zeal has sought out the woes of man in every land, in order to their relief. In the primitive church voluntary collections[770] were regularly made for the poor, the aged, the sick, the brethren in bonds, and for the burial of the dead. All fraud and deceit was abhorred, and all usury forbidden. Many gave all their goods to feed the poor. “Our charity dispenses more in the streets,” says Tertullian to the heathen, “than your religion in all the temples.”[771] He upbraids them for offering to the gods only the worn-out and useless, such as is given to dogs.[772] “How monstrous is it,” exclaims the Alexandrian Clement, “to live in luxury while so many are in want.”[773] “As you would receive, show mercy,” says Chrysostom; “make God your debtor that you may receive again with usury.”[774] The church at Antioch, he tells us, maintained three thousand widows and virgins, besides the sick and poor. Under the persecuting Decius the widows and infirm under the care of the church at Rome were fifteen hundred. “Behold the treasures of the church,” said St. Lawrence, pointing to the aged and poor, when the heathen prefect came to confiscate its wealth. The church in Carthage sent a sum equal to four thousand dollars to ransom Christian captives in Numidia. St. Ambrose sold the sacred vessels of the church of Milan to rescue prisoners from the Goths, esteeming it their truest consecration to the service of God. “Better clothe the living temples of Christ,” says Jerome, “than adorn the temples of stone.”[775] “God has no need of plates and dishes,” said Acacius, bishop of Amida, and he ransomed therewith a number of poor captives. For a similar purpose
Paulinus of Nola sold the treasures of his beautiful church, and it is said even sold himself into African slavery.[776] The Christian traveller was hospitably entertained by the faithful; and before the close of the fourth century asylums were provided for the sick, aged, and infirm. During the Decian persecution, when the streets of Carthage were strewn with the dying and the dead, the Christians, with the scars of recent torture and imprisonment upon them, exhibited the nobility of a gospel revenge in their care for their fever-smitten persecutors, and seemed to seek the martyrdom of Christian charity, even more glorious than that they had escaped.[777] In the plague of Alexandria six hundred Christian parabolani periled their lives to succour the dying and bury the dead.[778] Julian urged the pagan priests to imitate the virtues of the lowly Christians.
Christianity also gave a new sanctity to human life, and even denounced as murder the heathen custom of destroying the unborn child. The exposure of infants was a fearfully prevalent pagan practice, which even Plato and Aristotle permitted. We have had evidences of the tender charity of the Christians in rescuing these foundlings from death, or from a fate more dreadful still—a life of infamy. Christianity also emphatically affirmed the Almighty’s “canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” which crime the pagans had even exalted into a virtue. It taught that a patient endurance of suffering, like Job’s, exhibited a loftier courage than Cato’s renunciation of life.
Out of eleven thousand Christian inscriptions of the first six centuries, scarce half a dozen make any reference to a condition of servitude, and of these, as
Dr. Northcote remarks, two or three are doubtful. Yet of pagan epitaphs at least three fourths are those of slaves or freedmen. The conspicuous absence of recognition of this unhappy social distinction is no mere accident. We know that the Christians were largely drawn from the servile classes, but in the church of God there was no respect of persons. The gospel of liberty smote the gyves at once from the bodies and the souls of men. In Christ Jesus there was neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free. The wretched slave, in the intervals of toil or torture, caught with joy the emancipating message, and sprang up enfranchised by an immortalizing hope. Then “trampled manhood heard and claimed his crown.” The victim of human oppression exulted in a new-found liberty in Christ which no wealth could purchase, no chains of slavery fetter, nor even death itself destroy. To him earth’s loftiest palace was but a gilded prison of the soul, his lowly cot became the antechamber of the skies, and his emancipated spirit passed from his pallet of straw to the repose of Abraham’s bosom.
In the Christian church the distinctions of worldly rank were abolished.[779] The highest spiritual dignities were open to the lowliest slave. In the ecclesiastical hierarchy were no rights of birth, and no privileges of blood. In the inscriptions of the Catacombs no badges of servitude, no titles of honour appear. The wealthy noble—the lord of many acres—recognized in his lowly servant a fellow-heir of glory. They bowed together at the same table of the Lord, saluted each other with the mutual kiss of charity, and side by side in their narrow graves at length returned to indistinguishable dust.
The story of Onesimus may have often been repeated, and the patrician master have received his returning slave, “not now as a servant, but above a servant—a brother beloved.” Nay, he may have bowed to him as his ecclesiastical superior, and received from his plebeian hands the emblems of their common Lord. The lowly arenarii and fossors, the rude Campagnian husbandmen and shepherds, and they “of Cæsar’s household,” met in common brotherhood, knit together by stronger ties than those of kinship or of worldly rank, as heirs of glory and of everlasting life.
The condition of the slave population of Rome was one of inconceivable wretchedness. Colossal piles built by their blood and sweat attest the bitterness of their bondage. The lash of the taskmaster was heard in the fields, and crosses bearing aloft their quivering victims polluted the public highways. Vidius Pollio fed his lampreys with the bodies of his slaves. Four hundred of these wretched beings deluged with their blood the funeral pyre of Pedanius Secundus. A single freedman possessed over four thousand of these human chattels. They had no rights of marriage nor any claim to their children. This dumb, weltering mass of humanity, crushed by power, led by their lusts, and fed by public dole, became a hot-bed of vice in which every evil passion grew apace. The institution of slavery cast a stigma of disgrace on labour, and prevented the formation of that intelligent middle class which is the true safeguard of liberty. Christianity, on the contrary, dignified, ennobled, and in a sense hallowed labour by the example of its Divine Founder. It consecrated the lowly virtues of humility, obedience, gentleness, patience, and long-suffering, which paganism contemned. It did not, indeed, at once subvert the political
institution of slavery, but it mitigated its evils, and gradually led to its abolition.
One of the noblest triumphs of Christianity was its suppression of the bloody spectacles of the amphitheatre. The early Christians had good reason to regard with shuddering aversion those accursed scenes within that vast Coliseum which rears to-day its mighty walls, a perpetual monument of the cruelty of Rome’s Christless creed. Many of their number had been mangled to death by savage beasts or still more savage men, surrounded by a sea of pitiless faces, twice eighty thousand hungry eyes gloating on the mortal agony of the confessor of Christ, while not a single thumb was reversed to make the sign of mercy.[780] There the maids and matrons, the patricians and the “vile plebs” of Rome, enjoyed the grateful spectacle of cruelty and blood. Even woman’s pitiful nature forgot its tenderness, and the honour was reserved for the vestal virgin to give the signal for the mortal stroke that crowned the martyr’s brow with fadeless amaranth. These hateful scenes, in which the spectacle of human agony and death became the impassioned delight of all classes, created a ferocious thirst for blood and torture throughout society.[781] They overthrew the altar of pity, and impelled to every excess and refinement of barbarity. Even children imitated the cruel sport in their games, schools of gladiators were trained for the work of slaughter, and women fought in the arena, or lay dead and trampled in the sand.