, who received him into the
Church. The young convert served him with such eager willingness that
St. Paul would have been glad to keep him with him, but he decides to
send him back to Philemon with this letter to ensure his forgiveness.

We have, therefore, in this letter a picture of St. Paul in a new
relation. There is no other letter in the New Testament of such a
private nature except 3 John. The great apostle of the Gentiles is
taking his pen to provide a dishonest runaway slave with a note that
shall shield him from the just anger of his master. He writes both
with a strong sense of justice and with his own perfect diplomatic
instinct. The letter is at once authoritative, confident, and most
gentle. He does not command or insist, yet it is quite clear that
Philemon must do just what he asks. There is no violent attack upon
slavery as an institution. Any such attack would have been both
foolish and criminal. For it would have encouraged slaves to make
Christianity a cloak for revolt, and precipitated horrors far worse
than those which it could have professed to remove. But St. Paul
asserts a principle which will eventually prove fatal to slavery. When
he tells Philemon to receive Onesimus "as a brother beloved," he is
really saying that our estimate of men must not be based on their
social class, but rather on their relation to God.

This letter has been compared with a letter written under similar
circumstances by the younger Pliny, one of the best of the pagan
gentlemen of Rome. But while the letter of Pliny is more elegant in
language, the letter of St. Paul is a finer masterpiece of feeling. A
Roman slave was still allowed no rights and no family relationship, and
for the smallest offence he might be tortured and killed. In the next
century the Emperor Hadrian first took away from masters the power of
life and death over their slaves, and it was not until the time {179}
of the Emperor Constantine, who established Christianity, that the laws
affecting slavery pointed to the future triumph of emancipation. But
the ancient conception of slavery was doomed as soon as "slave-girls
like Blandina in Gaul, or Felicitas in Africa, having won for
themselves the crown of martyrdom, were celebrated in the festivals of
the Church with honours denied to the most powerful and noblest born of
mankind." [1]

ANALYSIS

Salutation from Paul and Timothy to Philemon and Apphia (? wife), to
Archippus and the