To: Maple MAGA who wrote (1239557 ) 6/15/2020 8:57:05 AM From: Brumar89 Respond to Now you're using google to try to justify slavery ... but after all, your political hero says Lincoln's emancipation was questionable.In Greek and Roman civilization slavery on an extensive scale formed an essential element of the social structure; and consequently the ethical speculators, no less than the practical statesmen, regarded it as a just and indispensable institution. The Greek, however, assumed that the slave population should be recruited normally only from the barbarian or lower races.The Roman laws in the heyday of the empire, treated the slave as a mere chattel. The master possessed over him the power of life and death; the slave could not contract a legal marriage, or any other kind of contract; in fact he possessed no civil rights ; in the eyes of the law he was not a "person". Nevertheless the settlement of natural justice asserted itself sufficiently to condemn, or at least to disapprove, the conduct of masters who treated their slaves with signal inhumanity.Christianity found slavery in possession throughout the Roman world; and when Christianity obtained power it could not and did not attempt summarily to abolish the institution. From the beginning, however, as is shown elsewhere in this article, the Church exerted a steady powerful pressure for the immediate amelioration of the condition of the individual slave, and for the ultimate abolition of a system which, even in its mildest form, could with difficulty be reconciled with the spirit of the Gospel and the doctrine that all men are brothers in that Divine sonship which knows no distinction of bond and free.
