are, doubtless, often surprised to find how grossly erroneous are their moral perceptions.  Their false education still cleaves to them.  They are yet, to a great extent, in the mould of a corrupted public opinion; and, as far from having a clear discernment of moral truth, as were the partially unsealed eyes which saw “men, as trees, walking.”  The first letter to the Church at Corinth, proves that the new principles implanted in its members had not yet purged out the leaven of their old wickedness; and that their conceptions of Christian purity and conduct were sadly defective.  As it was with the Corinthian Christians, so was it to a great extent with the other Christians of that age.  Now, if the Apostles did not directly teach the primitive believers that wars, and theatres, and games, and slavery, are sinful, it is because they thought it more fit to exercise their ignorant pupils chiefly in the mere alphabet and syllables of Christianity. (Acts xv, 28, 29.) The construction of words and sentences would naturally follow.  The rudiments of the gospel, if once possessed by them, would be apt to lead them on to greater attainments.  Indeed, the love, peace, truth, and other elements of holy living inculcated by the Apostles, would, if turned to all proper account, be fatal to every, even the most gigantic, system of wickedness.  Having these elements in their minds and hearts, they would not fail of condemning the great and compound sin of war whenever they should be led to take it up, examine it, resolve it into its constituent parts, and lay these parts for comparison, by the side of those elements.  But, such an advance was hardly to be expected from many of these heathen converts during the brief period in which they enjoyed Apostolic instruction; and it is but too probable, that most of them died in great ignorance of the sin of national wars.  Converts from the heathen, in the present age, when conviction of the sinfulness of war is spreading in different parts of Christendom, would be more likely to imbibe correct views of it.

The Apostles “fed with milk” before they fed with meat, as did our Saviour, who declared, “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.”  In every community, the foundation principles of righteousness must be laid, before there can be fulcrums for the levers to be employed in overthrowing the sins which prevail in it.  You will doubtless, then, agree with me, that it is not probable that the Apostles taught their heathen converts, directly and specifically, the sinfulness of war.  But slaves, in that age, with the exception of the comparative few who were reduced to slavery on account of the crimes of which they had been judicially convicted, were the spoils of war.  How often in that age, as was most awfully the fact, on the final destruction of Jerusalem, were the slave-markets of the world glutted by the captives of war!  Until, therefore, they should be brought to see the sinfulness of war, how could they see the sinfulness of so direct and legitimate a fruit of it as slavery?—­and, if the Apostles thought their heathen converts too weak to be instructed in the sinfulness of war, how much more would they abstain from instructing them, directly and specifically, in the sin of slavery!