Now the method of Christianity is exactly the reverse of this. Its appeal is made to the individual; it does not concern itself directly with social and industrial systems, or with governmental institutions and arrangements. It would reform society by reforming the individual. When Christianity entered the world Cæsarism had just established itself upon the ruins of republican and national freedom, but the Christian preachers said nothing about political liberty; the Master had said, “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.” The war system was in full vigor; after a period of Quakerism the Church first condoned, then accepted, and finally consecrated this heritage of barbarism as one of the necessary institutions of human society. The gladiatorial games were the sole important institution of antiquity which the Christian teachers absolutely condemned as an institution, and the abolition of which they persistently demanded and finally effected.
It was the same with slavery as with other social institutions. It existed everywhere when Christianity appeared, but the Christian teachers never preached abolition. The Christian emperors adopted, and for two centuries maintained practically unchanged, the pagan slave code. There were under these rulers, it is true, some ameliorations in the laws, due to Christian influence; thus cruel forms of punishment, as branding on the forehead or throwing from a precipice, were prohibited. With the exception of these minor isolated mitigations of the lot of the slave, slavery passed over into Christian civilization as an unchanged heritage from the ancient world, and continued to exist as a Christian institution until, through the action of various agencies, political and economic as well as moral, it was gradually transformed into serfdom. During the later centuries of its prevalence, however, Christian teachings softened many of the cruelties of the system, and caused, speaking generally, the individual slave to be treated with greater consideration and humanity.
The broadening moral movement in progress in the ancient world is checked
Unfortunately there were large offsets to the moral gains of which we have been speaking. Christianity had entered a world in which the most important ethical movement in progress was the broadening of the moral sympathies. The genius of the new religion, a genius inherited from the great prophets of Judaism, was well calculated to impart, as for a period it did, a fresh impulse to this cosmopolitan movement, and to foster and strengthen this growing sentiment of philanthropy and universal brotherhood. Its mission seemed to be to consummate the work of Greek philosophy and of Roman world conquest, to complete the obliteration of national boundaries, to throw down the partition wall between Greek and barbarian, Jew and gentile, patrician and plebeian, bond and free, and to make each man’s neighbor to be every fellow being of whatsoever race or class or creed.
But this spirit of genuine Christianity was soon obscured and the world movement toward ethical universalism obstructed and checked by the theological teaching which made moral merit and salvation dependent upon the acceptance of a prescribed creed. In place of the tribal and racial walls of division which had originally separated the communities of men and which the progress of events had thrown down, it raised a new partition wall which divided mankind into two great ethically artificial classes, believers and unbelievers, Christians and pagans. In place of the doctrine of race election it substituted the doctrine of individual election. Throughout a large part of the Christian period “infidels” and “heathen” have too often been to Christians what “gentiles” were to the “chosen people,” and “barbarians” to the intellectually elect Greeks.
Thus was the broadening and leveling movement which marked the later centuries of antiquity checked, while a new division as inimical to universal charity as the old divisions of race and cult was created.
St. Augustine as the representative of the narrowing movement
The representative and promoter of this retrograde movement in the moral domain was the African bishop St. Augustine. His “City of God,” viewed from one side, is altogether like unto the old city of man. It is simply the ancient classical city in its early period of aristocratic pride and exclusiveness before it had felt the broadening influence of a thousand years of varied experience and growing culture. Only a few can acquire citizenship in the new city. Its privileges are only for “the elect.” A great multitude, the nonelect, are left outside the city gates. Thus, in the words of Wedgwood, “all the arrogance, all the exclusiveness, all the love of privilege, for which the city of man no longer afforded any escape, found a refuge in the city of God.”[653]
The narrowing and hampering influence upon the moral development of the European peoples of this unethical system of Augustinian theology and metaphysics it would be difficult to exaggerate.
Loss of the virtue of toleration