The efforts of the church in the first centuries of Christianity, and later too, in behalf of the weak and the oppressed—woman, the child, and the slave—are intimately connected with the progress of civil liberty. It is impossible for us, who are the children of two thousand years of Christian influences, to realize the full significance of her enthusiastic devotion to the people, poor, suffering, and degraded, in an age in which no other voice than hers pleaded for them. In order to do this we should be able to place ourselves in the midst of the old pagan world, so as to contemplate the abject condition to which the masses of men had been reduced—a state so pitiable that possibly nothing short of the appearance of God himself, in poverty and sorrow, could have inspired the courage even to hope for better things.
The history of heathenism, in the past as in the present, is marked by contempt for man, by the degradation of the multitude. In this respect the civilization of Greece and Rome was not different from that of India and China in our own day. If in Christian nations, after long struggles and terrible conflicts, a better state of social existence has been brought about, we owe it to Christ working in and through his church. To render liberty possible an intellectual and moral revolution
had to take place. New ideas as to what man is in himself simply, new sentiments as to what is due him by virtue of his very nature, new doctrines as to what all men owe to all men, had to be preached and accepted before there could be any question of civil reform in the direction of larger and more universal liberty. Institutions, laws, constitutions are mechanical, the surfaces of things, social garments which, unless they cover and protect some inner life and divine truth, are merely useless forms. Liberty, individual and social, is inseparable from self-control, which is born of self-denial. Good men cannot be made by good laws any more than by good clothes. Man, of course, is influenced, in part educated, by what he wears as by what he eats; but it does not follow that the wisest course would be to hand over the children, body and soul, to cooks and tailors. Not less unreasonable is it to surrender them to politicians to be drilled and fashioned by the mechanical appliances of government.
Liberty is of the soul; it is from this sanctuary that it passes into the laws and customs of society. Men who are slaves in heart cannot be made free by legislative enactments. The church of Christ taught men how to be worthy to be free by showing them liberty’s great law—self-denial; by restoring to the soul the sovereignty of which it had been deprived since the gates of Paradise were barred; by clothing human nature with inviolable sacredness and inalienable rights; by proclaiming that man, for being simply man, is worthy of all love and respect.
When Christ came, the slave, without honor and without hope, was everywhere. The master was like his
slave. Surrounded by human herds, to whom vice in its most degrading forms had become a necessity, he breathed in an atmosphere of corruption against whose deadly poison he was powerless to contend. His life was a fever alternating between lust and blood. The debauched are always cruel, and as men sank deeper into the slough of sensual indulgence the cry for carnage grew fiercer. Nothing but the hacking and mangling of human bodies could rouse the senses, deadened by the gratification of brutish passions. Here and there a stray voice protested, but only in the sad tones of despair. Hope had fled; the world was prostrate; in the mephitic air of sensuous indulgence the soul was stifled; the poor were starving and the rich were glutted; a thousand slaves could hardly feed the stomach of Dives; and Jesus Christ took Lazarus in his arms, and in a voice from heaven called upon all who believed in God and in man to follow him in the service of outraged humanity; and his voice was re-echoed through the earth and through the ages. At its sound the despairing took heart, the dead lived, the poor heard the new gospel of glad tidings, and the slave, crushed and ignored by human society, found citizenship and liberty in the kingdom of God.
[80] “A Sequel of the Gladstone Controversy.” The Catholic World, February, March, and April.
EASTER IN ST. PETER’S, ROME, 1875.
The glorious sun of Easter morning, 1875, arose in splendor, gilding the domes and turrets of the Eternal City with burnished gold, picturing to the mind the gates of Paradise this day opened by the Sun of Righteousness. The Roman people were early astir, though no cannon sounded from Mount St. Angelo to usher in the great festival, nor papal banner flung its folds to the breeze from that old citadel this bright spring day to speak to Christians of him whom our Lord appointed to watch over his sheep.