“‘They [the parents] gave us for food to dogs and to be turned out to swine. Some of us they threw into the river,’ exclaimed these children; “and so now the guilty are condemned to eternal punishment while the children are committed to the angels.”[379]
We have quoted already the eloquent Lactantius. Basil the Great thundered against infanticide and the spectacle of free children being sold by avaricious creditors of their fathers. The same Ambrosius, who, although only a Christian Bishop, castigated the Emperor Theodosius for the massacre at Thessalonica, brought his force and courage to play against the law which permitted a debtor to satisfy his claim, at the cost of the liberty of his son, or the debauchery of his daughter, as the fisc was then authorized to sell infants to pay unsatisfied taxes.
A new religion in one of the least important provinces of the Roman Empire, Christianity, in three centuries, pushed its doctrines to the very end of the vast Roman domain, and even made the conquest of the imperial throne itself.
Its impassioned preachers and apostles vaunted the humanity of their new faith; for cast-out infants and the despised slaves the new priests fought such a battle of perseverance and martyrdom as the world had never seen before.
In the name of their new God, Jesus, himself admittedly a poor Jew and a carpenter, they took all the truth there was in the aristocratic philosophy of the Romans and their emperors, and made it live indeed—they applied it to the lowest, and the most humble—even to children. “Nothing human is alien”—this was a verity in the lives of the men who fought the first battles of Christianity.
Every human being had a soul—that was a vital point in their fight. They asserted that children had souls, to which religious doctrine probably more is due in the way of checking the practice of infanticide than any other single idea. We have seen how Plutarch, the polished philosopher, had gone as far as the pagan mind could under its philosophy, in directing thought as to man’s responsibility for actions toward the child, by collecting opinions of the philosophers as to when an unborn child became a human being.
The Fathers won the battle in that they convinced the Roman world that children had souls—but the economic battle was one not yet to be won by preaching. But it was not by orations and preaching alone that they had won as much as they had.
Constantine, in the year 315, as we have seen, had put forth the proclamation:
“Let a law be at once promulgated in all the towns of Italy, to turn parents from using a parricidal hand on their new-born children, and to dispose their hearts to the best sentiments. Watch with care over this, that, if a father brings his child, saying that he cannot support it, someone should supply him without delay with food and clothing; for the cares of the new-born suffer no delay, and we order that our revenue, as well as our treasure, aid in this expense.”[380]
To this he added, in 321, including the provinces: