Bond-service, Abolition and the Mosaic Law

With regard to the other matter, the subject of bond-service, we should remember that this was an old established custom in the world when the Law was given; and in various forms, it has persisted all through the ages. It has been connected with some horrible evils in which the lust for gold has consumed all feeling of sympathy or pity. Unfortunately the abolition of slavery in the modern world did not effect a softening of heart or decrease the lust for gold. It freed the wealthy from a sense of responsibility and destroyed the personal touch between master and servant. The development of big business and limited companies has carried the estrangement further. An individual master may have both soul and conscience, but a limited company has neither. Often a bond servant might love his master as the Law distinctly recognised, but we can hardly imagine anyone loving a limited company. Many observers, who during the last century had opportunity to see and make comparisons, declared that the negro slaves in the Southern States of America fared much better than the submerged tenth in industrialised England.

Carlyle was one who wrote to that effect. There were some bad masters in the Southern States as there are bad men everywhere, but there were many slave owners who felt a sense of responsibility, so that their bond-servants shared in their wealth in time of prosperity and were given some protection in time of death. Free workers, on the other hand, may only be free to starve. The development of industry in recent years has been so ill balanced that, in spite of an enormous increase in man’s power over nature, poverty still abounds. At the present time the tendency is in the direction of a return to a form of bond-service, with the State as owner and its minions as the irresponsible task masters. Government departments and committees may exercise a tyranny worse than that of ancient kings or slave owners, but quite unheeded by those who do not happen to suffer.

To continue reading this Bible article, click here.

Author: Islip Collyer

Keywords: servitude, slavery, slave, hired servant, abolition of slavery, kidnapper, kidnapping, kidnap

Bible reference(s): Exo 21:2-6, Ex. 21:16, Exodus 21:20-21, ex 21:26-27, Exo 21:32, Lev 25:40, Deu 15:17

Source: “The Law Given Through Moses,” The Testimony, Vol. 17, No. 195, March 1947, pp. 85-6.

Page indexed by: inWORD Bible Software.