“What man of sound mind,” he said, “will affirm that we, who abhor murder, are murderers; we who condemn as murder the use of drugs for abortion, and declare that those who even expose a child are chargeable with murder.”[374]
Tertullian, whose apology was written in the year 200, or 205, of our era, was equally bold.
“Riders of the Roman Empire,” he began, “seated for the administration of justice on your lofty tribunal”—and then made the charge direct: “You first of all expose your children, that they may be taken up by any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite unknown; or you give them away to be adopted by those who will act better to them the part of parents.”[375]
Later, in another address, this time to the pagan people, he returns to the charges.
“Although you are forbidden by the laws to slay new-born infants, it so happens that no laws are evaded with more impunity or greater safety, with the deliberate knowledge of the public and the suffrages of this entire age, ... You make away with them in a more cruel manner, because you expose them to cold and hunger, and to wild beasts, or else you get rid of them by the slower death of drowning [sic].”[376]
“Man is more cruel to his offspring than animals,” said the learned Clement of Alexandria. “Orpheus tamed the tiger by his songs, but the God of the Christians, in calling men to their true religion, did more, since he tamed and softened the most ferocious of all animals—men themselves.”[377]
No abler pleader for the new order of things was there than Minucius Felix, a Roman lawyer of education, who, on his conversion to the new faith, became one of the eloquent founders of Latin Christianity. A disciple of Cicero, he has been called the “precursor of Lactantius in the graces of style.”
“How I should like to meet him,” he exclaims, indignantly, “who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant ... no one can believe this except one who can dare do it. And I see that you at one time exposed your begotten children to wild beasts and to birds; and another, that you crush them when strangled with a miserable kind of death ... and these things assuredly come down from the teachings of your gods. For Saturn did not expose his children, but devoured them. With reason were infants sacrificed to him by parents in some part of Africa, caresses and kisses repressing their crying, that a weeping victim might not be sacrificed. Moreover, among the Tauri of Pontus, and to the Egyptian Busiris, it was a sacred rite to immolate their guests, and for the Galli to slaughter to Mercury human, or rather inhuman, sacrifices. The Roman sacrifices buried living a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman; and to this day, Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with murder; and, what is worthy of the son of Saturn, he is gorged with the blood of an evil and criminal man.”[378]
To drive home the awful character of a crime that was so common we have the vision of Paul, who sees the man and woman who have exposed children, suffering in hell the terrible tortures of the damned.