CHAPTER IV. FROM CONSTANTINE TO CHARLEMAGNE.

Having in the last chapter given a brief, but I trust not altogether

indistinct, account of the causes that ensured the triumph of Christianity

in Rome, and of the character of the opposition it overcame, I proceed to

examine the nature of the moral ideal the new religion introduced, and

also the methods by which it attempted to realise it. And at the very

outset of this enquiry it is necessary to guard against a serious error.

It is common with many persons to establish a comparison between

Christianity and Paganism, by placing the teaching of the Christians in

juxtaposition with corresponding passages from the writings of Marcus

Aurelius or Seneca, and to regard the superiority of the Christian over

the philosophical teaching as a complete measure of the moral advance that

was effected by Christianity. But a moment’s reflection is sufficient to

display the injustice of such a conclusion. The ethics of Paganism were

part of a philosophy. The ethics of Christianity were part of a religion.

The first were the speculations of a few highly cultivated individuals and

neither had nor could have had any direct influence upon the masses of

mankind. The second were indissolubly connected with the worship, hopes,

and fears of a vast religious system, that acts at least as powerfully on

the most ignorant as on the most educated. The chief objects of Pagan

religions were to foretell the future, to explain the universe, to avert

calamity, to obtain the assistance of the gods. They contained no

instruments of moral teaching analogous to our institution of preaching,

or to the moral preparation for the reception of the sacrament, or to

confession, or to the reading of the Bible, or to religious education, or

to united prayer for spiritual benefits. To make men virtuous was no more

the function of the priest than of the physician. On the other hand, the

philosophic expositions of duty were wholly unconnected with the religious

ceremonies of the temple. To amalgamate these two spheres, to incorporate

moral culture with religion, and thus to enlist in behalf of the former

that desire to enter, by means of ceremonial observances, into direct

communication with Heaven, which experience has shown to be one of the

most universal and powerful passions of mankind, was among the most

important achievements of Christianity. Something had, no doubt, been

already attempted in this direction. Philosophy, in the hands of the

rhetoricians, had become more popular. The Pythagoreans enjoined religious

ceremonies for the purpose of purifying the mind, and expiatory rites were

common, especially in the Oriental religions. But it was the

distinguishing characteristic of Christianity that its moral influence was

not indirect, casual, remote, or spasmodic. Unlike all Pagan religions, it

made moral teaching a main function of its clergy, moral discipline the

leading object of its services, moral dispositions the necessary condition

of the due performance of its rites. By the pulpit, by its ceremonies, by

all the agencies of power it possessed, it laboured systematically and

perseveringly for the regeneration of mankind. Under its influence,

doctrines concerning the nature of God, the immortality of the soul, and

the duties of man, which the noblest intellects of antiquity could barely

grasp, have become the truisms of the village school, the proverbs of the

cottage and of the alley.

But neither the beauty of its sacred writings, nor the perfection of its

religious services, could have achieved this great result without the

introduction of new motives to virtue. These may be either interested or

disinterested, and in both spheres the influence of Christianity was very

great. In the first, it effected a complete revolution by its teaching

concerning the future world and concerning the nature of sin. The doctrine

of a future life was far too vague among the Pagans to exercise any

powerful general influence, and among the philosophers who clung to it

most ardently it was regarded solely in the light of a consolation.

Christianity made it a deterrent influence of the strongest kind. In

addition to the doctrines of eternal suffering, and the lost condition of

the human race, the notion of a minute personal retribution must be

regarded as profoundly original. That the commission of great crimes, or

the omission of great duties, may be expiated hereafter, was indeed an

idea familiar to the Pagans, though it exercised little influence over

their lives, and seldom or never produced, even in the case of the worst

criminals, those scenes of deathbed repentance which are so conspicuous in

Christian biographies. But the Christian notion of the enormity of little

sins, the belief that all the details of life will be scrutinised

hereafter, that weaknesses of character and petty infractions of duty, of

which the historian and the biographer take no note, which have no

perceptible influence upon society, and which scarcely elicit a comment

among mankind, may be made the grounds of eternal condemnation beyond the

grave, was altogether unknown to the ancients, and, at a time when it

possessed all the freshness of novelty, it was well fitted to transform

the character. The eye of the Pagan philosopher was ever fixed upon

virtue, the eye of the Christian teacher upon sin. They first sought to

amend men by extolling the beauty of holiness; the second by awakening the

sentiment of remorse. Each method had its excellences and its defects.

Philosophy was admirably fitted to dignify and ennoble, but altogether

impotent to regenerate, mankind. It did much to encourage virtue, but

little or nothing to restrain vice. A relish or taste for virtue was

formed and cultivated, which attracted many to its practice; but in this,

as in the case of all our other higher tastes, a nature that was once

thoroughly vitiated became altogether incapable of appreciating it, and

the transformation of such a nature, which was continually effected by

Christianity, was confessedly beyond the power of philosophy.(1)

Experience has abundantly shown that men who are wholly insensible to the

beauty and dignity of virtue, can be convulsed by the fear of judgment,

can be even awakened to such a genuine remorse for sin as to reverse the

current of their dispositions, detach them from the most inveterate

habits, and renew the whole tenor of their lives.

But the habit of dilating chiefly on the darker side of human nature,

while it has contributed much to the regenerating efficacy of Christian

teaching, has not been without its disadvantages. Habitually measuring

character by its aberrations, theologians, in their estimates of those

strong and passionate natures in which great virtues are balanced by great

failings, have usually fallen into a signal injustice, which is the more

inexcusable, because in their own writings the Psalms of David are a

conspicuous proof of what a noble, tender, and passionate nature could

survive, even in an adulterer and a murderer. Partly, too, through this

habit of operating through the sense of sin, and partly from a desire to

show that man is in an abnormal and dislocated condition, they have

continually propounded distorted and degrading views of human nature, have

represented it as altogether under the empire of evil, and have sometimes

risen to such a height of extravagance as to pronounce the very virtues of

the heathen to be of the nature of sin. But nothing can be more certain

than that that which is exceptional and distinctive in human nature is not

its vice, but its excellence. It is not the sensuality, cruelty,

selfishness, passion, or envy, which are all displayed in equal or greater

degrees in different departments of the animal world; it is that moral

nature which enables man apparently, alone of all created beings, to

classify his emotions, to oppose the current of his desires, and to aspire

after moral perfection. Nor is it less certain that in civilised, and

therefore developed man, the good greatly preponderates over the evil.

Benevolence is more common than cruelty; the sight of suffering more

readily produces pity than joy; gratitude, not ingratitude, is the normal

result of a conferred benefit. The sympathies of man naturally follow

heroism and goodness, and vice itself is usually but an exaggeration or

distortion of tendencies that are in their own nature perfectly innocent.

But these exaggerations of human depravity, which have attained their

extreme limits in some Protestant sects, do not appear in the Church of

the first three centuries. The sense of sin was not yet accompanied by a

denial of the goodness that exists in man. Christianity was regarded

rather as a redemption from error than from sin,(2) and it is a

significant fact that the epithet “well deserving,” which the Pagans

usually put upon their tombs, was also the favourite inscription in the

Christian catacombs. The Pelagian controversy, the teaching of St.

Augustine, and the progress of asceticism, gradually introduced the

doctrine of the utter depravity of man, which has proved in later times

the fertile source of degrading superstition.

In sustaining and defining the notion of sin, the early Church employed

the machinery of an elaborate legislation. Constant communion with the

Church was regarded as of the very highest importance. Participation in

the Sacrament was believed to be essential to eternal life. At a very

early period it was given to infants, and already in the time of St.

Cyprian we find the practice universal in the Church, and pronounced by at

least some of the Fathers to be ordinarily necessary to their

salvation.(3) Among the adults it was customary to receive the Sacrament

daily, in some churches four times a week.(4) Even in the days of

persecution the only part of their service the Christians consented to

omit was the half-secular agape.(5) The clergy had power to accord or

withhold access to the ceremonies, and the reverence with which they were

regarded was so great that they were able to dictate their own conditions

of communion.

From these circumstances there very naturally arose a vast system of moral

discipline. It was always acknowledged that men could only rightly

approach the sacred table in certain moral dispositions, and it was very

soon added that the commission of crimes should be expiated by a period of

penance, before access to the communion was granted. A multitude of

offences, of very various degrees of magnitude, such as prolonged

abstinence from religious services, prenuptial unchastity, prostitution,

adultery, the adoption of the profession of gladiator or actor, idolatry,

the betrayal of Christians to persecutors, and paiderastia or unnatural

love, were specified, to each of which a definite spiritual penalty was

annexed. The lowest penalty consisted of deprivation of the Eucharist for

a few weeks. More serious offenders were deprived of it for a year, or for

ten years, or until the hour of death, while in some cases the sentence

amounted to the greater excommunication, or the deprivation of the

Eucharist for ever. During the period of penance the penitent was

compelled to abstain from the marriage-bed, and from all other pleasures,

and to spend his time chiefly in religious exercises. Before he was

readmitted to communion, he was accustomed publicly, before the assembled

Christians, to appear clad in sackcloth, with ashes strewn upon his head,

with his hair shaven off, and thus to throw himself at the feet of the

minister, to confess aloud his sins, and to implore the favour of

absolution. The excommunicated man was not only cut off for ever from the

Christian rites; he was severed also from all intercourse with his former

friends. No Christian, on pain of being himself excommunicated, might eat

with him or speak with him. He must live hated and alone in this world,

and be prepared for damnation in the next.(6)

This system of legislation, resting upon religious terrorism, forms one of

the most important parts of early ecclesiastical history, and a leading

object of the Councils was to develop or modify it. Although confession

was not yet an habitual and universally obligatory rite, although it was

only exacted in cases of notorious sins, it is manifest that we have in

this system, not potentially or in germ, but in full developed activity,

an ecclesiastical despotism of the most crushing order. But although this

recognition of the right of the clergy to withhold from men what was

believed to be essential to their salvation, laid the foundation of the

worst superstitions of Rome, it had, on the other hand, a very valuable

moral effect. Every system of law is a system of education, for it fixes

in the minds of men certain conceptions of right and wrong, and of the

proportionate enormity of different crimes; and no legislation was

enforced with more solemnity, or appealed more directly to the religious

feelings, than the penitential discipline of the Church. More than,

perhaps, any other single agency, it confirmed that conviction of the

enormity of sin, and of the retribution that follows it, which was one of

the two great levers by which Christianity acted upon mankind.

But if Christianity was remarkable for its appeals to the selfish or

interested side of our nature, it was far more remarkable for the empire

it attained over disinterested enthusiasm. The Platonist exhorted men to

imitate God; the Stoic, to follow reason; the Christian, to the love of

Christ. The later Stoics had often united their notions of excellence in

an ideal sage, and Epictetus had even urged his disciples to set before

them some man of surpassing excellence, and to imagine him continually

near them; but the utmost the Stoic ideal could become was a model for

imitation, and the admiration it inspired could never deepen into

affection. It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an

ideal character, which through all the changes of eighteen centuries has

inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love; has shown itself

capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has

been not only the highest pattern of virtue but the strongest incentive to

its practice; and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly

said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done

more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of

philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists. This has indeed been

the well-spring of whatever is best and purest in the Christian life. Amid

all the sins and failings, amid all the priestcraft and persecution and

fanaticism that have defaced the Church, it has preserved, in the

character and example of its Founder, an enduring principle of

regeneration. Perfect love knows no rights. It creates a boundless,

uncalculating self-abnegation that transforms the character, and is the

parent of every virtue. Side by side with the terrorism and the

superstitions of dogmatism, there have ever existed in Christianity those

who would echo the wish of St. Theresa, that she could blot out both

heaven and hell, to serve God for Himself alone; and the power of the love

of Christ has been displayed alike in the most heroic pages of Christian

martyrdom, in the most pathetic pages of Christian resignation, in the

tenderest pages of Christian charity. It was shown by the martyrs who sank

beneath the fangs of wild beasts, extending to the last moment their arms

in the form of the cross they loved;(7) who ordered their chains to be

buried with them as the insignia of their warfare;(8) who looked with joy

upon their ghastly wounds, because they had been received for Christ;(9)

who welcomed death as the bridegroom welcomes the bride, because it would

bring them near to Him. St. Felicitas was seized with the pangs of

childbirth as she lay in prison awaiting the hour of martyrdom, and as her

sufferings extorted from her a cry, one who stood by said, “If you now

suffer so much, what will it be when you are thrown to wild beasts?” “What

I now suffer,” she answered, “concerns myself alone; but then another will

suffer for me, for I will then suffer for Him.”(10) When St. Melania had

lost both her husband and her two sons, kneeling by the bed where the

remains of those she loved were laid, the childless widow exclaimed,

“Lord, I shall serve Thee more humbly and readily for being eased of the

weight Thou hast taken from me.”(11)

Christian virtue was described by St. Augustine as “the order of

love.”(12) Those who know how imperfectly the simple sense of duty can

with most men resist the energy of the passions; who have observed how

barren Mohammedanism has been in all the higher and more tender virtues,

because its noble morality and its pure theism have been united with no

living example; who, above all, have traced through the history of the

Christian Church the influence of the love of Christ, will be at no loss

to estimate the value of this purest and most distinctive source of

Christian enthusiasm. In one respect we can scarcely realise its effects

upon the early Church. The sense of the fixity of natural laws is now so

deeply implanted in the minds of men, that no truly educated person,

whatever may be his religious opinions, seriously believes that all the

more startling phenomena around him—storms, earthquakes, invasions, or

famines—are results of isolated acts of supernatural power, and are

intended to affect some human interest. But by the early Christians all

these things were directly traced to the Master they so dearly loved. The

result of this conviction was a state of feeling we can now barely

understand. A great poet, in lines which are among the noblest in English

literature, has spoken of one who had died as united to the all-pervading

soul of nature, the grandeur and the tenderness, the beauty and the

passion of his being blending with the kindred elements of the universe,

his voice heard in all its melodies, his spirit a presence to be felt and

known, a part of the one plastic energy that permeates and animates the

globe. Something of this kind, but of a far more vivid and real character,

was the belief of the early Christian world. The universe, to them, was

transfigured by love. All its phenomena, all its catastrophes, were read

in a new light, were endued with a new significance, acquired a religious

sanctity. Christianity offered a deeper consolation than any prospect of

endless life, or of millennial glories. It taught the weary, the

sorrowing, and the lonely, to look up to heaven and to say, “Thou, God,

carest for me.”

It is not surprising that a religious system which made it a main object

to inculcate moral excellence, and which by its doctrine of future

retribution, by its organisation, and by its capacity of producing a

disinterested enthusiasm, acquired an unexampled supremacy over the human

mind, should have raised its disciples to a very high condition of

sanctity. There can, indeed, be little doubt that, for nearly two hundred

years after its establishment in Europe, the Christian community exhibited

a moral purity which, if it has been equalled, has never for any long

period been surpassed. Completely separated from the Roman world that was

around them, abstaining alike from political life, from appeals to the

tribunals, and from military occupations; looking forward continually to

the immediate advent of their Master, and the destruction of the Empire in

which they dwelt, and animated by all the fervour of a young religion, the

Christians found within themselves a whole order of ideas and feelings

sufficiently powerful to guard them from the contamination of their age.

In their general bearing towards society, and in the nature and minuteness

of their scruples, they probably bore a greater resemblance to the Quakers

than to any other existing sect.(13) Some serious signs of moral decadence

might, indeed, be detected even before the Decian persecution; and it was

obvious that the triumph of the Church, by introducing numerous nominal

Christians into its pale, by exposing it to the temptations of wealth and

prosperity, and by forcing it into connection with secular politics, must

have damped its zeal and impaired its purity; yet few persons, I think,

who had contemplated Christianity as it existed in the first three

centuries would have imagined it possible that it should completely

supersede the Pagan worship around it; that its teachers should bend the

mightiest monarchs to their will, and stamp their influence on every page

of legislation, and direct the whole course of civilisation for a thousand

years; and yet that the period in which they were so supreme should have

been one of the most contemptible in history.

The leading features of that period may be shortly told. From the death of

Marcus Aurelius, about which time Christianity assumed an important

influence in the Roman world, the decadence of the Empire was rapid and

almost uninterrupted. The first Christian emperor transferred his capital

to a new city, uncontaminated by the traditions and the glories of

Paganism; and he there founded an Empire which derived all its ethics from

Christian sources, and which continued in existence for about eleven

hundred years. Of that Byzantine Empire the universal verdict of history

is that it constitutes, with scarcely an exception, the most thoroughly

base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed. Though very

cruel and very sensual, there have been times when cruelty assumed more

ruthless, and sensuality more extravagant, aspects; but there has been no

other enduring civilisation so absolutely destitute of all the forms and

elements of greatness, and none to which the epithet mean may be so

emphatically applied. The Byzantine Empire was pre-eminently the age of

treachery. Its vices were the vices of men who had ceased to be brave

without learning to be virtuous. Without patriotism, without the fruition

or desire of liberty, after the first paroxysms of religious agitation,

without genius or intellectual activity; slaves, and willing slaves, in

both their actions and their thoughts, immersed in sensuality and in the

most frivolous pleasures, the people only emerged from their listlessness

when some theological subtilty, or some rivalry in the chariot races,

stimulated them into frantic riots. They exhibited all the externals of

advanced civilisation. They possessed knowledge; they had continually

before them the noble literature of ancient Greece, instinct with the

loftiest heroism; but that literature, which afterwards did so much to

revivify Europe, could fire the degenerate Greeks with no spark or

semblance of nobility. The history of the Empire is a monotonous story of

the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of

conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides. After the

conversion of Constantine there was no prince in any section of the Roman

Empire altogether so depraved, or at least so shameless, as Nero or

Heliogabalus; but the Byzantine Empire can show none bearing the faintest

resemblance to Antonine or Marcus Aurelius, while the nearest

approximation to that character at Rome was furnished by the Emperor

Julian, who contemptuously abandoned the Christian faith. At last the

Mohammedan invasion terminated the long decrepitude of the Eastern Empire.

Constantinople sank beneath the Crescent, its inhabitants wrangling about

theological differences to the very moment of their fall.

The Asiatic Churches had already perished. The Christian faith, planted in

the dissolute cities of Asia Minor, had produced many fanatical ascetics

and a few illustrious theologians, but it had no renovating effect upon

the people at large. It introduced among them a principle of interminable

and implacable dissension, but it scarcely tempered in any appreciable

degree their luxury or their sensuality. The frenzy of pleasure continued

unabated, and in a great part of the Empire it seemed, indeed, only to

have attained its climax after the triumph of Christianity.

The condition of the Western Empire was somewhat different. Not quite a

century after the conversion of Constantine, the Imperial city was

captured by Alaric, and a long series of barbarian invasions at last

dissolved the whole framework of Roman society, while the barbarians

themselves, having adopted the Christian faith and submitted absolutely to

the Christian priests, the Church, which remained the guardian of all the

treasures of antiquity, was left with a virgin soil to realise her ideal

of human excellence. Nor did she fall short of what might have been

expected. She exercised for many centuries an almost absolute empire over

the thoughts and actions of mankind, and created a civilisation which was

permeated in every part with ecclesiastical influence. And the dark ages,

as the period of Catholic ascendancy is justly called, do undoubtedly

display many features of great and genuine excellence. In active

benevolence, in the spirit of reverence, in loyalty, in co-operative

habits, they far transcend the noblest ages of Pagan antiquity, while in

that humanity which shrinks from the infliction of suffering, they were

superior to Roman, and in their respect for chastity, to Greek

civilisation. On the other hand, they rank immeasurably below the best

Pagan civilisations in civic and patriotic virtues, in the love of

liberty, in the number and splendour of the great characters they

produced, in the dignity and beauty of the type of character they formed.

They had their full share of tumult, anarchy, injustice, and war, and they

should probably be placed, in all intellectual virtues, lower than any

other period in the history of mankind. A boundless intolerance of all

divergence of opinion was united with an equally boundless toleration of

all falsehood and deliberate fraud that could favour received opinions.

Credulity being taught as a virtue, and all conclusions dictated by

authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human mind, which for many

centuries almost suspended its action, and was only effectually broken by

the scrutinising, innovating, and free-thinking habits that accompanied

the rise of the industrial republics in Italy. Few men who are not either

priests or monks would not have preferred to live in the best days of the

Athenian or of the Roman republics, in the age of Augustus or in the age

of the Antonines, rather than in any period that elapsed between the

triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth century.

It is, indeed, difficult to conceive any clearer proof than was furnished

by the history of the twelve hundred years after the conversion of

Constantine, that while theology has undoubtedly introduced into the world

certain elements and principles of good, scarcely if at all known to

antiquity, while its value as a tincture or modifying influence in society

can hardly be overrated, it is by no means for the advantage of mankind

that, in the form which the Greek and Catholic Churches present, it should

become a controlling arbiter of civilisation. It is often said that the

Roman world before Constantine was in a period of rapid decay; that the

traditions and vitality of half-suppressed Paganism account for many of

the aberrations of later times; that the influence of the Church was often

rather nominal and superficial than supreme; and that, in judging the

ignorance of the dark ages, we must make large allowance for the

dislocations of society by the barbarians. In all this there is much

truth; but when we remember that in the Byzantine Empire the renovating

power of theology was tried in a new capital free from Pagan traditions,

and for more than one thousand years unsubdued by barbarians, and that in

the West the Church, for at least seven hundred years after the shocks of

the invasions had subsided, exercised a control more absolute than any

other moral or intellectual agency has ever attained, it will appear, I

think, that the experiment was very sufficiently tried. It is easy to make

a catalogue of the glaring vices of antiquity, and to contrast them with

the pure morality of Christian writings; but, if we desire to form a just

estimate of the realised improvement, we must compare the classical and

ecclesiastical civilisations as wholes, and must observe in each case not

only the vices that were repressed, but also the degree and variety of

positive excellence attained. In the first two centuries of the Christian

Church the moral elevation was extremely high, and was continually

appealed to as a proof of the divinity of the creed. In the century before

the conversion of Constantine, a marked depression was already manifest.

The two centuries after Constantine are uniformly represented by the

Fathers as a period of general and scandalous vice. The ecclesiastical

civilisation that followed, though not without its distinctive merits,

assuredly supplies no justification of the common boast about the

regeneration of society by the Church. That the civilisation of the last

three centuries has risen in most respects to a higher level than any that

had preceded it, I at least firmly believe; but theological ethics, though

very important, form but one of the many and complex elements of its

excellence. Mechanical inventions, the habits of industrial life, the

discoveries of physical science, the improvements of government, the

expansion of literature, the traditions of Pagan antiquity, have all a

distinguished place, while, the more fully its history is investigated,

the more clearly two capital truths are disclosed. The first is that the

influence of theology having for centuries numbed and paralysed the whole

intellect of Christian Europe, the revival, which forms the starting-point

of our modern civilisation, was mainly due to the fact that two spheres of

intellect still remained uncontrolled by the sceptre of Catholicism. The

Pagan literature of antiquity, and the Mohammedan schools of science, were

the chief agencies in resuscitating the dormant energies of Christendom.

The second fact, which I have elsewhere endeavoured to establish in

detail, is that during more than three centuries the decadence of

theological influence has been one of the most invariable signs and

measures of our progress. In medicine, physical science, commercial

interests, politics, and even ethics, the reformer has been confronted

with theological affirmations which barred his way, which were all

defended as of vital importance, and were all in turn compelled to yield

before the secularising influence of civilisation.

We have here, then, a problem of deep interest and importance, which I

propose to investigate in the present chapter. We have to enquire why it

was that a religion which was not more remarkable for the beauty of its

moral teaching than for the power with which it acted upon mankind, and

which during the last few centuries has been the source of countless

blessings to the world, should have proved itself for so long a period,

and under such a variety of conditions, altogether unable to regenerate

Europe. The question is not one of languid or imperfect action, but of

conflicting agencies. In the vast and complex organism of Catholicity

there were some parts which acted with admirable force in improving and

elevating mankind. There were others which had a directly opposite effect.

The first aspect in which Christianity presented itself to the world was

as a declaration of the fraternity of men in Christ. Considered as

immortal beings, destined for the extremes of happiness or of misery, and

united to one another by a special community of redemption, the first and

most manifest duty of a Christian man was to look upon his fellow-men as

sacred beings, and from this notion grew up the eminently Christian idea

of the sanctity of all human life. I have already endeavoured to show—and

the fact is of such capital importance in meeting the common objections to

the reality of natural moral perceptions, that I venture, at the risk of

tediousness, to recur to it—that nature does not tell man that it is wrong

to slay without provocation his fellow-men. Not to dwell upon those early

stages of barbarism in which the higher faculties of human nature are

still undeveloped, and almost in the condition of embryo, it is an

historical fact beyond all dispute, that refined, and even moral societies

have existed, in which the slaughter of men of some particular class or

nation has been regarded with no more compunction than the slaughter of

animals in the chase. The early Greeks, in their dealings with the

barbarians; the Romans, in their dealings with gladiators, and in some

periods of their history, with slaves; the Spaniards, in their dealings

with Indians; nearly all colonists removed from European supervision, in

their dealings with an inferior race; an immense proportion of the nations

of antiquity, in their dealings with new-born infants, display this

complete and absolute callousness, and we may discover traces of it even

in our own islands and within the last three hundred years.(14) And

difficult as it may be to realise it in our day, when the atrocity of all

wanton slaughter of men has become an essential part of our moral

feelings, it is nevertheless an incontestable fact that this callousness

has been continually shown by good men, by men who in all other respects

would be regarded in any age as conspicuous for their humanity. In the

days of the Tudors, the best Englishmen delighted in what we should now

deem the most barbarous sports, and it is absolutely certain that in

antiquity men of genuine humanity—tender relations, loving friends,

charitable neighbours—men in whose eyes the murder of a fellow-citizen

would have appeared as atrocious as in our own, attended, instituted, and

applauded gladiatorial games, or counselled without a scruple the

exposition of infants. But it is, as I conceive, a complete confusion of

thought to imagine, as is so commonly done, that any accumulation of facts

of this nature throws the smallest doubt upon the reality of innate moral

perceptions. All that the intuitive moralist asserts is that we know by

nature that there is a distinction between humanity and cruelty; that the

first belongs to the higher or better part of our nature, and that it is

our duty to cultivate it. The standard of the age, which is itself

determined by the general condition of society, constitutes the natural

line of duty; for he who falls below it contributes to depress it. Now,

there is no fact more absolutely certain than that nations and ages which

have differed most widely as to the standard have been perfectly unanimous

as to the excellence of humanity. Plato, who recommended infanticide;

Cato, who sold his aged slaves; Pliny, who applauded the games of the

arena; the old generals, who made their prisoners slaves or gladiators, as

well as the modern generals, who refuse to impose upon them any degrading

labour; the old legislators, who filled their codes with sentences of

torture, mutilation, and hideous forms of death, as well as the modern

legislators, who are continually seeking to abridge the punishment of the

most guilty; the old disciplinarian, who governed by force, as well as the

modern instructor, who governs by sympathy; the Spanish girl, whose dark

eye glows with rapture as she watches the frantic bull, while the fire

streams from the explosive dart that quivers in its neck; as well as the

reformers we sometimes meet, who are scandalised by all field sports, or

by the sacrifice of animal life for food; or who will eat only the larger

animals, in order to reduce the sacrifice of life to a minimum; or who are

continually inventing new methods of quickening animal death—all these

persons, widely as they differ in their acts and in their judgments of

what things should be called “brutal,” and of what things should be called

“fantastic,” agree in believing humanity to be better than cruelty, and in

attaching a definite condemnation to acts that fall below the standard of

their country and their time. Now, it was one of the most important

services of Christianity, that besides quickening greatly our benevolent

affections it definitely and dogmatically asserted the sinfulness of all

destruction of human life as a matter of amusement, or of simple

convenience, and thereby formed a new standard higher than any which then

existed in the world.

The influence of Christianity in this respect began with the very earliest

stage of human life. The practice of abortion was one to which few persons

in antiquity attached any deep feeling of condemnation. I have noticed in

a former chapter that the physiological theory that the fœtus did not

become a living creature till the hour of birth, had some influence on the

judgments passed upon this practice; and even where this theory was not

generally held, it is easy to account for the prevalence of the act. The

death of an unborn child does not appeal very powerfully to the feeling of

compassion, and men who had not yet attained any strong sense of the

sanctity of human life, who believed that they might regulate their

conduct on these matters by utilitarian views, according to the general

interest of the community, might very readily conclude that the prevention

of birth was in many cases an act of mercy. In Greece, Aristotle not only

countenanced the practice, but even desired that it should be enforced by

law, when population had exceeded certain assigned limits.(15) No law in

Greece, or in the Roman Republic, or during the greater part of the

Empire, condemned it;(16) and if, as has been thought, some measure was

adopted condemnatory of it before the close of the Pagan Empire, that

measure was altogether inoperative. A long chain of writers, both Pagan

and Christian, represent the practice as avowed and almost universal. They

describe it as resulting, not simply from licentiousness or from poverty,

but even from so slight a motive as vanity, which made mothers shrink from

the disfigurement of childbirth. They speak of a mother who had never

destroyed her unborn offspring as deserving of signal praise, and they

assure us that the frequency of the crime was such that it gave rise to a

regular profession. At the same time, while Ovid, Seneca, Favorinus the

Stoic of Arles, Plutarch, and Juvenal, all speak of abortion as general

and notorious, they all speak of it as unquestionably criminal.(17) It was

probably regarded by the average Romans of the later days of Paganism much

as Englishmen in the last century regarded convivial excesses, as

certainly wrong, but so venial as scarcely to deserve censure.

The language of the Christians from the very beginning was widely

different. With unwavering consistency and with the strongest emphasis,

they denounced the practice, not simply as inhuman, but as definitely

murder. In the penitential discipline of the Church, abortion was placed

in the same category as infanticide, and the stern sentence to which the

guilty person was subject imprinted on the minds of Christians, more

deeply than any mere exhortations, a sense of the enormity of the crime.

By the Council of Ancyra the guilty mother was excluded from the Sacrament

till the very hour of death; and though this penalty was soon reduced,

first to ten and afterwards to seven years’ penitence,(18) the offence

still ranked amongst the gravest in the legislation of the Church. In one

very remarkable way the reforms of Christianity in this sphere were

powerfully sustained by a doctrine which is perhaps the most revolting in

the whole theology of the Fathers. To the Pagans, even when condemning

abortion and infanticide, these crimes appeared comparatively trivial,

because the victims seemed very insignificant and their sufferings very

slight. The death of an adult man who is struck down in the midst of his

enterprise and his hopes, who is united by ties of love or friendship to

multitudes around him, and whose departure causes a perturbation and a

pang to the society in which he has moved, excites feelings very different

from any produced by the painless extinction of a new-born infant, which,

having scarcely touched the earth, has known none of its cares and very

little of its love. But to the theologian this infant life possessed a

fearful significance. The moment, they taught, the fœtus in the womb

acquired animation, it became an immortal being, destined, even if it died

unborn, to be raised again on the last day, responsible for the sin of

Adam, and doomed, if it perished without baptism, to be excluded for ever

from heaven and to be cast, as the Greeks taught, into a painless and

joyless limbo, or, as the Latins taught, into the abyss of hell. It is

probably, in a considerable degree, to this doctrine that we owe in the

first instance the healthy sense of the value and sanctity of infant life

which so broadly distinguishes Christian from Pagan societies, and which

is now so thoroughly incorporated with our moral feelings as to be

independent of all doctrinal changes. That which appealed so powerfully to

the compassion of the early and mediæval Christians, in the fate of the

murdered infants, was not that they died, but that they commonly died

unbaptised; and the criminality of abortion was immeasurably aggravated

when it was believed to involve, not only the extinction of a transient

life, but also the damnation of an immortal soul.(19) In the “Lives of the

Saints” there is a curious legend of a man who, being desirous of

ascertaining the condition of a child before birth, slew a pregnant woman,

committing thereby a double murder, that of the mother and of the child in

her womb. Stung by remorse, the murderer fled to the desert, and passed

the remainder of his life in constant penance and prayer. At last, after

many years, the voice of God told him that he had been forgiven the murder

of the woman. But yet his end was a clouded one. He never could obtain an

assurance that he had been forgiven the death of the child.(20)

If we pass to the next stage of human life, that of the new-born infant,

we find ourselves in presence of that practice of infanticide which was

one of the deepest stains of the ancient civilisation. The natural history

of this crime is somewhat peculiar.(21) Among savages, whose feelings of

compassion are very faint, and whose warlike and nomadic habits are

eminently unfavourable to infant life, it is, as might be expected, the

usual custom for the parent to decide whether he desires to preserve the

child he has called into existence, and if he does not, to expose or slay

it. In nations that have passed out of the stage of barbarism, but are

still rude and simple in their habits, the practice of infanticide is

usually rare; but, unlike other crimes of violence, it is not naturally

diminished by the progress of civilisation, for, after the period of

savage life is passed, its prevalence is influenced much more by the

sensuality than by the barbarity of a people.(22) We may trace too, in

many countries and ages, the notion that children, as the fruit,

representatives, and dearest possessions of their parents, are acceptable

sacrifices to the gods.(23) Infanticide, as is well known, was almost

universally admitted among the Greeks, being sanctioned, and in some cases

enjoined, upon what we should now call “the greatest happiness principle,”

by the ideal legislations of Plato and Aristotle, and by the actual

legislations of Lycurgus and Solon. Regarding the community as a whole,

they clearly saw that it is in the highest degree for the interest of

society that the increase of population should be very jealously

restricted, and that the State should be as far as possible free from

helpless and unproductive members; and they therefore concluded that the

painless destruction of infant life, and especially of those infants who

were so deformed or diseased that their lives, if prolonged, would

probably have been a burden to themselves, was on the whole a benefit. The

very sensual tone of Greek life rendered the modern notion of prolonged

continence wholly alien to their thoughts; and the extremely low social

and intellectual condition of Greek mothers, who exercised no appreciable

influence over the habits of thought of the nation should also, I think,

be taken into account, for it has always been observed that mothers are

much more distinguished than fathers for their affection for infants that

have not yet manifested the first dawning of reason. Even in Greece,

however, infanticide and exposition were not universally permitted. In

Thebes these offences are said to have been punished by death.(24)

The power of life and death, which in Rome was originally conceded to the

father over his children, would appear to involve an unlimited permission

of infanticide; but a very old law, popularly ascribed to Romulus, in this

respect restricted the parental rights, enjoining the father to bring up

all his male children, and at least his eldest female child, forbidding

him to destroy any well-formed child till it had completed its third year,

when the affections of the parent might be supposed to be developed, but

permitting the exposition of deformed or maimed children with the consent

of their five nearest relations.(25) The Roman policy was always to

encourage, while the Greek policy was rather to restrain, population, and

infanticide never appears to have been common in Rome till the corrupt and

sensual days of the Empire. The legislators then absolutely condemned it,

and it was indirectly discouraged by laws which accorded special

privileges to the fathers of many children, exempted poor parents from

most of the burden of taxation, and in some degree provided for the

security of exposed infants. Public opinion probably differed little from

that of our own day as to the fact, though it differed from it much as to

the degree, of its criminality. It was, as will be remembered, one of the

charges most frequently brought against the Christians, and it was one

that never failed to arouse popular indignation. Pagan and Christian

authorities are, however, united in speaking of infanticide as a crying

vice of the Empire, and Tertullian observed that no laws were more easily

or more constantly evaded than those which condemned it.(26) A broad

distinction was popularly drawn between infanticide and exposition. The

latter, though probably condemned, was certainly not punished by law;(27)

it was practised on a gigantic scale and with absolute impunity, noticed

by writers with the most frigid indifference, and, at least in the case of

destitute parents, considered a very venial offence.(28) Often, no doubt,

the exposed children perished, but more frequently the very extent of the

practice saved the lives of the victims. They were brought systematically

to a column near the Velabrum, and there taken by speculators, who

educated them as slaves, or very frequently as prostitutes.(29)

On the whole, what was demanded on this subject was not any clearer moral

teaching, but rather a stronger enforcement of the condemnation long since

passed upon infanticide, and an increased protection for exposed infants.

By the penitential sentences, by the dogmatic considerations I have

enumerated, and by the earnest exhortations both of her preachers and

writers, the Church laboured to deepen the sense of the enormity of the

act, and especially to convince men that the guilt of abandoning their

children to the precarious and doubtful mercy of the stranger was scarcely

less than that of simple infanticide.(30) In the civil law her influence

was also displayed, though not, I think, very advantageously. By the

counsel, it is said, of Lactantius, Constantine, in the very year of his

conversion, in order to diminish infanticide by destitute parents, issued

a decree, applicable in the first instance to Italy, but extended in A.D.

322 to Africa, in which he commanded that those children whom their

parents were unable to support should be clothed and fed at the expense of

the State,(31) a policy which had already been pursued on a large scale

under the Antonines. In A.D. 331, a law intended to multiply the chances

of the exposed child being taken charge of by some charitable or

interested person, provided that the foundling should remain the absolute

property of its saviour, whether he adopted it as a son or employed it as

a slave, and that the parent should not have power at any future time to

reclaim it.(32) By another law, which had been issued in A.D. 329, it had

been provided that children who had been, not exposed, but sold, might be

reclaimed upon payment by the father.(33)

The last two laws cannot be regarded with unmingled satisfaction. The law

regulating the condition of exposed children, though undoubtedly enacted

with the most benevolent intentions, was in some degree a retrograde step,

the Pagan laws having provided that the father might always withdraw the

child he had exposed, from servitude, by payment of the expenses incurred

in supporting it,(34) while Trajan had even decided that the exposed child

could not become under any circumstance a slave.(35) The law of

Constantine, on the other hand, doomed it to an irrevocable servitude; and

this law continued in force till A.D. 529, when Justinian, reverting to

the principle of Trajan, decreed that not only the father lost all

legitimate authority over his child by exposing it, but also that the

person who had saved it could not by that act deprive it of its natural

liberty. But this law applied only to the Eastern Empire; and in part at

least of the West(36) the servitude of exposed infants continued for

centuries, and appears only to have terminated with the general extinction

of slavery in Europe. The law of Constantine concerning the sale of

children was also a step, though perhaps a necessary step, of

retrogression. A series of emperors, among whom Caracalla was conspicuous,

had denounced and endeavoured to abolish, as “shameful,” the traffic in

free children, and Diocletian had expressly and absolutely condemned

it.(37) The extreme misery, however, resulting from the civil wars under

Constantine, had rendered it necessary to authorise the old practice of

selling children in the case of absolute destitution, which, though it had

been condemned, had probably never altogether ceased. Theodosius the Great

attempted to take a step in advance, by decreeing that the children thus

sold might regain their freedom without the repayment of the

purchase-money, a temporary service being a sufficient compensation for

the purchase;(38) but this measure was repealed by Valentinian III. The

sale of children in case of great necessity, though denounced by the

Fathers,(39) continued long after the time of Theodosius, nor does any

Christian emperor appear to have enforced the humane enactment of

Diocletian.

Together with these measures for the protection of exposed children, there

were laws directly condemnatory of infanticide. This branch of the subject

is obscured by much ambiguity and controversy; but it appears most

probable that the Pagan legislation reckoned infanticide as a form of

homicide, though, being deemed less atrocious than other forms of

homicide, it was punished, not by death, but by banishment.(40) A law of

Constantine, intended principally, and perhaps exclusively, for Africa,

where the sacrifices of children to Saturn were very common, assimilated

to parricide the murder of a child by its father;(41) and finally,

Valentinian, in A.D. 374, made all infanticide a capital offence,(42) and

especially enjoined the punishment of exposition.(43) A law of the Spanish

Visigoths, in the seventh century, punished infanticide and abortion with

death or blindness.(44) In the Capitularies of Charlemagne the former

crime was punished as homicide.(45)

It is not possible to ascertain, with any degree of accuracy, what

diminution of infanticide resulted from these measures. It may, however,

be safely asserted that the publicity of the trade in exposed children

became impossible under the influence of Christianity, and that the sense

of the serious nature of the crime was very considerably increased. The

extreme destitution, which was one of its most fertile causes, was met by

Christian charity. Many exposed children appear to have been educated by

individual Christians.(46) Brephotrophia and Orphanotrophia are among the

earliest recorded charitable institutions of the Church; but it is not

certain that exposed children were admitted into them, and we find no

trace for several centuries of Christian foundling hospitals. This form of

charity grew up gradually in the early part of the middle ages. It is said

that one existed at Trêves in the sixth, and at Angers in the seventh

century, and it is certain that one existed at Milan in the eighth

century.(47) The Council of Rouen, in the ninth century, invited women who

had secretly borne children to place them at the door of the church, and

undertook to provide for them if they were not reclaimed. It is probable

that they were brought up among the numerous slaves or serfs attached to

the ecclesiastical properties; for a decree of the Council of Arles, in

the fifth century, and afterwards a law of Charlemagne, had echoed the

enactment of Constantine, declaring that exposed children should be the

slaves of their protectors. As slavery declined, the memorials of many

sins, like many other of the discordant elements of mediæval society, were

doubtless absorbed and consecrated in the monastic societies. The strong

sense always evinced in the Church of the enormity of unchastity probably

rendered the ecclesiastics more cautious in this than in other forms of

charity, for institutions especially intended for deserted children

advanced but slowly. Even Rome, the mother of many charities, could boast

of none till the beginning of the thirteenth century.(48) About the middle

of the twelfth century we find societies at Milan charged, among other

functions, with seeking for exposed children. Towards the close of the

same century, a monk of Montpellier, whose very name is doubtful, but who

is commonly spoken of as Brother Guy, founded a confraternity called by

the name of the Holy Ghost, and devoted to the protection and education of

children; and this society in the two following centuries ramified over a

great part of Europe.(49) Though principally and at first, perhaps,

exclusively intended for the care of the orphans of legitimate marriages,

though in the fifteenth century the Hospital of the Holy Ghost at Paris

even refused to admit deserted children, yet the care of foundlings soon

passed in a great measure into its hands. At last, after many complaints

of the frequency of infanticide, St. Vincent de Paul arose, and gave so

great an impulse to that branch of charity that he may be regarded as its

second author, and his influence was felt not only in private charities,

but in legislative enactments. Into the effects of these measures—the

encouragement of the vice of incontinence by institutions that were

designed to suppress the crime of infanticide, and the serious moral

controversies suggested by this apparent conflict between the interests of

humanity and of chastity—it is not necessary for me to enter. We are at

present concerned with the principles that actuated Christian charity, not

with the wisdom of its organisations. Whatever mistakes may have been

made, the entire movement I have traced displays an anxiety not only for

the life, but also for the moral well-being, of the castaways of society,

such as the most humane nations of antiquity had never reached. This

minute and scrupulous care for human life and human virtue in the humblest

forms, in the slave, the gladiator, the savage, or the infant, was indeed

wholly foreign to the genius of Paganism. It was produced by the Christian

doctrine of the inestimable value of each immortal soul. It is the

distinguishing and transcendent characteristic of every society into which

the spirit of Christianity has passed.

The influence of Christianity in the protection of infant life, though

very real, may be, and I think often has been, exaggerated. It would be

difficult to overrate its influence in the sphere we have next to examine.

There is scarcely any other single reform so important in the moral

history of mankind as the suppression of the gladiatorial shows, and this

feat must be almost exclusively ascribed to the Christian Church. When we

remember how extremely few of the best and greatest men of the Roman world

had absolutely condemned the games of the amphitheatre, it is impossible

to regard, without the deepest admiration, the unwavering and

uncompromising consistency of the patristic denunciations. And even

comparing the Fathers with the most enlightened Pagan moralists in their

treatment of this matter, we shall usually find one most significant

difference. The Pagan, in the spirit of philosophy, denounced these games

as inhuman, or demoralising, or degrading, or brutal. The Christian, in

the spirit of the Church, represented them as a definite sin, the sin of

murder, for which the spectators as well as the actors were directly

responsible before Heaven. In the very latest days of the Pagan Empire,

magnificent amphitheatres were still arising,(50) and Constantine himself

had condemned numerous barbarian captives to combat with wild beasts.(51)

It was in A.D. 325, immediately after the convocation of the Council of

Nice, that the first Christian emperor issued the first edict in the Roman

Empire condemnatory of the gladiatorial games.(52) It was issued in

Berytus in Syria, and is believed by some to have been only applicable to

the province of Phœnicia;(53) but even in this province it was suffered to

be inoperative, for, only four years later, Libanius speaks of the shows

as habitually celebrated at Antioch.(54) In the Western Empire their

continuance was fully recognised, though a few infinitesimal restrictions

were imposed upon them. Constantine, in A.D. 357, prohibited the lanistæ,

or purveyors of gladiators, from bribing servants of the palace to enrol

themselves as combatants.(55) Valentinian, in A.D. 365, forbade any

Christian criminal,(56) and in A.D. 367, any one connected with the

Palatine,(57) being condemned to fight. Honorius prohibited any slave who

had been a gladiator passing into the service of a senator; but the real

object of this last measure was, I imagine, not so much to stigmatise the

gladiator, as to guard against the danger of an armed nobility.(58) A much

more important fact is that the spectacles were never introduced into the

new capital of Constantine. At Rome, though they became less numerous,

they do not appear to have been suspended until their final suppression.

The passion for gladiators was the worst, while religious liberty was

probably the best, feature of the old Pagan society; and it is a

melancholy fact that of these two it was the nobler part that in the

Christian Empire was first destroyed. Theodosius the Great, who suppressed

all diversity of worship throughout the Empire, and who showed himself on

many occasions the docile slave of the clergy, won the applause of the

Pagan Symmachus by compelling his barbarian prisoners to fight as

gladiators.(59) Besides this occasion, we have special knowledge of

gladiatorial games that were celebrated in A.D. 385, in A.D. 391, and

afterwards in the reign of Honorius, and the practice of condemning

criminals to the arena still continued.(60)

But although the suppression of the gladiatorial shows was not effected in

the metropolis of the Empire till nearly ninety years after Christianity

had been the State religion, the distinction between the teaching of the

Christians and Pagans on the subject remained unimpaired. To the last, the

most estimable of the Pagans appear to have regarded them with favour or

indifference. Julian, it is true, with a rare magnanimity, refused

persistently, in his conflict with Christianity, to avail himself, as he

might most easily have done, of the popular passion for games which the

Church condemned; but Libanius has noticed them with some approbation,(61)

and Symmachus, as we have already seen, both instituted and applauded

them. But the Christians steadily refused to admit any professional

gladiator to baptism till he had pledged himself to abandon his calling,

and every Christian who attended the games was excluded from communion.

The preachers and writers of the Church denounced them with the most

unqualified vehemence, and the poet Prudentius made a direct and earnest

appeal to the emperor to suppress them. In the East, where they had never

taken very firm root, they appear to have ceased about the time of

Theodosius, and a passion for chariot races, which rose to the most

extravagant height at Constantinople and in many other cities, took their

place. In the West, the last gladiatorial show was celebrated at Rome,

under Honorius, in A.D. 404, in honour of the triumph of Stilicho, when an

Asiatic monk, named Telemachus, animated by the noblest heroism of

philanthropy, rushed into the amphitheatre, and attempted to part the

combatants. He perished beneath a shower of stones flung by the angry

spectators; but his death led to the final abolition of the games.(62)

Combats of men with wild beasts continued, however, much later, and were

especially popular in the East. The difficulty of procuring wild animals,

amid the general poverty, contributed, with other causes, to their

decline. They sank, at last, into games of cruelty to animals, but of

little danger to men, and were finally condemned, at the end of the

seventh century, by the Council of Trullo.(63) In Italy, the custom of

sham fights, which continued through the whole of the middle ages, and

which Petrarch declares were in his days sometimes attended with

considerable bloodshed, may perhaps be traced in some degree to the

traditions of the amphitheatre.(64)

The extinction of the gladiatorial spectacles is, of all the results of

early Christian influence, that upon which the historian can look with the

deepest and most unmingled satisfaction. Horrible as was the bloodshed

they directly caused, these games were perhaps still more pernicious on

account of the callousness of feeling they diffused through all classes,

the fatal obstacle they presented to any general elevation of the standard

of humanity. Yet the attitude of the Pagans decisively proves that no

progress of philosophy or social civilisation was likely, for a very long

period, to have extirpated them; and it can hardly be doubted that, had

they been flourishing unchallenged as in the days of Trajan, when the rude

warriors of the North obtained the empire of Italy, they would have been

eagerly adopted by the conquerors, would have taken deep root in mediæval

life, and have indefinitely retarded the progress of humanity.

Christianity alone was powerful enough to tear this evil plant from the

Roman soil. The Christian custom of legacies for the relief of the

indigent and suffering replaced the Pagan custom of bequeathing sums of

money for games in honour of the dead; and the month of December, which

was looked forward to with eagerness through all the Roman world, as the

special season of the gladiatorial spectacles, was consecrated in the

Church by another festival commemorative of the advent of Christ.

The notion of the sanctity of human life, which led the early Christians

to combat and at last to overthrow the gladiatorial games, was carried by

some of them to an extent altogether irreconcilable with national

independence, and with the prevailing penal system. Many of them taught

that no Christian might lawfully take away life, either as a soldier, or

by bringing a capital charge, or by acting as an executioner. The first of

these questions it will be convenient to reserve for a later period of

this chapter, when I propose to examine the relations of Christianity to

the military spirit, and a very few words will be sufficient to dispose of

the others. The notion that there is something impure and defiling, even

in a just execution, is one which may be traced through many ages; and

executioners, as the ministers of the law, have been from very ancient

times regarded as unholy. In both Greece and Rome the law compelled them

to live outside the walls, and at Rhodes they were never permitted even to

enter the city.(65) Notions of this kind were very strongly held in the

early Church; and a decree of the penitential discipline which was

enforced, even against emperors and generals, forbade any one whose hands

had been imbrued in blood, even when that blood was shed in a righteous

war, approaching the altar without a preparatory period of penance. The

opinions of the Christians of the first three centuries were usually

formed without any regard to the necessities of civil or political life;

but when the Church obtained an ascendancy, it was found necessary

speedily to modify them; and although Lactantius, in the fourth century,

maintained the unlawfulness of all bloodshed,(66) as strongly as Origen in

the third, and Tertullian in the second, the common doctrine was simply

that no priest or bishop must take any part in a capital charge. From this

exceptional position of the clergy they speedily acquired the position of

official intercessors for criminals, ambassadors of mercy, when, from some

act of sedition or other cause, their city or neighbourhood was menaced

with a bloody invasion. The right of sanctuary, which was before possessed

by the Imperial statues and by the Pagan temples, was accorded to the

churches. During the holy seasons of Lent and Easter, no criminal trials

could be held, and no criminal could be tortured or executed.(67)

Miracles, it was said, were sometimes wrought to attest the innocence of

accused or condemned men, but were never wrought to consign criminals to

execution by the civil power.(68)

All this had an importance much beyond its immediate effect in tempering

the administration of the law. It contributed largely to associate in the

popular imagination the ideas of sanctity and of mercy, and to increase

the reverence for human life. It had also another remarkable effect, to

which I have adverted in another work. The belief that it was wrong for a

priest to bring any charge that could give rise to a capital sentence

caused the leading clergy to shrink from persecuting heresy to death, at a

time when in all other respects the theory of persecution had been fully

matured. When it was readily admitted that heresy was in the highest

degree criminal, and ought to be made penal, when laws banishing, fining,

or imprisoning heretics filled the statute-book, and when every vestige of

religious liberty was suppressed at the instigation of the clergy, these

still shrank from the last and inevitable step, not because it was an

atrocious violation of the rights of conscience, but because it was

contrary to the ecclesiastical discipline for a bishop, under any

circumstances, to countenance bloodshed. It was on this ground that St.

Augustine, while eagerly advocating the persecution of the Donatists, more

than once expressed a wish that they should not be punished with death,

and that St. Ambrose, and St. Martin of Tours, who were both energetic

persecutors, expressed their abhorrence of the Spanish bishops, who had

caused some Priscillianists to be executed. I have elsewhere noticed the

odious hypocrisy of the later inquisitors, who relegated the execution of

the sentence to the civil power, with a prayer that the heretics should be

punished “as mildly as possible and without the effusion of blood,”(69)

which came at last to be interpreted, by the death of fire; but I may here

add, that this hideous mockery is not unique in the history of religion.

Plutarch suggests that one of the reasons for burying unchaste vestals

alive was that they were so sacred that it was unlawful to lay violent

hands upon them,(70) and among the Donatists the Circumcelliones were for

a time accustomed to abstain, in obedience to the evangelical command,

from the use of the sword, while they beat to death those who differed

from their theological opinions with massive clubs, to which they gave the

very significant name of Israelites.(71)

The time came when the Christian priests shed blood enough. The extreme

scrupulosity, however, which they at first displayed, is not only

exceedingly curious when contrasted with their later history; it was also,

by the association of ideas which it promoted, very favourable to

humanity. It is remarkable, however, that while some of the early Fathers

were the undoubted precursors of Beccaria, their teaching, unlike that of

the philosophers in the eighteenth century, had little or no appreciable

influence in mitigating the severity of the penal code. Indeed, the more

carefully the Christian legislation of the Empire is examined, and the

more fully it is compared with what had been done under the influence of

Stoicism by the Pagan legislators, the more evident, I think, it will

appear that the golden age of Roman law was not Christian, but Pagan.

Great works of codification were accomplished under the younger

Theodosius, and under Justinian; but it was in the reign of Pagan

emperors, and especially of Hadrian and Alexander Severus, that nearly all

the most important measures were taken, redressing injustices, elevating

oppressed classes, and making the doctrine of the natural equality and

fraternity of mankind the basis of legal enactments. Receiving the

heritage of these laws, the Christians, no doubt, added something; but a

careful examination will show that it was surprisingly little. In no

respect is the greatness of the Stoic philosophers more conspicuous than

in the contrast between the gigantic steps of legal reform made in a few

years under their influence, and the almost insignificant steps taken when

Christianity had obtained an ascendancy in the Empire, not to speak of the

long period of decrepitude that followed. In the way of mitigating the

severity of punishments, Constantine made, it is true, three important

laws prohibiting the custom of branding criminals upon the face, the

condemnation of criminals as gladiators, and the continuance of the once

degrading but now sacred punishment of crucifixion, which had been very

commonly employed; but these measures were more than counterbalanced by

the extreme severity with which the Christian emperors punished

infanticide, adultery, seduction, rape, and several other crimes, and the

number of capital offences became considerably greater than before.(72)

The most prominent evidence, indeed, of ecclesiastical influence in the

Theodosian code is that which must be most lamented. It is the immense

mass of legislation, intended on the one hand to elevate the clergy into a

separate and sacred caste, and on the other to persecute in every form,

and with every degree of violence, all who deviated from the fine line of

Catholic orthodoxy.(73)

The last consequence of the Christian estimate of human life was a very

emphatic condemnation of suicide. We have already seen that the arguments

of the Pagan moralists, who were opposed to this act, were of four kinds.

The religious argument of Pythagoras and Plato was, that we are all

soldiers of God, placed in an appointed post of duty, which it is a

rebellion against our Maker to desert. The civic argument of Aristotle and

the Greek legislators was that we owe our services to the State, and that

therefore voluntarily to abandon life is to abandon our duty to our

country. The argument which Plutarch and other writers derived from human

dignity was that true courage is shown in the manful endurance of

suffering, while suicide, being an act of flight, is an act of cowardice,

and therefore unworthy of man. The mystical or Quietist argument of the

Neoplatonists was that all perturbation is a pollution of the soul; that

the act of suicide is accompanied by, and springs from, perturbation, and

that therefore the perpetrator ends his days by a crime. Of these four

arguments, the last cannot, I think, be said to have had any place among

the Christian dissuasives from suicide, and the influence of the second

was almost imperceptible. The notion of patriotism being a moral duty was

habitually discouraged in the early Church; and it was impossible to urge

the civic argument against suicide without at the same time condemning the

hermit life, which in the third century became the ideal of the Church.

The duty a man owes to his family, which a modern moralist would deem the

most obvious and, perhaps, the most conclusive proof of the general

criminality of suicide, and which may be said to have replaced the civic

argument, was scarcely noticed either by the Pagans or the early

Christians. The first were accustomed to lay so much stress upon the

authority, that they scarcely recognised the duties, of the father; and

the latter were too anxious to attach all their ethics to the interests of

another world, to do much to supply the omission. The Christian estimate

of the duty of humility, and of the degradation of man, rendered appeals

to human dignity somewhat uncongenial to the patristic writers; yet these

writers frequently dilated upon the true courage of patience, in language

to which their own heroism under persecution gave a noble emphasis. To the

example of Cato they opposed those of Regulus and Job, the courage that

endures suffering to the courage that confronts death. The Platonic

doctrine, that we are servants of the Deity, placed upon earth to perform

our allotted task in His sight, with His assistance, and by His will, they

continually enforced and most deeply realised; and this doctrine was in

itself, in most cases, a sufficient preventive; for, as a great writer has

said: “Though there are many crimes of a deeper dye than suicide, there is

no other by which men appear so formally to renounce the protection of

God.”(74)

But, in addition to this general teaching, the Christian theologians

introduced into the sphere we are considering new elements both of

terrorism and of persuasion, which have had a decisive influence upon the

judgments of mankind. They carried their doctrine of the sanctity of human

life to such a point that they maintained dogmatically that a man who

destroys his own life has committed a crime similar both in kind and

magnitude to that of an ordinary murderer,(75) and they at the same time

gave a new character to death by their doctrines concerning its penal

nature and concerning the future destinies of the soul. On the other hand,

the high position assigned to resignation in the moral scale, the hope of

future happiness, which casts a ray of light upon the darkest calamities

of life, the deeper and more subtle consolations arising from the feeling

of trust and from the outpouring of prayer, and, above all, the Christian

doctrine of the remedial and providential character of suffering, have

proved sufficient protection against despair. The Christian doctrine, that

pain is a good, had in this respect an influence that was never attained

by the Pagan doctrine, that pain is not an evil.

There were, however, two forms of suicide which were regarded in the early

Church with some tolerance or hesitation. During the frenzy excited by

persecution, and under the influence of the belief that martyrdom effaced

in a moment the sins of a life, and introduced the sufferer at once into

celestial joys, it was not uncommon for men, in a transport of enthusiasm,

to rush before the Pagan judges, imploring or provoking martyrdom; and

some of the ecclesiastical writers have spoken of these men with

considerable admiration,(76) though the general tone of the patristic

writings and the councils of the Church condemned them. A more serious

difficulty arose about Christian women who committed suicide to guard

their chastity when menaced by the infamous sentences of their

persecutors, or more frequently by the lust of emperors, or by barbarian

invaders. St. Pelagia, a girl of only fifteen, who has been canonised by

the Church, and who was warmly eulogised by St. Ambrose and St.

Chrysostom, having been captured by the soldiery, obtained permission to

retire to her room for the purpose of robing herself, mounted to the roof

of the house, and, flinging herself down, perished by the fall.(77) A

Christian lady of Antioch, named Domnina, had two daughters renowned alike

for their beauty and their piety. Being captured during the Diocletian

persecution, and fearing the loss of their chastity, they agreed by one

bold act to free themselves from the danger, and, casting themselves into

a river by the way, mother and daughters sank unsullied in the wave.(78)

The tyrant Maxentius was fascinated by the beauty of a Christian lady, the

wife of the Prefect of Rome. Having sought in vain to elude his addresses,

having been dragged from her house by the minions of the tyrant, the

faithful wife obtained permission, before yielding to her master’s

embraces, to retire for a moment into her chamber, and she there, with

true Roman courage, stabbed herself to the heart.(79) Some Protestant

controversialists have been scandalised,(80) and some Catholic

controversialists perplexed, by the undisguised admiration with which the

early ecclesiastical writers narrate these histories. To those who have

not suffered theological opinions to destroy all their natural sense of

nobility it will need no defence.

This was the only form of avowed suicide which was in any degree permitted

in the early Church. St. Ambrose rather timidly, and St. Jerome more

strongly, commended it; but at the time when the capture of Rome by the

soldiers of Alaric made the question one of pressing interest, St.

Augustine devoted an elaborate examination to the subject, and while

expressing his pitying admiration for the virgin suicides, decidedly

condemned their act.(81) His opinion of the absolute sinfulness of suicide

has since been generally adopted by the Catholic theologians, who pretend

that Pelagia and Domnina acted under the impulse of a special

revelation.(82) At the same time, by a glaring though very natural

inconsistency, no characters were more enthusiastically extolled than

those anchorites who habitually deprived their bodies of the sustenance

that was absolutely necessary to health, and thus manifestly abridged

their lives. St. Jerome has preserved a curious illustration of the

feeling with which these slow suicides were regarded by the outer world,

in his account of the life and death of a young nun named Blesilla. This

lady had been guilty of what, according to the religious notions of the

fourth century, was, at least, the frivolity of marrying, but was left a

widow seven months afterwards, having thus “lost at once the crown of

virginity and the pleasure of marriage.”(83) An attack of illness inspired

her with strong religious feelings. At the age of twenty she retired to a

convent. She attained such a height of devotion that, according to the

very characteristic eulogy of her biographer, “she was more sorry for the

loss of her virginity than for the decease of her husband;”(84) and a long

succession of atrocious penances preceded, if they did not produce, her

death.(85) The conviction that she had been killed by fasting, and the

spectacle of the uncontrollable grief of her mother, filled the populace

with indignation, and the funeral was disturbed by tumultuous cries that

the “accursed race of monks should be banished from the city, stoned, or

drowned.”(86) In the Church itself, however, we find very few traces of

any condemnation of the custom of undermining the constitution by

austerities,(87) and if we may believe but a small part of what is related

of the habits of the early and mediæval monks, great numbers of them must

have thus shortened their days. There is a touching story told by St.

Bonaventura, of St. Francis Assisi, who was one of these victims to

asceticism. As the dying saint sank back exhausted with spitting blood, he

avowed, as he looked upon his emaciated body, that “he had sinned against

his brother, the ass;” and then, the feeling of his mind taking, as was

usual with him, the form of an hallucination, he imagined that, when at

prayer during the night, he heard a voice saying: “Francis, there is no

sinner in the world whom, if he be converted, God will not pardon; but he

who kills himself by hard penances will find no mercy in eternity.” He

attributed the voice to the devil.(88)

Direct and deliberate suicide, which occupies so prominent a place in the

moral history of antiquity, almost absolutely disappeared within the

Church; but beyond its pale the Circumcelliones, in the fourth century,

constituted themselves the apostles of death, and not only carried to the

highest point the custom of provoking martyrdom, by challenging and

insulting the assemblies of the Pagans, but even killed themselves in

great numbers, imagining, it would seem, that this was a form of

martyrdom, and would secure for them eternal salvation. Assembling in

hundreds, St. Augustine says even in thousands, they leaped with paroxysms

of frantic joy from the brows of overhanging cliffs, till the rocks below

were reddened with their blood.(89) At a much later period, we find among

the Albigenses a practice, known by the name of Endura, of accelerating

death, in the case of dangerous illness, by fasting, and sometimes by

bleeding.(90) The wretched Jews, stung to madness by the persecution of

the Catholics, furnish the most numerous examples of suicide during the

middle ages. A multitude perished by their own hands, to avoid torture, in

France, in 1095; five hundred, it is said, on a single occasion at York;

five hundred in 1320, when besieged by the Shepherds. The old Pagan

legislation on this subject remained unaltered in the Theodosian and

Justinian codes; but a Council of Arles, in the fifth century, having

pronounced suicide to be the effect of diabolical inspiration, a Council

of Bragues, in the following century, ordained that no religious rites

should be celebrated at the tomb of the culprit, and that no masses should

be said for his soul; and these provisions, which were repeated by later

Councils, were gradually introduced into the laws of the barbarians and of

Charlemagne. St. Lewis originated the custom of confiscating the property

of the dead man, and the corpse was soon subjected to gross and various

outrages. In some countries it could only be removed from the house

through a perforation specially made for the occasion in the wall; it was

dragged upon a hurdle through the streets, hung up with the head

downwards, and at last thrown into the public sewer, or burnt, or buried

in the sand below high-water mark, or transfixed by a stake on the public

highway.(91)

These singularly hideous and at the same time grotesque customs, and also

the extreme injustice of reducing to beggary the unhappy relations of the

dead, had the very natural effect of exciting, in the eighteenth century,

a strong spirit of reaction. Suicide is indeed one of those acts which may

be condemned by moralists as a sin, but which, in modern times at least,

cannot be regarded as within the legitimate sphere of law; for a society

which accords to its members perfect liberty of emigration, cannot

reasonably pronounce the simple renunciation of life to be an offence

against itself. When, however, Beccaria and his followers went further,

and maintained that the mediæval laws on the subject were as impotent as

they were revolting, they fell, I think, into serious error. The outrages

lavished upon the corpse of the suicide, though in the first instance an

expression of the popular horror of his act, contributed, by the

associations they formed, to strengthen the feeling that produced them,

and they were also peculiarly fitted to scare the diseased, excited, and

oversensitive imaginations that are most prone to suicide. In the rare

occasions when the act was deliberately contemplated, the knowledge that

religious, legislative, and social influences would combine to aggravate

to the utmost the agony of the surviving relatives, must have had great

weight. The activity of the Legislature shows the continuance of the act;

but we have every reason to believe that within the pale of Catholicism it

was for many centuries extremely rare. It is said to have been somewhat

prevalent in Spain in the last and most corrupt period of the Gothic

kingdom,(92) and many instances occurred during a great pestilence which

raged in England in the seventh century,(93) and also during the Black

Death of the fourteenth century.(94) When the wives of priests were

separated in vast numbers from their husbands by Hildebrand, and driven

into the world blasted, heart-broken, and hopeless, not a few of them

shortened their agony by suicide.(95) Among women it was in general

especially rare; and a learned historian of suicide has even asserted that

a Spanish lady, who, being separated from her husband, and finding herself

unable to resist the energy of her passions, killed herself rather than

yield to temptation, is the only instance of female suicide during several

centuries.(96) In the romances of chivalry, however, this mode of death is

frequently pourtrayed without horror,(97) and its criminality was

discussed at considerable length by Abelard and St. Thomas Aquinas, while

Dante has devoted some fine lines to painting the condition of suicides in

hell, where they are also frequently represented in the bas-reliefs of

cathedrals. A melancholy leading to desperation, and known to theologians

under the name of “acedia,” was not uncommon in monasteries, and most of

the recorded instances of mediæval suicides in Catholicism were by monks.

The frequent suicides of monks, sometimes to escape the world, sometimes

through despair at their inability to quell the propensities of the body,

sometimes through insanity produced by their mode of life, and by their

dread of surrounding demons, were noticed in the early Church,(98) and a

few examples have been gleaned, from the mediæval chronicles,(99) of

suicides produced by the bitterness of hopeless love, or by the

derangement that follows extreme austerity. These are, however, but few;

and it is probable that the monasteries, by providing a refuge for the

disappointed and the broken-hearted, have prevented more suicides than

they have caused, and that, during the whole period of Catholic

ascendancy, the act was more rare than before or after. The influence of

Catholicism was seconded by Mohammedanism, which, on this as on many other

points, borrowed its teaching from the Christian Church, and even

intensified it; for suicide, which is never expressly condemned in the

Bible, is more than once forbidden in the Koran, and the Christian duty of

resignation was exaggerated by the Moslem into a complete fatalism. Under

the empire of Catholicism and Mohammedanism, suicide, during many

centuries, almost absolutely ceased in all the civilised, active, and

progressive part of mankind. When we recollect how warmly it was

applauded, or how faintly it was condemned, in the civilisation of Greece

and Rome; when we remember, too, that there was scarcely a barbarous

tribe, from Denmark to Spain, who did not habitually practise it,(100) we

may realise the complete revolution which was effected in this sphere by

the influence of Christianity.

A few words may be added on the later phases of this mournful history. The

Reformation does not seem to have had any immediate effect in multiplying

suicide, for Protestants and Catholics held with equal intensity the

religious sentiments which are most fitted to prevent it, and in none of

the persecutions was impatience of life largely displayed. The history at

this period passes chiefly into the new world, where the unhappy Indians,

reduced to slavery, and treated with atrocious cruelty by their

conquerors, killed themselves in great numbers; till the Spaniards, it is

said, discovered an ingenious method of deterring them, by declaring that

the master also would commit suicide, and would pursue his victims into

the world of spirits.(101) In Europe the act was very common among the

witches, who underwent all the sufferings with none of the consolations of

martyrdom. Without enthusiasm, without hope, without even the

consciousness of innocence, decrepit in body, and distracted in mind,

compelled in this world to endure tortures, before which the most

impassioned heroism might quail, and doomed, as they often believed, to

eternal damnation in the next, they not unfrequently killed themselves in

the agony of their despair. A French judge named Remy tells us that he

knew no less than fifteen witches commit suicide in a single year.(102) In

these cases, fear and madness combined in urging the victims to the deed.

Epidemics of purely insane suicide have also not unfrequently occurred.

Both the women of Marseilles and the women of Lyons were afflicted with an

epidemic not unlike that which, in antiquity, had been noticed among the

girls of Miletus.(103) In that strange mania which raged in the Neapolitan

districts from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth

century, and which was attributed to the bite of the tarantula, the

patients thronged in multitudes towards the sea, and often, as the blue

waters opened to their view, they chanted a wild hymn of welcome, and

rushed with passion into the waves.(104) But together with these cases,

which belong rather to the history of medicine than to that of morals, we

find many facts exhibiting a startling increase of deliberate suicide, and

a no less startling modification of the sentiments with which it was

regarded. The revival of classical learning, and the growing custom of

regarding Greek and Roman heroes as ideals, necessarily brought the

subject into prominence. The Catholic casuists, and at a later period

philosophers of the school of Grotius and Puffendorf, began to distinguish

certain cases of legitimate suicide, such as that committed to avoid

dishonour or probable sin, or that of the soldier who fires a mine,

knowing he must inevitably perish by the explosion, or that of a condemned

person who saves himself from torture by anticipating an inevitable fate,

or that of a man who offers himself to death for his friend.(105) The

effect of the Pagan examples may frequently be detected in the last words

or writings of the suicides. Philip Strozzi, when accused of the

assassination of Alexander I. of Tuscany, killed himself through fear that

torture might extort from him revelations injurious to his friends, and he

left behind him a paper in which, among other things, he commended his

soul to God, with the prayer that, if no higher boon could be granted, he

might at least be permitted to have his place with Cato of Utica and the

other great suicides of antiquity.(106) In England, the act appears in the

seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth to have been

more common than upon the Continent,(107) and several partial or even

unqualified apologies for it were written. Sir Thomas More, in his

“Utopia,” represented the priests and magistrates of his ideal republic

permitting or even enjoining those who were afflicted with incurable

disease to kill themselves, but depriving of burial those who had done so

without authorisation.(108) Dr. Donne, the learned and pious Dean of St.

Paul’s, had in his youth written an extremely curious, subtle, and

learned, but at the same time feeble and involved, work in defence of

suicide, which on his deathbed he commanded his son neither to publish nor

destroy, and which his son published in 1644. Two or three English

suicides left behind them elaborate defences, as did also a Swede named

Robeck, who drowned himself in 1735, and whose treatise, published in the

following year, acquired considerable celebrity.(109) But the most

influential writings about suicide were those of the French philosophers

and revolutionists. Montaigne, without discussing its abstract lawfulness,

recounts, with much admiration, many of the instances in antiquity.(110)

Montesquieu, in a youthful work, defended it with ardent enthusiasm.(111)

Rousseau devoted to the subject two letters of a burning and passionate

eloquence,(112) in the first of which he presented with matchless power

the arguments in its favour, while in the second he denounced those

arguments as sophistical, dilated upon the impiety of abandoning the post

of duty, and upon the cowardice of despair, and with a deep knowledge of

the human heart revealed the selfishness that lies at the root of most

suicide, exhorting all who felt impelled to it to set about some work for

the good of others, in which they would assuredly find relief. Voltaire,

in the best-known couplet he ever wrote, defends the act on occasions of

extreme necessity.(113) Among the atheistical party it was warmly

eulogised, and Holbach and Deslandes were prominent as its defenders. The

rapid decomposition of religious opinions weakened the popular sense of

its enormity, and at the same time the humanity of the age, and also a

clearer sense of the true limits of legislation, produced a reaction

against the horrible laws on the subject. Grotius had defended them.

Montesquieu at first denounced them with unqualified energy, but in his

later years in some degree modified his opinions. Beccaria, who was, more

than any other writer, the representative of the opinions of the French

school on such matters, condemned them partly as unjust to the innocent

survivors, partly as incapable of deterring any man who was resolved upon

the act. Even in 1749, in the full blaze of the philosophic movement, we

find a suicide named Portier dragged through the streets of Paris with his

face to the ground, hung from a gallows by his feet, and then thrown into

the sewers;(114) and the laws were not abrogated till the Revolution,

which, having founded so many other forms of freedom, accorded the liberty

of death. Amid the dramatic vicissitudes, and the fierce enthusiasm of

that period of convulsions, suicides immediately multiplied. “The world,”

it was said, had been “empty since the Romans.”(115) For a brief period,

and in this one country, the action of Christianity appeared suspended.

Men seemed to be transported again into the age of Paganism, and the

suicides, though more theatrical, were perpetrated with no less

deliberation, and eulogised with no less enthusiasm, than among the

Stoics. But the tide of revolution passed away, and with some

qualifications the old opinions resumed their authority. The laws against

suicide were, indeed, for the most part abolished. In France and several

other lands there exists no legislation on the subject. In other countries

the law simply enjoins burial without religious ceremonies. In England,

the burial in a highway and the mutilation by a stake were abolished under

George IV.; but the monstrous injustice of confiscating to the Crown the

entire property of the deliberate suicide still disgraces the

statute-book, though the force of public opinion and the charitable

perjury of juries render it inoperative.

The common sentiment of Christendom has, however, ratified the judgment

which the Christian teachers pronounced upon the act, though it has

somewhat modified the severity of the old censure, and has abandoned some

of the old arguments. It was reserved for Madame de Staël, who, in a

youthful work upon the Passions, had commended suicide, to reconstruct

this department of ethics, which had been somewhat disturbed by the

Revolution, and she did so in a little treatise which is a model of calm,

candid, and philosophic piety. Frankly abandoning the old theological

notions that the deed is of the nature of murder, that it is the worst of

crimes, and that it is always, or even generally, the offspring of

cowardice; abandoning, too, all attempts to scare men by religious

terrorism, she proceeded, not so much to meet in detail the isolated

arguments of its defenders, as to sketch the ideal of a truly virtuous

man, and to show how such a character would secure men against all

temptation to suicide. In pages of the most tender beauty, she traced the

influence of suffering in softening, purifying, and deepening the

character, and showed how a frame of habitual and submissive resignation

was not only the highest duty, but also the source of the purest

consolation, and at the same time the appointed condition of moral

amelioration. Having examined in detail the Biblical aspect of the

question, she proceeded to show how the true measure of the dignity of man

is his unselfishness. She contrasted the martyr with the suicide—the death

which springs from devotion to duty with the death that springs from

rebellion against circumstances. The suicide of Cato, which had been

absurdly denounced by a crowd of ecclesiastics as an act of cowardice, and

as absurdly alleged by many suicides as a justification for flying from

pain or poverty, she represented as an act of martyrdom—a death like that

of Curtius, accepted nobly for the benefit of Rome. The eye of the good

man should be for ever fixed upon the interest of others. For them he

should be prepared to relinquish life with all its blessings. For them he

should be prepared to tolerate life, even when it seemed to him a curse.

Sentiments of this kind have, through the influence of Christianity,

thoroughly pervaded European society, and suicide, in modern times, is

almost always found to have sprung either from absolute insanity; from

diseases which, though not amounting to insanity, are yet sufficient to

discolour our judgments; or from that last excess of sorrow, when

resignation and hope are both extinct. Considering it in this light, I

know few things more fitted to qualify the optimism we so often hear than

the fact that statistics show it to be rapidly increasing, and to be

peculiarly characteristic of those nations which rank most high in

intellectual development and in general civilisation.(116) In one or two

countries, strong religious feeling has counteracted the tendency; but the

comparison of town and country, of different countries, of different

provinces of the same country, and of different periods in history, proves

conclusively its reality. Many reasons may be alleged to explain it.

Mental occupations are peculiarly fitted to produce insanity,(117) and the

blaze of publicity, which in modern time encircles an act of suicide, to

draw weak minds to its imitation. If we put the condition of absolutely

savage life, out of our calculation, it is probable that a highly

developed civilisation, while it raises the average of well-being, is

accompanied by more extreme misery and acute sufferings than the simpler

stages that had preceded it. Nomadic habits, the vast agglomeration of men

in cities, the pressure of a fierce competition, and the sudden

fluctuations to which manufactures are peculiarly liable, are the

conditions of great prosperity, but also the causes of the most profound

misery. Civilisation makes many of what once were superfluities,

necessaries of life, so that their loss inflicts a pang long after their

possession had ceased to be a pleasure. It also, by softening the

character, renders it peculiarly sensitive to pain, and it brings with it

a long train of antipathies, passions, and diseased imaginations, which

rarely or never cross the thoughts or torture the nerves of the simple

peasant. The advance of religious scepticism, and the relaxation of

religious discipline, have weakened and sometimes destroyed the horror of

suicide; and the habits of self-assertion, the eager and restless

ambitions which political liberty, intellectual activity, and

manufacturing enterprise, all in their different ways conspire to foster,

while they are the very principles and conditions of the progress of our

age, render the virtue of content in all its forms extremely rare, and are

peculiarly unpropitious to the formation of that spirit of humble and

submissive resignation which alone can mitigate the agony of hopeless

suffering.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

From examining the effect of Christianity in promoting a sense of the

sanctity of human life, we may now pass to an adjoining field, and examine

its influence in promoting a fraternal and philanthropic sentiment among

mankind. And first of all we may notice its effects upon slavery.

The reader will remember the general position this institution occupied in

the eyes of the Stoic moralists, and under the legislation which they had

in a great measure inspired. The legitimacy of slavery was fully

recognised; but Seneca and other moralists had asserted, in the very

strongest terms, the natural equality of mankind, the superficial

character of the differences between the slave and his master, and the

duty of the most scrupulous humanity to the former. Instances of a very

warm sympathy between master and slave were of frequent occurrence; but

they may unfortunately be paralleled by not a few examples of the most

atrocious cruelty. To guard against such cruelty, a long series of

enactments, based avowedly upon the Stoical principle of the essential

equality of mankind, had been made under Hadrian, the Antonines, and

Alexander Severus. Not to recapitulate at length what has been mentioned

in a former chapter, it is sufficient to remind the reader that the right

of life and death had been definitely withdrawn from the master, and that

the murder of a slave was stigmatised and punished by the law. It had,

however, been laid down, by the great lawyer Paul, that homicide implies

an intention to kill, and that therefore the master was not guilty of that

crime if his slave died under chastisement which was not administered with

this intention. But the licence of punishment which this decision might

give was checked by laws which forbade excessive cruelty to slaves,

provided that, when it was proved, they should be sold to another master,

suppressed the private prisons in which they had been immured, and

appointed special officers to receive their complaints.

In the field of legislation, for about two hundred years after the

conversion of Constantine, the progress was extremely slight. The

Christian emperors, in A.D. 319 and 326, adverted in two elaborate laws to

the subject of the murder of slaves,(118) but, beyond reiterating in very

emphatic terms the previous enactments, it is not easy to see in what way

they improved the condition of the class.(119) They provided that any

master who applied to his slave certain atrocious tortures, that are

enumerated, with the object of killing him, should be deemed a homicide,

but if the slave died under moderate punishment, or under any punishment

not intended to kill him, the master should be blameless; no charge

whatever, it was emphatically said, should be brought against him. It has

been supposed, though I think without evidence, by commentators(120) that

this law accorded immunity to the master only when the slave perished

under the application of “appropriate” or servile punishments—that is to

say, scourging, irons, or imprisonment; but the use of torture not

intended to kill was in no degree restricted, nor is there anything in the

law to make it appear either that the master was liable to punishment, if

contrary to his intention his slave succumbed beneath torture, or that

Constantine proposed any penalty for excessive cruelty which did not

result in death. It is, perhaps, not out of place to observe, that this

law was in remarkable harmony with the well-known article of the Jewish

code, which provided that if a slave, wounded to death by his master,

linger for a day or two, the master should not be punished, for the slave

was his money.(121)

The two features that were most revolting in the slave system, as it

passed from the Pagan to the Christian emperors, were the absolute want of

legal recognition of slave marriage, and the licence of torturing still

conceded to the master. The Christian emperors before Justinian took no

serious steps to remedy either of these evils, and the measures that were

taken against adultery still continued inapplicable to slave unions,

because “the vileness of their condition makes them unworthy of the

observation of the law.”(122) The abolition of the punishment of

crucifixion had, however, a special value to the slave class, and a very

merciful law of Constantine forbade the separation of the families of the

slaves.(123) Another law, which in its effects was perhaps still more

important, imparted a sacred character to manumission, ordaining that the

ceremony should be celebrated in the Church,(124) and permitting it on

Sundays. Some measures were also taken, providing for the freedom of the

Christian slaves of Jewish masters, and, in two or three cases, freedom

was offered as a bribe to slaves, to induce them to inform against

criminals. Intermarriage between the free and slave classes was still

strictly forbidden, and if a free woman had improper intercourse with her

slave, Constantine ordered that the woman should be executed and the slave

burnt alive.(125) By the Pagan law, the woman had been simply reduced to

slavery. The laws against fugitive slaves were also rendered more

severe.(126)

This legislation may on the whole be looked upon as a progress, but it

certainly does not deserve the enthusiasm which ecclesiastical writers

have sometimes bestowed upon it. For about two hundred years, there was an

almost absolute pause in the legislation on this subject. Some slight

restrictions were, however, imposed upon the use of torture in trials;

some slight additional facilities of manumission were given, and some very

atrocious enactments made to prevent slaves accusing their masters.

According to that of Gratian, any slave who accused his master of any

offence, except high treason, should immediately be burnt alive, without

any investigation of the justice of the charge.(127)

Under Justinian, however, new and very important measures were taken. In

no other sphere were the laws of this emperor so indisputably an advance

upon those of his predecessors. His measures may be comprised under three

heads. In the first place, all the restrictions upon enfranchisement which

had accumulated under the Pagan legislation were abolished; the legislator

proclaimed in emphatic language, and by the provisions of many laws, his

desire to encourage manumission, and free scope was thus given to the

action of the Church. In the second place, the freedmen, considered as an

intermediate class between the slave and the citizen, were virtually

abolished, all or nearly all the privileges accorded to the citizen being

granted to the emancipated slave. This was the most important contribution

of the Christian emperors to that great amalgamation of nations and

classes which had been advancing since the days of Augustus; and one of

its effects was, that any person, even of senatorial rank, might marry a

slave when he had first emancipated her. In the third place, a slave was

permitted to marry a free woman with the authorisation of his master, and

children born in slavery became the legal heirs of their emancipated

father. The rape of a slave woman was also in this reign punished, like

that of a free woman, by death.(128)

But, important as were these measures, it is not in the field of

legislation that we must chiefly look for the influence of Christianity

upon slavery. This influence was indeed very great, but it is necessary

carefully to define its nature. The prohibition of all slavery, which was

one of the peculiarities of the Jewish Essenes, and the illegitimacy of

hereditary slavery, which was one of the speculations of the Stoic Dion

Chrysostom, had no place in the ecclesiastical teaching. Slavery was

distinctly and formally recognised by Christianity,(129) and no religion

ever laboured more to encourage a habit of docility and passive obedience.

Much was indeed said by the Fathers about the natural equality of mankind,

about the duty of regarding slaves as brothers or companions, and about

the heinousness of cruelty to them; but all this had been said with at

least equal force, though it had not been disseminated over an equally

wide area, by Seneca and Epictetus, and the principle of the original

freedom of all men was repeatedly averred by the Pagan lawyers. The

services of Christianity in this sphere were of three kinds. It supplied a

new order of relations, in which the distinction of classes was unknown.

It imparted a moral dignity to the servile classes, and it gave an

unexampled impetus to the movement of enfranchisement.

The first of these services was effected by the Church ceremonies and the

penitential discipline. In these spheres, from which the Christian mind

derived its earliest, its deepest, and its most enduring impressions, the

difference between the master and his slave was unknown. They received the

sacred elements together, they sat side by side at the agape, they mingled

in the public prayers. In the penal system of the Church, the distinction

between wrongs done to a freeman, and wrongs done to a slave, which lay at

the very root of the whole civil legislation, was repudiated. At a time

when, by the civil law, a master, whose slave died as a consequence of

excessive scourging, was absolutely unpunished, the Council of Illiberis

excluded that master for ever from the communion.(130) The chastity of

female slaves, for the protection of which the civil law made but little

provision, was sedulously guarded by the legislation of the Church. Slave

birth, moreover, was no disqualification for entering into the priesthood;

and an emancipated slave, regarded as the dispenser of spiritual life and

death, often saw the greatest and the most wealthy kneeling humbly at his

feet imploring his absolution or his benediction.(131)

In the next place, Christianity imparted a moral dignity to the servile

class. It did this not only by associating poverty and labour with that

monastic life which was so profoundly revered, but also by introducing new

modifications into the ideal type of morals. There is no fact more

prominent in the Roman writers than the profound contempt with which they

regarded slaves, not so much on account of their position, as on account

of the character which that position had formed. A servile character was a

synonym for a vicious one. Cicero had declared that nothing great or noble

could exist in a slave, and the plays of Plautus exhibit the same estimate

in every scene. There were, it is true, some exceptions. Epictetus had not

only been, but had been recognised as one of the noblest characters of

Rome. The fidelity of slaves to their masters had been frequently

extolled, and Seneca in this, as in other respects, had been the defender

of the oppressed. Still there can be no doubt that this contempt was

general, and also that in the Pagan world it was to a great extent just.

Every age has its own moral ideal, to which all virtuous men aspire. Every

sphere of life has also a tendency to produce a distinctive type being

specially favourable to some particular class of virtues, and specially

unfavourable to others. The popular estimate, and even the real moral

condition, of each class depends chiefly upon the degree in which the type

of character its position naturally develops, coincides with the ideal

type of the age. Now, if we remember that magnanimity, self-reliance,

dignity, independence, and, in a word, elevation of character, constituted

the Roman ideal of perfection, it will appear evident that this was

preeminently the type of freemen, and that the condition of slavery was in

the very highest degree unfavourable to its development. Christianity for

the first time gave the servile virtues the foremost place in the moral

type. Humility, obedience, gentleness, patience, resignation, are all

cardinal or rudimentary virtues in the Christian character; they were all

neglected or underrated by the Pagans; they can all expand and flourish in

a servile position.