CHAPTER XXIV.
THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITY.
For those that fly may fight again,
Which he can never do that’s slain;
Hence timely running’s no mean part
Of conduct in the martial art.—Butler.
The Divine origin of Christianity is manifested in nothing more powerfully than by the progress it rapidly made among the Latin races. Tho soft, voluptuous climates of Southern Europe would have bred, one would have thought, nations whose chief characteristics would have been gentleness and tenderness. But it is not so, and the cruelty that was deeply ingrained in the Roman nature lives on in Christian Italy and Spain, uninfluenced by some sixteen centuries of Christianity, so far as regards the treatment of the lower animals. To have softened towards their neighbours and dependents, the cruel patricians of Nero’s reign needed the greatest miracle of the Christian religion. The actual reception of the code of Christ by the men of old Rome is evidence enough that there was no mere human agency at work. We may estimate the magnitude of the task Christianity had to accomplish by marking the condition of the shores which its tide has failed to overflow. Up to the present it would seem, in Spain and Italy at least, the high-water mark of mercy stops short of the animals which serve us. “To them Christianity has no duties,” they say. The women and children of Italy do not think for a moment that they are not justified in torturing the trapped wolves and foxes the shepherds have taken, just as our sailors used to torment sharks. “What rights have such naughty beasts?” say they.
The long, stern contention of the men of the North against the rigour of the elements, or some other profound cause, has produced in the Teutonic races a tenderness of heart, and a sympathy with every phase of wrong, which have made the Anglo-Saxon race the pioneers of mercy throughout the whole world.
The progress of Christianity was assured when the men of the North were converted; and if they owe to warmer climates the message of the Friend of man, they have in their turn blessed the birth lands of the Gospel with the broader humanity which has help for everything that lives and suffers.
Elsworth was amazed to find how the bull-fight cultus had permeated and moulded every Spanish mind. That it was a pastime, he knew; that it was a religion, he did not imagine till he had lived in Spain. The very landscapes were cruel; the mountains and rocks had no softness, they were all angles, with stern, hard outlines that seemed reflected in the Spanish nature. Man, modified by his surroundings, often formed the subject of his meditations. Here, if anywhere, cruelty would be apotheosized! The railway journey to Madrid, and the landscape of the Escorial threw a light on many chapters of Spanish history which had often seemed hard to understand.