"5 Bondservants, obey your earthly master, with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, 6 not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart,7 rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, 8 knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. 9 Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him."
Ephesians 6:5-9
Here are two statements which serve as a warning against too simplistic a dismissal of the idea of slavery being undermined gradually and from within. The first is from Lightfoot, in his commentary on Philemon:
'With this widespread institution Christianity found itself in conflict. How was the evil to be met? Slavery was in-woven into the texture of society; and to prohibit slavery was to tear society into shreds. Nothing less than a servile war with its certain horrors and its doubtful issues must have been the consequence. Such a mode of operation was altogether alien to the spirit of the Gospel. The New Testament, it has been truly said, "is not concerned with any political or social institutions; for political and social institutions belong to particular nations and particular phases of society." "Nothing marks the divine character of the Gospel more than its perfect freedom from any appeal to the spirit of political revolution." It belongs to all time: and therefore, instead of attacking special abuses, it lays down universal principles which shall undermine the evil.'
The second statement is from an article by Sir Fred Catherwood entitled 'Can Society Survive without Christian Ethics?', on the subject of violent overthrow of institutions in the interests of justice:
'those (students) who were most revolutionary came from the most affluent and politically stable countries .... They assumed ... that society could take an awful lot of beating without much ill-effect, that if you turned parts of it upside down because you didn't like them, the parts you did like would stay the right way up.
'On the other hand, if you came from an unstable country, you realised that this was not so, that authoritarianism of the right could be replaced by authoritarianism of the left and vice versa, that civil war might wipe out some old inequalities, but would produce a whole crop of new ones.'