Let as many as are bondservants under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and the doctrine not be blasphemed.
For the apostles to have attempted to eradicate slavery "by preaching it as hateful to God and degrading to men would have produced rebellion and revolution in its darkest and most violent form; and Christ did not propose to break up such relations by violence."[5] There was also another side to the problem.  If becoming a Christian had been equated with emancipation, the churches would have been overwhelmed with a flood tide of unregenerated men, seeking not Christ or holiness, but freedom from their chains, creating circumstances which would immediately have destroyed Christianity from the earth.  "It would have been impossible for the Christian church to strike overtly in any effective way at the institution of slavery; but indirectly the church sounded the death knell of the institution."[6]  This was done by teaching the dignity of man, the supreme value of the individual, and those very Christian graces admonished in this chapter.