The Abolition of Slavery

Wilberforce may have been a Churchman, but so were the bishops and dignitaries who screamed so loudly against the abolition for the reason that the Lord's people had slaves in the Bible.

The Church's initial move for the abolition of slavery in the Eastern Empire, under Justinian, was but another sign of Christianity accommodating itself to changing social forms—"I'll "still be the Vicar of Bray, Sir"—and also of the fact that Christianity began, historically as a "slave movement."