It was Jesus Christ himself, therefore, who drew the line of demarcation
between the law and the Gospel--who announced the end of local and
temporary institutions. Has he revealed other institutions, this time
definitive? To form such an idea of the Gospel, we must never have
opened it. The Gospel is not a Koran. In the Koran, we doubtless find
both civil and criminal laws, and the principles of government; the
Apostles did not once tread on this ground. Fancy what their work would
have been, had they substituted a social for a spiritual revolution--had
they touched, above all, the question of slavery, which formed part of
the fundamental law of the ancient world. And here I wish my thought to
be clearly comprehended: I do not pretend that the Apostles were
conscious of the unlawfulness of slavery, and that they avoided pointing
it out through policy, for fear of compromising their work. No, indeed,
this happened unconsciously. According to all appearances, they held the
opinions of their times, and God revealed nothing to them on the
subject, wishing that the abolition of slavery, like all the social
results of the Gospel, should be produced by moral agency, which works
from within outward, which changes the heart before changing the
actions.

At the time of the Apostles, there were many other abuses than slavery;
they never wrote a word in their condemnation. They make allusions to
war, yet say nothing of the nameless horrors which then attended it;
they speak of the sword placed in the king's hands to punish crime, yet
say nothing of those atrocious tortures, in the first rank of which must
be cited crucifixion; they make use of figures borrowed from the public
games, yet say nothing either of the combats of the gladiators, or of
the abominations which sullied other spectacles; they unceasingly call
to mind the reciprocal relations of husbands and wives, of parents and