DEBASEMENT OF THE NEW POWER WHEN SEIZED BY RULERS.
Cost of making the New Ideas triumphant--Change in Character in
the hands of Kings, Courtiers, and Profitmongers--Emancipations
become a matter of Policy and Profit--Repudiation of Principles of
Fraternity and Equality--Horrors of Introduction of Proletarianism.
We have seen, in the two last chapters, what terrible tribulations
it cost the early Christians to obtain admission into the world for
the doctrines of liberty, fraternity, and equality,--we ought rather,
perhaps, to say, for the more comprehensive doctrines of justice
and humanity, upon which the others must be based to be real and
enduring. For upwards of three hundred years these poor Christians
were the victims of an untiring persecution, which smote them without
pity and without remorse, in every part of the wide-extended Roman
empire. We have seen how, at ten distinct epochs, by the edicts of as
many emperors, this persecution burst upon them with such signal and
surpassing fury that, to this day, it seems almost a miracle that the
sect was not utterly extirpated. More marvellous still, we find them
growing and extending themselves after every persecution, till at
length, under Constantine, they have become so numerous and formidable
that persecution may no longer be safely tried. Indeed, force would
no longer prevail; so fraud must be resorted to. The sham conversion
of Constantine and his courtiers was the fraud had recourse to. Those
hypocrites suddenly pretended to a new light. Constantine made his
own conversion quite a supernatural affair; he pretended to have
seen a brilliant apparition in the heavens, presenting a cross with
this inscription, “In hoc signo vinces,”--“In this sign thou shalt
conquer.” His courtiers and expectants, of course, partook of the
imperial illumination; they discovered with miraculous haste, if not
by miraculous agency, the divine authority of the Christian religion.
By embracing it in _name_ and _profession_ they wisely calculated
they could more easily extinguish it in _substance_ and in _practice_
than by any other means. In the first place, it would detach the mere
_political_ Christians--_i.e._, the selfish and ambitious ones--from
the real ones, the honest, unsuspecting mass. In the next place, it
would conciliate the former by throwing open to them the offices and
honours of the state; and, at the same time, flatter the multitude by
the seeming conversion of an emperor and his court to their religion.
Above all, it would have the advantage of pricking up the Christian
organization (which, up to that epoch, was a veritable democratic
organization) by detaching from the multitude all their leading
spiritual and political chiefs, who would thenceforward be sure to have
one doctrine for the rich and another for the poor, in order to keep
the doors of preferment open for themselves. Such, at least, was the
effect of the legal establishment of Christianity; and they know but
little of men and of politics who would attribute that event to other
motives or causes.
In truth, the progress of real Christianity--the Christianity taught
by Christ and his disciples--received its death-blow from its legal
establishment by Constantine. As long as it had the enemies of human
rights for its foes, it attracted to itself the friends of human
rights; but the moment it became a state religion--the religion of
courts and courtiers--the religion of emperors and aristocrats--the
religion of ambitious priests and sanguinary soldiers--the religion, in
short, of the rich and powerful,--from that moment it repelled sincere
believers from all communion with the church. It either plunged them
into despair for humanity, or else forced them, by their necessities
and passions, to become servile and hypocritical professors of what in
their hearts they despised, as being a libel upon the Redeemer and a
fraud upon humanity. It was, in effect, paganism under a new name and
with somewhat new forms.
Altogether the propagation of Christianity assumed a new aspect after
it became the religion of the Roman empire. Pride and hypocrisy took
the place of humility and zeal. Ambition, corruption, and servility
entirely supplanted in the hearts of men the virtues which the Gospel
had hitherto consecrated in the eyes of Christians. Not a shred of
democracy, not a vestige of fraternity nor of the love of liberty and
equality, could survive in a religion patronised by courts, professed
by its parasites and prostitutes, made a stepping-stone for the
purposes of lucre and ambition, guarded and defended by prætorian
bands, and surrounded with the munificence and corruption of imperial
power.
The effects of the change soon became visible and palpable to all.
During the three first centuries every extension of the Christian
propagandism was followed by the most beneficial social consequences.
It brought rich and poor, gentle and simple, high and low, learned and
unlearned, Jew and Gentile, into terms of the closest and most cordial
communionship. All distinctions of wealth and talent, of rank, station,
office, intellectual and personal endowments--all, all sank before
the beneficent spell of a religion which declared all men equal and
brothers, and which promised to all a heaven both here and hereafter,
upon the sole condition of keeping its commandments and carrying
into effect its precepts. In the face of such a religion, no man who
believed in it could be a tyrant; no man would be a slave a moment
longer than he could help. “My service,” says Christ, “is perfect
freedom.” Thus was it understood by the Christians of the first three
centuries. Under the Heaven-bred influence of the new dispensation,
masters manumitted their slaves in thousands. The slaves so manumitted
loved their masters to distraction, and would die rather than betray or
disoblige them. The rich converts divided their substance freely with
the poor; the poor as freely bestowed their services, and administered
comforts to the rich, renouncing or losing all feelings of envy and
distrust towards them. Everywhere collections were made amongst the
brethren for distressed members--for members even of churches or
congregations in far-off countries; and these collections were always
superabundant, because from the heart, and inspired by a power greater
than the power of pelf. In many of the primitive congregations a real
equality prevailed amongst all the members--a veritable reciprocity of
benefactions and sacrifices--a _bona fide_ community of goods and of
friendly offices.
This it was which gave such an extraordinary impulse to Christianity
at its first outset:--the total absence of selfishness; the perfect
sincerity of the members; their unbounded faith in their new religion
and in one another; their sovereign contempt for worldly advantages
obtained by trickery and fraud; and their firm belief that it needed
only their example and precept to change the face of entire humanity,
and assimilate the rest of the world to themselves in virtue and innate
happiness. In a word, they abounded and superabounded in the three
cardinal virtues--
FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY!
faith in their principles--a perfect hope of seeing them realised--and
a charity prepared to make the most unbounded allowances for the
weaknesses and follies of all who might oppose themselves to the new
dispensation. No wonder, with such principles, they accomplished such
marvels.
But all was changed with the change that took place under Constantine.
Masters, it is true, still continued to manumit their slaves; but,
alas! it was in a very different spirit, and for very different
purposes from those which actuated the true or early Christians. It
appears from the concurrent testimonies of the Fathers of the church,
and of legal documents still extant, that vast numbers of slaves were
manumitted, in the first three centuries, through the pious zeal of
their masters; and that those slaves and their progeny fell into great
poverty and want through the absence of any legal provision for them,
to compensate for the loss of their masters’ protection and support.
The early Christian missionaries, who caused their liberation from
slavery, never, of course, contemplated such a result. They looked to a
complete renovation of society, which would dispense the blessings of
creation to all God’s creatures alike, according to their services and
deserts. They never imagined a state of things in which _to be free_
would imply _freedom only to starve_. Yet such, unfortunately, was the
result they unconsciously brought about. The myriads of manumitted
slaves, once deprived of their masters’ homes and protection, had
thenceforward no other means of providing a subsistence, but to betake
themselves to one or other of the four courses indicated in our first
and second chapters. They must either find work as hired labourers,
or they must beg, or they must steal, or they (if females) must turn
to prostitution. They must, to repeat the Guizot classification of
proletarianism, become
LABOURERS, BEGGARS, THIEVES, OR PROSTITUTES
And that is just what happened. All that could find work, and were
inclined to work, became labourers for hire; others took to begging;
a third class became thieves and robbers; and the unfortunates of
the weaker sex as naturally and as necessarily betook themselves to
prostitution.
The majority of both sexes, of course, took to hired labour, when they
could get it, as the safest occupation. Having no land nor capital
wherewith to turn their freedom to account for their own advantage,
they had no alternative but to find employers, or else die of hunger,
unless they betook themselves to the other courses adverted to.
Here began that frightful system of wages-slavery, so often adverted to
in the progress of this inquiry--that desolating system which has since
extended itself all over the civilized world, and which has converted
three-fourths of Christendom into more degraded and unhappy beings than
were the ancient chattel-slaves of the pagans or the negro-slaves who
were in the Southern States of the American republic.
Constantine’s courtier-“Christians” and capitalists were not slow in
availing themselves of this new form of slavery. They soon discovered
that it was (to them) a _cheaper_ slavery than the old one. They
discovered that an “independent labourer” might be made, by the fear
of starvation, to do more work than a chattel-slave ever did under the
fear of the lash; and with this advantage in their own favour, that
he might be turned off and left to starve when there was no work for
him; whereas they would have to _keep_ the chattel-slave, and _keep him
well_ too, whether there was work for him or not.
But as we have already, in a former chapter, so largely dwelt on the
comparative merits of the two kinds of slavery, it is unnecessary to
repeat here the signal advantages which landlords and capitalists
derive from wages-slavery in comparison with the other. At any rate,
the capitalists or proprietors, under Constantine and his successors,
must have been well aware of them; for we find that, instead of
compelling the manumitted slaves and their progeny to return to the
condition of chattel-slavery, they greatly added to their numbers by
still further manumissions, only accompanying them with very stringent
laws and regulations to keep them, now “independent labourers,” as
effectually under their thumb as when they had been nominal bondsmen.
Had the primitive Christians foreseen the terrible abuse their
benevolent labours were destined to give rise to, it may be questioned
whether they would not have abandoned their mission, rather than risk
the superinducing of proletarianism, with all its horrors, upon the
system they sought to explode--the system of chattel-slavery. It was
not in order to fill the world with famishing beggars, with necessitous
thieves and prostitutes, and, above all, with myriads of honest
producers starving in the midst of their own productions,--it was not
for such unholy purposes that the early Christians divized the _régime_
of fraternity and equality; yet all the traditions that remain to us of
Christian propagandism prove unmistakably that such were its effects,
even before the downfall of the Roman empire, to which event it, in our
opinion, in no small degree contributed.
Indeed, Rome was already overrun with paupers and fugitive slaves, and
Italy with thieves and vagabonds, before Constantine found it politic
to make Christianity a state religion. But, lest we might be suspected
of giving scope to invention, or of indulging in idle imaginings,
on a subject so fraught with interest to mankind, we shall here use
the authority of a profound antiquarian to illustrate this critical
period of history, when the great transition from chattel-slavery to
proletarianism was effected. Let our readers fail not, in perusing it,
to compare it with what we have previously laid down in respect of
the condition of slaves under the old pagan system. We quote from the
learned work of M. Granier de Cassagnac, entitled “Histoire des Classes
Ouvrières et Bourgeoises”:--
“Things remained in this state, that is to say, the poor, still far
from numerous, had no hospital or asylum in which to take refuge
during the first ages of the vulgar era. The Christians dispensed alms
freely and bountifully, nourishing the necessitous poor out of their
substance. But they were not yet masters; they were still a minority
of the population. They could not act collectively, publicly, or in a
corporate or legal capacity, but only individually and in an isolated
manner, each on his own account. The pagan clergy, on the other hand,
who were in possession of immense territorial estates, which proceeded
partly from permanent grants or donations disbursed from the imperial
treasury, and dating as far back as the age of Numa (who had originated
them), and partly from innumerable inheritances and legacies which had
subsequently fallen to them, never had any idea of succouring the poor,
or of organizing any system of public charity; and when, towards the
close of the fourth century, Symmachus addressed to Valentinian II., to
Theodosius, and to Arcadius those two celebrated letters on the pagan
worship which was falling into decay, in which he complains so bitterly
of the emperors having confiscated the property of the priests and the
vestals, St. Ambrose, in the first of his two answers to Symmachus
addressed to Valentinian II., contrasts with the avarice of the pagan
clergy, who kept all their riches to themselves, the self-denial of the
Christian church, which possessed nothing (as St. Ambrose expresses it)
but its faith, and the whole of whose goods were the property of the
poor.
“However, although it is certain the number of permanent poor or
professional beggars was not very numerous up to the beginning of the
third century, there occurred terrible epochs when this number was
fearfully augmented. It was in years of famine--in years when the
harvests failed in Sicily or in Africa, or when the two corporations of
shippers and bakers--one charged with superintending the importations
and the other with the distribution of bread and flour--were suddenly
brought to a standstill, that occurred those horrible famines from
which the superior administration of modern times preserves the
people of our times; it was then that all the slaves of Italy, no
longer fed by their masters, were seen flocking to Rome to demand
bread; but as this increase of population soon threatened Rome itself
with starvation, they were expelled the city upon a given day, to
go and die where they might. This was the ordinary course adopted
by Roman administrations in critical times; and Symmachus, who was
prefect of Rome about the year 383, wrote thus:--‘We fear the total
failure of provisions at Rome, even after having chased away all the
stranger-population which took refuge amongst us, and which the city
subsisted.’
“On their side, the Christians inveighed loudly against the burgesses
of Rome for refusing to divide their superfluity with the strangers who
sought relief within her walls. St. Ambrose, who makes mention of this
expulsion in several parts of his works, inveighs indignantly against
this want of feeling on the part of the pagans. ‘Those,’ says he, ‘who
banish the poor strangers from Rome are much to blame. It is inhuman
to repulse a fellow-creature at the moment he craves succour at your
hands. Brute beasts do not treat their kind so: ’tis only man that
behaves so to man.’ Sometimes the pagans themselves protested against
the expulsion of strangers when famine threatened the towns they had
fled from.”
This, it will be observed, took place after the legal establishment of
Christianity under Constantine. M. de Cassagnac continues:--
“For the rest, it is manifest from divers writings of the third and
fourth centuries that, as soon as the charity of the early Christians
became known, the poor gathered in groups around the churches. At Rome
they congregated near the church of the Apostles, in the Vatican.
It was there they received a diurnal distribution of alms, as may
be seen (amongst other proofs) in the works of Ammian Marcellinus,
and in the poem of Prudentius against Symmachus. Moreover, it seems
all manner of imposition used to be committed by loose characters to
surprise the compassion of the Christian bishops. Here is the way
St. Ambrose expresses himself on this subject, in the second book of
his treatise on the duties of ministers:--‘We must fix bounds to our
liberality, that it may not be abused or rendered useless. The priests,
in particular, ought to be very circumspect on this head, that they
may proportion their alms to the justice of the case, and not to the
importunity of the claimant. Never did the greediness of beggars reach
such a pitch. Able-bodied men present themselves, strolling about for
the mere pleasure of vagabondizing, and who would absorb the relief
due only to the veritable poor. There are some of them who feign to
be in debt: let this point be strictly verified. Others declare they
have been despoiled by robbers: let exact information be taken of these
persons,’ &c. The scandal given by these fraudulent beggars and their
impositions went to such a length, that the Emperor Valentinian II.
made a law, dated from Padua, in 382, expelling from Rome all who were
not beggars really incapable of gaining a livelihood.
“The law of Valentinian is very curious, in so far as it contains
certain data and precise details illustrative of the state of
pauperism in Italy towards the close of the fourth century. We see
by it, for example, that the greater part of the beggars congregated
at Rome were either runaway slaves or serfs whom the culture of the
fields could not supply with employment. They precipitated themselves
into Rome, which was then the largest city in the world, and where,
better than anywhere else, they might escape the vigilant search of
their masters.... Justinian re-enacts pretty nearly the same law as
Valentinian--only with this difference,--that he condemns all sturdy
beggars to labour on the public works.
“The whole of this vast redundancy of beggars took place in the third
and fourth centuries. It seems they had interpreted literally St.
Jerome’s character of Christians, when he calls them, in his 26th
Epistle to Pammachius, the _subordinates and candidates of the poor_.
The predominant historic and social fact of the fourth century is the
outrageous multiplication of proletarians, and (after innumerable
failures of private charity) the creation and organization of a grand
system of public charity to relieve the wants of the poor, and to
provide asylums for old age, for the infirm, and for deserted children.
This eleemosynary system, which the lapse of time has but more largely
developed, and which is still the only palliative resorted to by modern
societies to cure, or rather to bandage, the wounds of civilization,
thus owes its origin to Christianism.
“Seeing that antiquity, during a period of more than 4,000 years,
had not emancipated so many slaves as to produce any noticeable or
considerable mass of proletarians, and that in less than 400 years
Christianism had so multiplied them, that regular society was, as it
were, choked and perilled by them, one would be tempted to believe
that Christianity made a dead set against slavery, and went to work by
grand essays of systematic enfranchisement. That, however, would be an
error. In general, Christianism did not meddle with the positive law:
it left to Cæsar what belonged to Cæsar. St. Paul wrote to the slaves
of Ephesus that the new religion made no change in their duties as
slaves. Nevertheless, Christianity created, alongside the old moral
world, a new moral world, into which it admitted all who volunteered
to accept its conditions. It was by this attractive power that
Christianism drew over to it, in succession, all the members of pagan
society; and the magnificent application that it gave to its ideas of
charity, fraternity, and love was the principal cause which indirectly
determined so many emancipations, and which gave birth to such a host
of proletarians.”
[Illustration: Decoration]