And what was the history of the apostles, but an illustration of the doctrine, that “it is enough for the disciple, that he be as his Master?” Were they lordly ecclesiastics, abounding with wealth, shining with splendor, bloated with luxury!  Were they ambitious of distinction, fleecing, and trampling, and devouring “the flocks,” that they themselves might “have the pre-eminence!” Were they slaveholding bishops!  Or did they derive their support from the wages of iniquity and the price of blood!  Can such inferences be drawn from the account of their condition, which the most gifted and enterprising of their number has put upon record?  “Even unto this present hour, we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffetted, and have no certain dwelling place, and labor working with our own hands.  Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it; being defamed, we entreat; we are made as the filth of the world, and are THE OFFSCOURING OF ALL THINGS unto this day."[23] Are these the men who practised or countenanced slavery? With such a temper, they WOULD NOT; in such circumstances, they COULD NOT.  Exposed to “tribulation, distress, and persecution;” subject to famine and nakedness, to peril and the sword; “killed all the day long; accounted as sheep for the slaughter,"[24] they would have made but a sorry figure at the great-house or slave-market.

[Footnote 23:  1 Cor. iv. 11-13.]

[Footnote 24:  Rom. viii. 35, 36.]

Nor was the condition of the brethren, generally, better than that of the apostles.  The position of the apostles doubtless entitled them to the strongest opposition, the heaviest reproaches, the fiercest persecution.  But derision and contempt must have been the lot of Christians generally.  Surely we cannot think so ill of primitive Christianity as to suppose that believers, generally, refused to share in the trials and sufferings of their leaders; as to suppose that while the leaders submitted to manual labor, to buffeting, to be reckoned the filth of the world, to be accounted as sheep for the slaughter, his brethren lived in affluence, ease, and honor! despising manual labor and living upon the sweat of unrequited toil!  But on this point we are not left to mere inference and conjecture.  The apostle Paul in the plainest language explains the ordination of Heaven.  “But God hath CHOSEN the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath CHOSEN the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised hath God CHOSEN, yea, and THINGS WHICH ARE NOT, to bring to nought things that are."[25] Here we may well notice,