_THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST, AND ITS LESSONS._
"When He had said these things, as they were looking, He was
taken up; and a cloud received Him out of their sight."--ACTS i.
9.
In this passage we have the bare literal statement of the fact of
Christ's ascension. Let us now consider this supernatural fact, the
Ascension, and meditate upon its necessity, and even naturalness, when
taken in connection with the whole earthly existence of Incarnate God,
and then strive to trace the results and blessings to mankind which
followed from it in the gift of the new power, the covenanted gift of
the Spirit, and in the spread of the universal religion.
I. The ascension of our Lord is a topic whereon familiarity has worked
its usual results; it has lost for most minds the sharpness of its
outline and the profundity of its teaching because universally
accepted by Christians; and yet no doctrine raises deeper questions,
or will yield more profitable and far-reaching lessons. First, then,
we may note the place this doctrine holds in apostolic teaching.
Taking the records of that teaching contained in the Acts and the
Epistles, we find that it occupies a real substantial position. The
ascension is there referred to, hinted at, taken as granted,
pre-supposed, but it is not obtruded nor dwelt upon overmuch.[27] The
resurrection of Christ was the great central point of apostolic
testimony; the ascension of Christ was simply a portion of that
fundamental doctrine, and a natural deduction from it. If Christ had
been raised from the dead and had thus become the firstfruits of the
grave, it required but little additional exercise of faith to believe
that He had passed into that unseen and immediate presence of Deity
where the perfected soul finds its complete satisfaction. In fact, the
doctrine of the resurrection apart from the doctrine of the ascension
would have been a mutilated fragment, for the natural question would
arise, not for one age but for every age, If Jesus of Nazareth has
risen from the dead, where is He? Produce your risen Master, and we
will believe in Him, would be the triumphant taunt to which Christians
would be ever exposed. But then when we closely examine the teaching
of the Apostles, we shall find that the doctrine of the ascension was
just as really bound up with all their preaching and exhortations as
the doctrine of the resurrection; the whole Christian idea as
conceived by them just as necessarily involved the doctrine of the
ascension as it did that of the resurrection. St. Peter's conception
of Christianity, for instance, involved the ascension. Whether in his
speech at the election of Matthias, or in his sermon on the day of
Pentecost, or in his address in Solomon's Porch after the healing of
the crippled beggar, his teaching ever presupposes and involves the
ascension. He takes the doctrine and the fact for granted. Jesus is
with him the Being "whom the heavens must receive until the times of
restoration of all things." So is it too with St. John in his Gospel.
He never directly mentions the fact of Christ's ascension, but he
always implies it. So too with St. Paul and the other apostolic
writers of the New Testament. It would be simply impossible to exhibit
in detail the manner in which this doctrine pervades and underlies all
St. Paul's teaching. The ascended Saviour occupies the same position
in St. Paul's earliest as in his latest writings. Is he speaking of
the lives of the Thessalonians in his First Epistle to that Church:
"they are waiting for God's Son from heaven." Is he pointing them
forward to the second advent of Christ: it is of that day he speaks
when "the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven." Is he in Rom. viii.
dwelling upon the abiding security of God's elect: he enlarges upon
their privileges in "Christ Jesus, who is at the right hand of God,
making intercession for us." Is he exhorting the Colossians to a
supernatural life: it is because they have supernatural privileges in
their ascended Lord. "If ye then were raised with Christ, seek the
things above, where Christ is seated on the right hand of God." The
more closely the teaching of the Apostles is examined, the more
clearly we shall perceive that the ascension was for them no ideal
act, no imaginary or fantastic elevation, but a real actual passing of
the risen Saviour out of the region and order of the seen and the
natural into the region and order of the unseen and supernatural.
Just as really as they believed Christ to have risen from the dead,
just as really did they in turn believe Him to have ascended into the
heavens.
[27] The incarnation and the ascension are, in this respect, very
much on a level in St. Paul's writings. The incarnation and birth
of our Lord are referred to incidentally, but only incidentally,
in Rom. i. 3; Gal. iv. 4; 1 Tim. iii. 16; yet the facts of the
birth and incarnation must have occupied a great share of St.
Paul's attention, if we are to judge of his teaching by the Gospel
of St. Luke, his disciple and companion. The Apostle never
formally states the doctrine of the incarnation as St. Luke set it
forth, because it was well known by all to whom he wrote as the
very foundation of his system. A bare reference was therefore
enough. It was just the same with the doctrine of the ascension.
II. But some one may raise curious questions as to the facts of the
ascension. Whither, for instance, it may be asked, did our Lord depart
when He left this earthly scene? The childish notion that He went up
and up far above the most distant star will not of course stand a
moment's reflection. It suits the apprehension of childhood, and the
innocent illusion should not be too rudely broken; but still, as the
advance of years and of wisdom dispels other illusions, so too will
this one depart, when the child learns that there is neither up nor
down in this visible universe of ours, and that if we were ourselves
transported to the moon, which seems shining over our heads, we should
see the earth suspended in the blue azure which would overhang the
moon and its newly-arrived inhabitants. The Book of the Acts of the
Apostles does not describe our Saviour as thus ascending through
infinite space. It simply describes Him as removed from off this
earthly ball, and then, a cloud shutting Him out from view, Christ
passed into the inner and unseen universe wherein He now dwells. The
existence of that inner and unseen universe, asserted clearly enough
in Scripture, has of late years been curiously confirmed by scientific
speculation. Scripture asserts the existence of such an unseen
universe, and the ascension implies it. The second coming of our
Saviour is never described as a descent from some far-off region. No,
it is always spoken of as an Apocalypse,--a drawing back, that is, of
a veil which hides an unseen chamber. The angels, as the messengers of
their Divine Master, are described by Christ in Matt. xiii. as
"coming forth" from the secret place of the Most High to execute His
behests.[28] What a solemn light such a scriptural view sheds upon
life! The unseen world is not at some vast distance, but, as the
ascension would seem to imply, close at hand, shut out from us by that
thin veil of matter which angelic hands will one day rend for ever.
And then how wondrously the speculations of that remarkable book to
which I have referred, _The Unseen Universe_, lend themselves to this
scriptural idea, pointing out the necessity imposed by modern
scientific thought for postulating some such interior spiritual
sphere, of which the external and material universe may be regarded as
a temporary manifestation and development.[29] The doctrine of the
ascension, when rightly understood, presents then no difficulties from
a scientific point of view, but is rather in strictest accordance with
the highest and subtlest forms of modern thought. But when we advance
still closer to the heart of this doctrine, and endeavour, quite apart
from all mere carping criticism, to realize its meaning and its power,
we shall perceive a profound fitness, beauty, and harmony in this
mysterious fact. Laying apart all carping criticism, I say, because
the critical spirit is not appreciative, it is on the look-out for
faults, it necessarily involves a certain assumption of superiority in
the critic to the thing or doctrine criticised; and most certainly it
is not to the proud critic, but to the humble soul alone, that the
doctrines of the Cross yield of their sweetness, and make revelation
of their profound depths. We can perceive a fitness and a naturalness
in the ascension; we can advance even farther still, and behold an
absolute necessity for it, if Christ's work was to be perfected in all
its details, and Christianity to become, not a narrow local religion,
but a universal and catholic Church.
[28] See Archbishop Trench on the Draw-net in _Notes on the
Parables_, p. 145, 10th ed.
[29] We now live so fast that it may perhaps be necessary to
explain that the _Unseen Universe_ was a book written some ten or
eleven years ago by two eminent scientists, showing how that it
was needful, on the principles, of modern science, to postulate
the existence of an unseen universe, out of which the seen
universe has been derived, and into which it is in turn passing.
III. The ascension was a fitting and a natural termination of Christ's
earthly ministry, considering the Christian conception of His sacred
Personality. When the Second Person of the Eternal Trinity wished to
reveal the life of God among men, and to elevate humanity by
associating it for ever with the person of Him who was the Eternal
God, He left the glory which He had with the Father before the world
was, and entered upon the world of humanity through a miraculous door.
"The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting
of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the
Father, took Man's nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her
substance." These are the careful, accurate, well-balanced words of
the second Article of the Church of England, in which all
English-speaking Christians substantially agree. They are accurate, I
say, and well-balanced, avoiding the Scylla of Nestorianism, which
divides Christ's person, on the one side, and the Charybdis of
Eutychianism, which denies His humanity, on the other. The Person of
God, the Eternal Word, assumed human nature, not a human person, but
human nature, so that God might be able, acting in and through this
human nature as His instrument, to teach mankind and to die for
mankind. God entered upon the sphere of the seen and the temporal by
a miraculous door. His life and work were marked all through by
miracle, His death and resurrection were encompassed with miracle; and
it was fitting, considering the whole course of His earthly career,
that His departure from this world should be through another
miraculous door. The departure of the Eternal King was, like His first
approach, a part of a scheme which forms one united and harmonious
whole. The Incarnation and the Ascension were necessarily related the
one to the other.
IV. Again, we may advance a step further, and say that not only was
the ascension a natural and fitting termination to the activities of
the Eternal Son manifest in the flesh, it was a necessary completion
and finish. "It is expedient," said Christ Himself, "that I go away;
for if I go not away the Comforter will not come to you." For some
reason secret from us, but hidden in the awful depths of that Being
who is the beginning and the end, the source and the condition of all
created existence, the return of Christ to the bosom of the Father was
absolutely necessary before the outpouring of the Divine Spirit of
Life and Love could take place. How this can have been we know not. We
only know the fact as revealed to us by Jesus Christ and affirmed by
His Apostles. "Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and
having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, He hath
poured forth this which ye see and hear," is the testimony of the
illuminated Apostle St. Peter on the day of Pentecost, speaking in
strict unison with the teaching of Jesus Christ Himself as reported in
St. John's Gospel. But without endeavouring to intrude into these
mysteries of the Divine nature, into which even the angels themselves
pry not, we behold in the character and constitution of Christ's
Church and Christ's religion sufficient reasons to show us the Divine
expediency of our Lord's ascension. Let us take the matter very
plainly and simply thus. Had our Lord not ascended into the unseen
state whence He had emerged for the purpose of rescuing mankind from
that horrible pit, that mire and clay of pollution, immorality, and
selfishness in which it lay at the epoch of the Christian era, He must
in that case (always proceeding on the supposition that He had risen
from the dead, because we always suppose our readers to be believers)
have remained permanently or temporarily resident in some one place.
He might have chosen Jerusalem, the city of the great King, as His
abode, and this would have seemed to the religious men of His time
quite natural. The same instinct of religious conservatism which made
the Twelve to tarry at Jerusalem even when persecution seemed to
threaten the infant Church with destruction, would have led the risen
Christ to fix His abode at the city which every pious Jew regarded as
the special seat of Jehovah. There would have been nothing to tempt
Him to Antioch, or Athens, or Alexandria, or Rome. None of these
cities could have held out any inducement or put forward any claim
comparable for one moment with that which the name, the traditions,
and the circumstances of Jerusalem triumphantly maintained. Nay,
rather the tone and temper of those cities must have rendered them
abhorrent as dwelling-places to the great Teacher of holiness and
purity.
At any rate, the risen Saviour, if He remained upon earth, must have
chosen some one place where His presence and His personal glory would
have been manifested. Now let us contemplate, and work out in some
detail, the results which would have inevitably followed. The place
chosen by our Lord as His visible dwelling-place must then have become
the centre of the whole Church. At that spot pilgrims from every land
must necessarily have assembled. To it would have resorted the doubter
to have his difficulties resolved, the sick and weak to have their
ailments cured, the men of profound devotion to bathe themselves and
lose themselves in the immediate presence of Incarnate Deity. All
interest in local Churches or local work would have been destroyed,
because every eye and every heart would be perpetually turning towards
the one spot where the risen Lord was dwelling, and where personal
adoration could be paid to Him. All honest, manly self-reliance would
have been lost for individuals, for Churches, and for nations.
Whenever a difficulty or controversy arose, either in the personal or
ecclesiastical, the social or political sphere, men, instead of trying
to solve it for themselves under the guidance of the Divine Spirit,
would have hurried off with it to the Fount of supernatural wisdom, as
an oracle, like the fabled pagan ones of old, whence direction would
infallibly be gained. Judaism would have triumphed and the
dispensation of the Spirit would have ceased.
The whole idea, too, of Christianity as a scheme of moral probation
would have been overthrown. Christ as belonging to the supernatural
sphere would of course have been raised above the laws of time and
space. For Him the powers of earth and the terrors of earth would have
had no meaning, and heavenly glory, shooting forth from His sacred
Person, would have compelled obedience and acceptance of His laws at
the hands of His most deadly and obstinate foes. Sight would have
taken the place of faith, and the terrified submission of slaves would
have been substituted for the moral, loving obedience of the
regenerate soul. The whole social order of life would also have been
overthrown. God has now placed men in families, societies, and
nations, that they might be proved by the very difficulties of their
positions. The probation which God thereby exercises over men extends
not to those alone who are subject to government, but to those as well
who are entrusted with government. God by His present system tries
governors and governed, kings and subjects, magistrates and people,
parents and children, teachers and pupils, all alike. Any one who has
ever made the experiment knows, however, how impossible it is to give
full play to one's power and faculties, whether of government or of
teaching, when overlooked by the conscious presence of one who can
supersede and control all the arrangements made or all the
instructions offered. Nervousness comes in, and paralyzes the best
efforts a man might otherwise make. So would it have been had Christ
remained upon earth. Neither those placed in authority nor those set
under authority would have done their best or played their part
effectually, feeling there was One standing by whose all-piercing gaze
could see the imperfection of their noblest actions. A modern
illustration or two will perhaps exhibit more plainly what we mean.
London, with its enormous and ever-growing population, constitutes in
many respects a portentous danger to our national life. But thoughtful
colonists often see in it a danger which does not strike us here at
home. London has a tendency to sap the springs of local interest and
local self-reliance. Every colonist who attains to wealth and position
feels himself an exile till he can get back to London, which he
regards as the one centre of the empire worth living at; while the
colonies, viewing London as the centre of England's wealth, power, and
resources, feel naturally inclined to fling upon London the care and
responsibility of the empire's protection, in which all its separate
parts should take their proportionate share.
Or again, let us take an illustration from the ecclesiastical sphere.
M. Renan is a writer who has depicted the early history of the Church
from a sceptical point of view. He has done so with all the skill of a
novelist, aided by the resources of immense erudition. Before Renan
became a sceptic he was a Roman Catholic, and a student for the
priesthood in one of those narrow seminaries wherein exclusively the
Roman Church now trains her clergy. Renan can never, therefore, view
Christianity save through a Roman medium, and from a Roman Catholic
standpoint. Descended himself from a Jewish stock, and trained up in
Roman Catholic ideas, Renan, sceptic though he be, is lost in
admiration of the Papacy, because it has combined the Jewish and the
ancient imperial ideas, so that Rome having taken the place which
Jerusalem once occupied in the spiritual organisation, has now become
the local centre of unity for the Latin Church, where Christ's vicar
visibly bears sway, to whom resort can be had from every land as an
authoritative guide, and whence he and he alone dispenses with more
than imperial sway the gifts and graces of Divine love. Rome is for
the Latin Church the centre of the earth, and upon Rome and its
spiritual ruler all interest is concentrated as Christ's earthly
representative and deputy. Now what London is to our own colonists,
what Rome is for its adherents, such, and infinitely more, would the
localised presence of Jesus Christ have been for the Christian world
had not the ascension taken place. The Papacy, instead of securing
the universality of the Church, strikes a deadly blow at it. The
Papacy, with its centralised ecclesiastical despotism, is not the
Catholic Church, it is simply the local Church of Rome spread out into
all the world; just as Judaism never was and never could have been
catholic in its ideal, no matter how widely spread it was, from the
shores of the British Islands in the West to the far-distant regions
of China in the East. Its adherents, like the eunuch of Ethiopia,
never felt a local interest in their religion,--their eyes ever turned
towards Zion, the city of the great King. And so would it have been
with the bodily presence of Christ manifested in one spot; the
Christian Church would still have remained a purely local institution,
and the place where the risen Saviour was manifested would have been
for Christian people the one centre towards which all their thoughts
would gravitate, to the complete neglect of those home interests and
labours in which each individual Church ought to find the special work
appointed for it by the Master. It was expedient for the Church that
Christ should go away, to deepen faith, to strengthen Christian
self-reliance, to offer play and scope for the power and work of the
Holy Ghost, to render life a testing-ground, and a place of probation
for the higher life to come. But above all, it was expedient that
Christ should go away in order that the Church might rise out of and
above that narrow provincialism in which the Jewish spirit would fain
bind it, might attain to a truly universal and catholic position, and
thus fulfil the Master's magnificent prophecy to the woman of Samaria,
when, viewing in spirit the Church's onward march, beholding it
bursting all local and national bonds, recognising it as the religion
of universal humanity, He proclaimed its destiny in words which shall
never die--"Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh when neither in this
mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father. God is a
Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in
truth." The ascension of Jesus Christ was absolutely necessary to
equip the Church for its universal mission, by withdrawing the bodily
presence of Christ into that unseen region which bears no special
relation to any terrestrial locality, but is the common destiny, the
true fatherland, of all the sons of God.[30]
[30] The line of thought here worked out was originally suggested
to me by Canon Liddon's sermon on "Our Lord's Ascension the
Church's Gain," in his first series of University sermons.
V. We have now seen how the ascension was needful for the Church, by
rendering Christ an ideal object of worship for the whole human race,
thus saving it from that tendency to mere localism which would have
utterly changed its character. We can also trace another great
blessing involved in it. The ascension glorified humanity as humanity,
and ennobled man viewed simply as man. The ascension thus transformed
life by adding a new dignity to life and to life's duties.
This was a very necessary lesson for the ancient world, especially the
ancient Gentile world, which Christ came to enlighten and to save.
Man, considered by himself as man, had no peculiar dignity in the
popular religious estimate of Greece and Rome. A Greek or a Roman was
a dignified person, not, however, in virtue of his humanity, but in
virtue of his Greek or Roman citizenship. The most pious Greeks or
Romans simply despised mankind as such, regarding all other nations
as barbarians, and treating them accordingly. Roman law exempted Roman
citizens from degrading and cruel punishments, which they reserved for
men outside the limits of Roman citizenship, because that humanity as
humanity had no dignity attached to it in their estimation. The
gladiatorial shows were the most striking illustration of this
contempt for human nature which paganism inculcated.[31]
[31] The gladiatorial shows form an interesting standard by which
we may compare the practical effects of Christian and the very
highest pagan sentiment. Tertullian denounced them in the
strongest language in his treatise _De Spectaculis_. Cicero, in
the _Tusculan Disputations_, ii. 17, defends them warmly as the
best discipline against fear of pain and death.
It is a notable evidence, too, of the firm grasp upon the popular mind
this contempt had taken, of the awful depths to which the fatal
infection had permeated the public conscience, that it was not till
four hundred years after the Incarnation, and not till one hundred
years after the triumph of Christianity, that these frightful
carnivals of human blood and slaughter yielded to the gentler and
nobler principles of the religion of the Cross. No name indeed in the
long roll of Christian martyrs, who for truth and righteousness have
laid down their lives, deserves higher mention than that of
Telemachus, the Asiatic monk, who, in the year 404, hearing that the
city, where the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul had suffered, was
still disgraced by the gladiatorial shows, made his way to Rome, and
by the sacrifice of his own life terminated them for ever within the
bounds of Christendom. Telemachus rushed between the combatants in the
arena, flung them asunder, and then was stoned to death by the mob,
infuriated at the interruption of their favourite amusement.[32] A
tragic but glorious ending indeed, showing clearly how little the
Roman mob realized as yet the doctrine of the sanctity of human
nature; how powerful was the sway which paganism and pagan modes of
thought held as yet over the populace of nominally Christian Rome; the
tradition of which even still perpetuates itself in the cruel
bull-fights of Spain. From the beginning, however, Christianity took
exactly the opposite course, declaring to all the dignity and glory of
human nature in itself. The Incarnation was in itself a magnificent
proclamation of this great elevating and civilising truth. The title
Son of Man, which Christ, rising above all narrow Jewish nationalism,
assumed to Himself, was a republication of the same dogma; and then,
to crown the whole fabric, comes the doctrine of the ascension,
wherein mankind was taught that human nature as joined to the person
of God has ascended into the holiest place of the universe, so that
henceforth the humblest and lowliest can view his humanity as allied
with that elder Brother who in the reality of human flesh--glorified,
indeed, spiritualised and refined by the secret, searching processes
of death--has passed within the veil, now to appear in the presence of
God for us. What new light must have been shed upon life--the life of
the barbarian and of the slave--crushed beneath the popular theory of
St. Paul's day![33] What new dignity this doctrine imparted to the
bodies of the outcast and despised, counted fit food only for the
cross, the stake, or the arena! Man might despise them and ill-treat
them, yet their bodies were made like unto the one glorious Body for
ever united to God, and therefore they were comforted, elevated,
enabled to endure as seeing Him who is invisible. Cannot we see many
examples of the consoling, elevating power of the ascension in the New
Testament? Take St. Paul's writings, and there we trace the influence
of the ascension in every page. Take the very lowest case. Slaves
under the conditions of ancient society occupied the most degraded
position. Their duties were of the humblest type, their treatment of
the worst description, their punishments of the most terrible
character.[34] Yet for even these oppressed and degraded beings the
doctrine of the ascension transformed life, because it endowed that
menial service which they rendered with a new dignity. "Servants, obey
in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eye
service, as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God."
And why? Because life has been enriched with a new motive:
"Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord, and not unto men;
knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the
inheritance; for ye serve the Lord Christ." _Ye serve the Lord
Christ._ That was the supreme point. The cooking of a dinner, the
dressing of an imperious lady's hair, the teaching of a careless or
refractory pupil--all these things were transfigured into the service
of the ascended Lord. And as with the servant, so was it with their
masters. The ascension furnished them with a new and practical motive,
which, at first leading to kindly treatment and generous actions,
would one day, by the force of logical deduction as well as of
Christian principle, lead to the utter extinction of slavery.
"Masters, render unto your servants that which is just and equal,
knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven." The doctrine of the
ascension diffused sweetness and light throughout the whole Christian
system, furnishing a practical motive, offering an ever-present and
eternal sanction, urging men upwards and onwards; without which
neither the Church nor the world would ever have reached that high
level of mercy, charity, and purity which men now enjoy. Perhaps here
again the present age may see the doctrine of the ascension asserting
its glory and its power in the same direction. Much of modern
speculation tends to debase and belittle the human body, teaching
theories respecting its origin which have a natural tendency to
degrade the popular standard. If people come to think of their bodies
as derived from a low source, they will be apt to think a low standard
of morals as befitting bodies so descended. The doctrine of evolution
has not, to say the least, an elevating influence upon the masses. I
say nothing against it. One or two passages in the Bible, as Gen. ii.
7, seem to support it, appearing, as that verse does, to make a
division between the creation of the body of man and the creation of
his spirit.[35] But the broad tendency of such speculation lies in a
downward moral direction. Here the doctrine of the ascension steps in
to raise for us, as it raised for the materialists of St. Paul's day,
the standard of current conceptions, and to teach men a higher and a
nobler view. We leave to science the investigation of the past and of
the lowly sources whence man's body may have come; but the doctrine of
the ascension speaks of its present sanctity and of its future glory,
telling of the human body as a body of humiliation and of lowliness
indeed, but yet proclaiming it as even now, in the person of Christ,
ascended into the heavens, and seated on the throne of the Most High.
It may have been once humble in its origin; it is now glorious in its
dignity and elevation; and that dignity and that elevation shed a halo
upon human nature, no matter how degraded and wherever it may be
found, because it is like unto that Body, the firstfruits of humanity,
which stands at the right hand of God. Thus the doctrine of the
ascension becomes for the Christian the ever-flowing fountain of
dignity, of purity, and of mercy, teaching us to call no man common or
unclean, because all have been made like unto the image of the Son of
God.
[32] The original authority for the story of Telemachus is
Theodoret's _Eccles. Hist._, v. 26. It is vigorously told by
Gibbon in the thirtieth chapter of his _Decline and Fall_.
[33] The doctrine of the sanctity of human life was unknown under
paganism. Tacitus tells us, about the year A.D. 61, how that
Pedianus Secundus, prefect of the city, having been murdered by
one of his slaves, the whole body of his slaves, numbering more
than four hundred persons, of every age and sex, were put to death
(_Annals_, xiv., 42-45).
[34] We have no idea of the frightful character of pagan slavery.
The worst form which negro slavery ever took never approached it.
The following story will give our readers some idea of it. Cato,
the censor, wrote a treatise, very little read or known, called
_De Re Rustica_, treating of farming operations. In this he gives
directions concerning the economical management of slaves, and
among other things tells how wine for their winter consumption was
to be prepared. "Put into a cask ten amphoræ of sweet wine, two
amphoræ of sour vinegar, and as much wine boiled down by
two-thirds. Add fifty amphoræ of pure water. Mix all together with
a stick three times a day for five consecutive days. After this
add sixty-four amphoræ of stale salt and water."
[35] See St. George Mivart, _Genesis of Species_, p. 282. The
whole chapter (xii.) on Theology and Evolution is well worth
careful study.