he has not been wronged by it.
Such is the modern doctrine, developed out of the fundamental fact that persons are not chattels; but it is to me wonderful that it should be needful to prove to any one, that this is _not_ the doctrine of the New Testament.

Paul and Peter deliver excellent charges to masters in regard to the treatment of their slaves, but without any hint to them that there is an injustice in claiming them as slaves at all.

That slavery, _as a system_, is essentially immoral, no Christian of those days seems to have suspected.

Yet it existed in its worst forms under Rome.