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Though the Heavens May Fall by Steven M. Wise Da Capo Press, 320 pp.; $25.00

Stephen M. Wise, veteran animal-rights lawyer, finds inspiration in the 18th-century antislavery activist Granville Sharp. And Christians who want to act effectively against contemporary slavery in Mali, sexual bondage in Cambodia, and religious persecution in North Korea need to study this father of evangelical social reform. The dogged intolerance of Granville Sharp in his pursuing the abolition of slavery is a lesson in the social impact of true religious commitment and the virtue of persistence.

Between the years of 1765 and 1772, Sharp advised and aided four different African slaves who wanted to claim their rights as human beings. In the first case, Sharp was visiting William, his physician brother, who treated sick paupers ever morning. At his brother's surgery he encountered Jonathan Strong, who was nearly dead: "feverish, nearly blind, doubly lame, 'ready to drop down.'" The young black's master had struck him repeatedly on the head and cast out into the street to die. Granville persuaded William to admit him to hospital and then found him employment as a delivery boy for a pharmacist. When Strong's former master saw him in the street one day, he decided to reclaim his "property" and had him held in a local prison pending his shipment as a slave to Jamaica.

Strong had been baptized since he had last seen his master, so he now sent a frantic message to his godparents and then to his employer. His employer contacted Granville Sharp. Sharp immediately arranged for a hearing on the legality of Strong's imprisonment. The Lord Mayor of London presided, found no cause for Strong's detention, and freed him, whereupon—right there in the presence of the Lord Mayor—his enemies grabbed him and began to drag him away. Sharp charged them with assault, and the villains skulked off.

The Jonathan Strong matter was not settled. The man who had purchased Strong from his master sued the brothers Sharp. The case brought against them was a mess, but the Sharps' lawyer advised them to settle out of court because they were up against was a 40-year-old legal opinion that seriously undercut their defense.

Can Christians be slaves?
The so-called Joint Opinion was, in fact, not law, but an informal opinion produced by two eminent legal officials under the influence of much food and drink and the convivial pressures of a group of West Indian planters. These economic interests lobbied the key legal minds to undercut two popular ideas that had been threatening the slave economies of the British Empire.

One idea was religious: that baptism automatically conferred freedom on slaves. The Hebrew Scriptures had set a kind of precedent. In Leviticus, the Lord had instructed the children of Israel not to enslave one another, but to buy the children of the strangers that sojourned around them. Some people applied this to the Christian nations of Europe and claimed that Christians could not enslave Christians. The heathen, on the other hand, were fair game.

But what if those heathen became Christians? Despite the fact that English courts had never actually freed a baptized slave, most blacks and many whites believed that baptism did indeed confer freedom. (Obviously, such a notion discouraged masters from teaching their slaves the Christian faith.) Plied with much wine, the two legal experts declared that baptism did not affect a person's slave status.

The other idea was political: that the air of England conferred liberty on all who breathed it. The notion derived in part from a 1569 case in which an English court freed a Russian slave, saying, "England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in." The popular mind had been infected with such notions of liberty from the day King John signed the Magna Carta.To this notion, too, the well-wined legal experts said their nay.

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April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4