Note 304 — Chapter II

1 Cor. vii, 21-24. The phrase unintelligibly garbled as "use it rather" clearly means "rather remain a slave." "even" being understood in the previous clause. This was the interpretation of Chrysostom and most of the Fathers. See the Variorum Teacher's Bible, ad loc. Cp. the whole first chapter of Larroque, De l'esclavage chez les nations chrétiennes, 2nd édit. 1864; and the forcible passage of Frédéric Morin, Origines de la Démocratie, 3e édit. 1865, pp. 384-86. As Morin points out, the Church has never passed a theological condemnation of slavery. On the other hand, it was expressly justified by Augustine (De Civ. Dei, 1. xix, c. 15) as a divinely ordained punishment for sin; and by Thomas Aquinas (De regimine principum, ii, 10) as being further a stimulus to bravery in soldiers. He cannot have seen the Histories of Tacitus, where (ii, 4) civil wars are declared to have been the most bloody, because prisoners were not to be enslaved.