Redemption

Slaves and slavery evoke images in our minds - from our own early years as a nation and stretching back to ancient times.

Listen to Wm. Barclay the liberal commentator of England a generation ago, who writes:

“A slave was not a person; he was a living tool. A master had absolute power over his slaves. ‘He can box their ears or condemn them to hard labour--making them, for instance, work in chains upon his lands in the country, or in a sort of prison-factory. Or, he may punish them with blows of the rod, the lash or the knot; he can brand them upon the forehead, if they are thieves or runaways, or, in the end, if they prove irreclaimable, he can crucify them.' Pliny tells how Vedius Pollio treated a slave. The slave was carrying a tray of crystal goblets into the courtyard; he dropped and broke one; on the instant Pollio ordered him to be thrown into the fishpond in the middle of the court, where the savage mornay eels tore him to pieces. Juvenal draws the picture of the mistress who will beat her maidservant as her caprice and the master who ‘delights in the sound of a cruel flogging, deeming it sweeter than any siren's song,' who is never happy ‘until he has summoned a torturer and he can brand someone with a hot iron for stealing a couple of towels,' ‘who revels in clanking chains,' The slave was continually at the mercy of the caprice of a master or a mistress.