With these powers and appliances at command, no portion of the human race needs the subjugation of any other portion for the gratification of its utmost legitimate wants and desires. With such prodigious advantages in its favour, the age we live in ought to witness the extinction of every vestige of every description of slavery known to man. The transition from chattel-slavery to proletarianism and wages-slavery cost, as we shall see, rivers of human blood; and, nevertheless, man’s ignorance and barbarity have, as we have seen, made the change rather a curse than a blessing to the majority of his fellows. The second social revolution—the transition from proletarianism and wages-slavery to real and universal emancipation—may be effected without the loss of a single life, or the sacrifice of a shilling’s worth of his possessions to any man of any class. Such, at least, is the creed of us, National Reformers. To make that creed known and appreciated by submitting it to a full and impartial examination by the public, and thereby to enlist as many as we can of the good and wise of all classes in the cause of human redemption, is, we hardly need say, the main object of this inquiry. In entering upon it, we found it necessary to begin at the beginning. The light of the past, though a lurid one, has appeared to us necessary to illumine the present; and, to see our way clearly into the future, both lights will, we think, be found serviceable. In other words, to render clearly intelligible what ought to be, we have deemed it an essential part of our inquiry to ascertain what has been and what now is. In the prosecution of this task, we now proceed to show how Christianity and selfishness concurred in changing the slavery that was into the slavery that is.
As already explained, the institution of slavery was never called in question by any class of the ancients before the advent of Christ, if we except that small obscure sect amongst the Jews known by the name of Essenes. Even these are supposed by some to have been a society of Christian monks originally formed by St. Mark, who is said to have founded the first Christian church at Alexandria. The accounts given us by Josephus and Philo, however, make it much more probable that the Essenes were Jews, and not Christians, and that they existed before the birth of the Messiah. Those who ascribe their origin to St. Mark evidently confound them with another sect of later growth, established at Alexandria by Christian monks, and known by the name, Therapeutæ. The bulk of this latter sect are supposed to have been Greek Jews, converted to Christianity, and settled in Egypt. The Essenes lived chiefly in Palestine, and spoke the Aramean and not the Greek language. As far as certainty can be had in such matters, there is reason to believe that the Essenes existed before and in the time of Christ; and though no mention is made of them in the New Testament, they are supposed to be alluded to by St. Paul in his Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians and in his First Epistle to Timothy. From Josephus’s and Philo’s account of them, we should suppose them to have been enthusiasts and ascetics, who occupied pretty much the same position amongst their contemporaries and co-religionists, the Jews, as the Shakers in America do amongst the modern Christian sects of that country. That they were not necessarily Christians might, we think, be fairly inferred from the very doctrines and practices ascribed to them; and that the existence of such a sect might well have preceded Christ’s appearance will appear strange to no one who considers how very popular St. John the Baptist was, and what crowds of enthusiastic followers he attracted by his preachings and asceticism before the Saviour made known His mission. Assuredly the Essenes were not more ascetic than St. John the Baptist, whose raiment was camel’s hair, and food locusts and wild honey; and assuredly their mysticism and social equalitarianism bear less analogy to veritable Christianity than the doctrines and practices of John.
This argument alone, independently of historic authority, ought, we think, to suffice to set aside the ill-grounded belief of many that the Essenes were necessarily an early Christian sect. Their holding certain doctrines in common with Christians, such as the immortality of the soul and man’s spiritual responsibility to and equality before God, is no more a proof that they were followers of Christ, than the holding of similar doctrines by Socrates and Plato would prove these philosophers to have been believers in a religion which was unknown till near four centuries after their death. Dr. Neander’s account of the Essenes is, that they were a society of pious Jews, who, disgusted with the cant and hypocrisy of the Pharisees, and wearied with the trials of the outward and of the inward life, had withdrawn themselves out of the strife of theological and political parties, at first, apparently (according to Pliny the Elder), to the western side of the Dead Sea, where they lived together in intimate connection, partly after the fashion of the monks of later days, and partly like mystical orders in all periods have done. From this society other smaller ones afterwards proceeded, and spread themselves all over Palestine. They employed themselves in the arts of peace, such as agriculture, pasture, handicraft works, and especially in the art of healing according to the simple but unerring ways of Nature. Dr. Neander thinks it also probable that they imagined themselves supernaturally illuminated in their search into Nature’s secrets and use of her powers; and that their natural knowledge and art of healing assumed, moreover, a sort of religious or theosophic character, since they professed to have peculiar prophetic gifts. Comparing this account with what we know of similar sects in our own time—with the Mormons, for instance, or with the Shakers, or with the White Quakers of Dublin—it seems probable enough. It is the way of all such enthusiasts to run from one extreme to another. Despising the Pharisees for their hollowness and canting adherence to mere traditional and ceremonial law, in which the letter was everything and the spirit nothing, the Essenes went right into the opposite extreme, and almost sacrificed the outer to the inner man. They believed firmly in the immortality of the soul and in future rewards and punishments; they were absolute predestinarians; they observed the seventh day with peculiar strictness; they held the traditions of the Old Testament in great reverence, but only as mystic writings which they expounded allegorically; they sent gifts to the Temple, like other Jews, but offered no sacrifices; they admitted no one into their society till after a three years’ probation; they lived in a state of perfect equality, except that they paid great respect to the aged and to their priests; they considered all secular employments ungodly and immoral, except agriculture and the trades and occupations connected with it. They were practical communists in the largest sense of the word, for they had no separate or individual interests, and held all things in common; they were industrious, quiet, orderly, and free from every kind of vice practised in ordinary society; they held solitude and celibacy in high esteem. Some say they allowed no marriages or sexual intercourse in their society; but this is doubted. They allowed no change of raiment till necessity required; they abstained from wine and other fermented liquors; they were not permitted to eat but with their own sect, and then a certain portion of food was served out to each person, of which they partook together after solemn ablutions.
It is, no doubt, the similarity of many of these practices to those of some of the early Christians, and of the Therapeutæ in particular, that has led some Roman Catholic divines, and also some philosophic writers, to speak of the Essenes as of a Christian sect. Were the supposition of these writers correct, history would in that case be without one single testimony to show that the theory or practice of the equality of human rights was known to any ancient people on earth, Jew or Gentile, before the propagation of the Gospel. We believe, however, that the supposition is without foundation. We believe the Essenes were a Jewish, not a Christian sect. We believe their sect was anterior to Christ, and even to John the Baptist. We believe it consisted of ardent Jews, who, inflamed by the pious, fervid, and truly democratic outpourings of Nehemiah and others of their prophets, and disgusted by the manner in which they saw all Moses’s laws in favour of the poor set aside by the scribes and Pharisees of their day, to the profit of usurers and land-monopolisers, resolved, in the language of their own Scripture, to “come out from amongst them and be separate;” and that, accordingly, in the words of Dr. Neander, they were “distinguished from the mass of ordinary Jews in this—that they knew and loved something higher than the outward ceremonial and a dead faith—that they really did strive after holiness of heart and inward communion with God.” We believe moreover, that, instead of owing their origin to Christianity, Christianity in a great measure owed its early progress and successes to the Essenes; and that the Therapeutæ, with whom they have been confounded, were but an offshoot of their society, which subsequently engrafted itself upon a Christian stock. With these considerations we hold it to be an established fact that the Essenes do constitute a veritable exception, but the only solitary one recorded in all history, of any people, before Christ’s advent, repudiating the doctrine and practice of human slavery. This singular exception, if it be one, proves two things worthy of every serious man’s notice. One is, that if we are not indebted to Christianity for the first or earliest repudiation of human slavery, we are indebted for it to the purest fraction of that people, and to the purest form of that religion, to whom and to which we owe Christianity itself; in other words, it is to believers in the God of the Jews and of the Christians, and not to the believers in any pagan gods or in no God, we are indebted for the first authoritative interference with the pretended right of man to hold his fellow-man in bondage. The other is, that the Essenes must have purposely avoided propagandism and proselytism, kept themselves few and select, and courted retirement and obscurity, in order to escape persecution and perhaps death at the hands of their Jewish brethren. Upon no other supposition would it be easy to account for their fewness and impunity. For everything recorded of them goes to show that they were as singular a people amongst the Jews, as the Jews themselves were singular to the rest of the world; and those who did not spare Christ and his Apostles were not likely to have spared them, had they been equally bold and zealous in the propagation of their principles. It was, probably, from similar motives that they mixed up celibacy and other asceticisms and eccentricities with their system. What was singular and unpopular was not likely to alarm rulers, or to excite a dread of innovation, because not likely to excite imitation and to attract followers; and what the authorities or the ruling classes saw no cause to dread, they would not be forward to prosecute or persecute. The apparent absurdities and vagaries of many other levelling sects might probably be accounted for in a similar way. Had the Mormons mixed up celibacy and other repulsive asceticisms and absurdities with their politico-religious system, like the Shakers and White Quakers, it is not improbable that they would be still under the patriarchal care of Joe Smith at Nauvoo. This fact alone speaks volumes for the dangers and difficulties Christianity had to encounter a few years later, when, for the first time in the history of the human race, a few fishermen and other obscure persons, headed by the supposed son of a carpenter, proclaimed open warfare against all that, up to that time, had been held sacred and indestructible in the constitution of human society.
And what pen, what tongue, can describe the zeal, the labour, the sacrifices, the dangers, the trials, the persecutions, of the early Christians in their first onslaught upon the powers of might and darkness? Never, never, can a tithe of a tithe of what they achieved and suffered in the cause of human redemption be known to their Christian successors of our day. It is only the profound politician, conversant with men and with the world, as well as versed in the history of his own and other times, who can even imagine what they must have suffered, or approximate to appreciating the miraculous virtues they must have displayed, and the herculean labours they must have performed.
Had the slaves of the ancient world been as conscious of their own degradation, or as discontented with their lot, as are their proletarian successors, the wages-slaves of our day, the case would have been vastly different. But it was not so; on the contrary, the slave-class of old was the very class that least of all was susceptible of the sentiment of equality, and least disposed by inclination or habit to countenance equalitarian innovators. What Mr. Edward Smith says of the negroes of America is still more applicable to the ancient slave-populations:—“They never tasted freedom, and do not feel the want of it; and to be as happy as a nigger is a common phrase in free and slave States alike.” If the modern negro has never tasted freedom, he has at least heard of it, and heard that slavery is accounted a crime and a felony in most Christian countries. But the ancient slave never heard of, or imagined, any such a thing. Besides, except when he had a downright brute for his master, he was really comfortable and happy—“as happy as a nigger,” and for the self-same reasons.
Here was the first great difficulty Christianity had to cope with—a difficulty almost impossible of conception in our times. To appreciate it properly, we must only try to conceive what a Chartist or Socialist lecturer’s difficulty would be as a propagandist in London or in the provinces, provided all our labourers, artisans, and other workpeople were so fully employed at light work and ample wages, that “as happy as a hand-loom weaver,” “as happy as a London needlewoman,” or “as happy as a Dorchester labourer” would be as current proverbial phrases in England as the phrase, “as happy as a nigger,” is in America. Add to this the difference between the toleration allowed to opinions now-a-days and formerly, and the fact that as slaves were the property of their masters, to tamper with them was, in the eye of the law and of public opinion, to tamper with the master’s rights of property and with his personal security. Just imagine these things, and we shall then have some faint idea of what the early Christians had to contend with from this source alone, in the first propagation of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But of this and their other difficulties, dangers, and sufferings more in the next chapter.
