Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

NEOSTOICISM AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHHecuba, and Croesus, and Plato, and Diogenes. Livewith your slave forbearingly, nay, kindly; talk withhim, advise with him, sit at table with him."Now, to estimate the advance which Seneca hadhere made, consider what the greatest men had saidon the subject before .him. Slavery is to Aristotlean institution inseparably bound up with social order.It is necessary, because a true family cannot subsistwithout slaves. It is lawful, because it rests upon adirection of nature; since by nature one portion ofmankind is formed to rule, and the other to serve andobey. These are those who are in a state of intellectualpupilage, the barbarians, who have only so much reasonas to know that it exists, not enough to possess it fortheir own independence. *These are the born slaves, ofuse only to understand and execute commands, boundto their master as the tool to the artist and the bodyto the soul. And yet more instructive, perhaps, is thelanguage of Cicero, who lived only a hundred yearsbefore Seneca. He stands on the ground of Aristotle,whose reasons in justification of this institution heexactly reproduces. Seneca, it is true, does not attackslavery as a legal institution, but he endeavours so tosoften the actual condition of the slave as to make itsomething quite different from what it had hitherto beenin theory and practice. And, moreover, in his moralconscience it is so shaken as an institution that he canscarcely suppress a confession of its unlawfulness.-It was natural that, in the case of a man who morethan any other in the heathen world assumes the toneof a preacher, his life should be compared with hisdoctrine. And here the inconsistency is striking.Seneca sets forth the equal dignity of all men byi Epist. xlvii.