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 ' ii^xi^ii'::

 
 %^^Hi/l 
 
 SLAVERY AS AFFECTED BY CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 " Christianity never bega^ by external alterations : for these, wherever they 
 did not begin from the inward man and fix there their first and firm foundation, 
 would always have failed in their salutary designs." Neander.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Introductory Eemarks 
 Division of Subject 
 
 I. The question answered a priori 
 II. The question answered a posteriori, or historically 
 i. The Period of the Empire 
 
 Influence of Christianity on the law 
 a. The law as Christianity found it 
 j8. Changes tinder the Christian Emperors 
 y. The law as Christianity left it 
 Influence of Christianity on treatment of slaves 
 Its success 
 Its failure 
 Slavery not abolished by Christianity 
 ii. Mediffival Period 
 
 Serfdom not abolished by Christianity 
 Beneficent influence of the Church 
 
 (1) In the ti-ansition period of the Conquests — 
 
 redemption of captives 
 
 (2) In the new nations formed by the Conquests 
 
 1. The Church as a slave -holding power 
 
 sets an example 
 
 2. The Church as a spiritual power influ 
 
 ences lay proprietors 
 iii. Modern Period 
 
 Slavery reestablished in spite of Christianity 
 Influence of Christianity sliewn by the correspond 
 ence between the phases of the history of slavery 
 and the fluctuations in the life of the Church 
 In the E,eformation period 
 In the eighteenth century 
 In modern times 
 Conclusion .... 
 
 Pages 
 1—5 
 
 1 
 5—18 
 18—78 
 18—44 
 18—27 
 19—22 
 22—26 
 
 26 
 27—42 
 27—40 
 40—42 
 42—44 
 44-64 
 44—48 
 48—64 
 
 48—50 
 50—64 
 
 52—55 
 
 55—64 
 64—78 
 64—67 
 
 67—76 
 67—71 
 71—74 
 74-76 
 76—78
 
 
 "•Crti^^
 
 Christianity made its appearance in the world, be- 
 lievers and rationalists would agree, at a congenial epoch. 
 Speculation seemed vaguely to have acknowledged, or to 
 be feeling after, truths to which Christianity alone gave 
 a definite and coherent expression : the political circum- 
 stances of the time — its destructive as well as its con- 
 structive forces — the annihilation of local distinctions and 
 the wider intercourse of the nations seemed to be favour- 
 able to the recognition of the new ideas, to assist their dis- 
 semination, and to enable them to produce more practical 
 effects. To this all have agreed, because all have an 
 interest in the proof. The believer sees evidence of the 
 care with which an all-wise Providence made straight the 
 path for the new revelation : while from the same facts 
 the sceptic claims to gain a justification for his infer- 
 ence that Christianity is in no distinctive sense super- 
 natural, but merely the natural outgrowth and inevitable 
 climax of antecedent and contemporary tendencies. Hence 
 it appears from the evidence of both sides, that had Chris- 
 tianity never appeared, there were forces at work which 
 would have produced results not wholly dissimilar to those 
 which she achieved. These forces were not annihilated 
 by Christianity. They worked on side by side with her, 
 sometimes independently, sometimes showing their own 
 influence by assisting and securing acceptance for her. 
 Thus the first difficulty in a subject like the present, is 
 to discover how much is to be allotted after all fair de- 
 ductions to the action of Christianity. 
 
 B
 
 It may be added, that this difficulty is not peculiar to the 
 period at which Christianity first appeared. In later times, 
 the middle ages for instance, though she was in the field 
 from the beginning, yet other forces came into existence 
 beside her, such as those which social or economical changes 
 generated, which cannot be called in any sense Christian, 
 and whose action must be discriminated from that of 
 Christianity*. 
 
 In both cases the difficulty remains : and it is enhanced 
 in proportion as we recognize the similarity of principle 
 and plan between God's ordinary and natural, and His 
 extraordinary and supernatural dealings with mankind : 
 a similarity which in part results from the employment 
 of human instruments, but which, whatever its cause, 
 implies the liability in its degree of God's revealed reli- 
 gion to the same vicissitudes and conditions — those for 
 instance of slow progress, of alternating success and defect, 
 and of degeneracy and perversion, which beset the history 
 of uninspired systems. It works to outward appearances 
 as other influences work ; hence the increased difficulty of 
 separating its achievements from theirs. 
 
 The recognition of this truth, which perhaps we owe in 
 part to the better side of the thought of the present day, 
 will help to remove a second difficulty which occurs in an 
 inquiry like the present. It may be called a difficulty of 
 language. What in the history of Christianity is to be 
 called failure ? What success ? But obviously it is much 
 more than a mere verbal question. The reason why one 
 person will congratulate himself on the success of Christi- 
 anity where another is mourning its failure, lies in the fact 
 that the two have formed completely difierent ideals as to 
 
 » So true is this, that a late -writer (Kcv. W. Church, Sermons) thinks that 
 he discerns such a movement of society and opinion parallel with the move- 
 ment set going by Christianity, and tending towards some of its results, yet 
 ilistiuguishable from it, and dependent upon different forces.
 
 the extent in which Christianity may be expected to triumph. 
 Is she to conquer all evil and reign? or is this her future 
 and not her present destiny, while here she must be content 
 to wage a ceaseless battle against predominating forces of 
 evil, and be satisfied to hold a small part of the field of 
 battle as her own ? Were this question resolved, it would 
 be easy to deal with a special point, like that of slavery. 
 The particular case would probably correspond to the 
 general rule ; and an a priori opinion would act as inter- 
 preter to the evidence of history. As it is, it is necessary 
 to begin at the other end. The solution of the particular 
 case may throw light upon the larger and more difficult 
 problem ; and knowing what Christianity has done against 
 slavery, it will be easier to judge what has been, or is likely 
 to be, her success in the wider issues of her general struggle 
 against the manifold evil of the world. 
 
 There is no reason why we should not anticipate so far 
 as to say, that the history of slavery countenances the less 
 sanguine view, since briefly that history appears to be 
 as follows. In the first great contest, when Christianity 
 encountered the slave-institutions of the Roman Empire, it 
 failed to destroy them ; for they never were destroyed until 
 Roman society was attacked and inundated from the North. 
 In the second struggle, waged against the villeinage of the 
 middle ages, villeinage was indeed abolished : but it resisted 
 for eight centuries, and only disappeared when other causes 
 adequate to its destruction had come into existence. The 
 history of the third, in which the absolute slavery inflicted 
 on the negro and other " inferior" races is the opponent, 
 remains unfinished : it is the part of the story on which 
 Christianity looks with most pride, for abolition where it 
 has been accomplished, was the result of definite measures, 
 whose supporters have acted on christian motives. Yet 
 abolition had been delayed for three Christian centuries : 
 it was carried through at a crisis for other reasons favour- 
 
 B 2
 
 able : it would probably never have taken place, but for the 
 peculiar political position of the communities in question, 
 which enabled a distant government, not directly influenced 
 by colonial interests, to force it upon them. 
 
 Thus, if the question of abolition be taken as a test, 
 there is surely reason to abstain from rhetorical declamation 
 and too enthusiastic fancies as to the triumphs of Chris- 
 tianity. Such exaggeration is not only dangerous but 
 unnecessary. Christianity has its triumphs, but they are 
 quiet and gradual ; it cannot conquer the world : but it 
 incessantly maintains the attack ; it achieves many a victory 
 of detail ; it often asserts its conquering power in the midst 
 of defeat. Turn from the question of abolition to consider 
 how Christianity has, at different times, mitigated, allevi- 
 ated, and removed many of the harsher and more degrading 
 features of slavery, and her power and her fidelity to her 
 Divine mission become alike apparent. In this connexion 
 two points are specially noticeable. First, that upon 
 slavery at large her influence was more generally ejQfective 
 in the second, or mediasval, struggle, when her power 
 dominated, in some sense, the whole of societyV than in the i 
 first, when she had not acquired her most extensive 
 dominion ; or in the third, when she has been feebly 
 represented in the slave countries, and when a part of 
 society has again escaped from her restraints. Secondly, 
 that her attacks on the worst features of these institutions 
 were conducted by an appeal to principles whicli were 
 really hostile to the whole system ; and thus public opinion 
 was gradually trained to welcome abolition, when in due 
 time other causes made it ready. And, since a strong 
 opinion may resist any change, however much all else may 
 demand it, Christianity did in this manner no small service 
 even to the cause of abolition. 
 
 It may be well to add, parenthetically, that throughout 
 this Essay it is assumed that slavery is, in the abstract.
 
 inconsistent with the whole spirit of Christianity ; but that 
 it is not inferred that Christianity would attempt its abo- 
 lition at all times and places. This is extremely important, 
 because it follows that Chi'istianity is not always to be 
 accused of failure, when slavery is seen to remain. It is 
 impossible to fail, where there is no attempt. The proviso 
 is the more necessary, because it is difficult to avoid em- 
 ploying the language of failure. 
 
 It seems then that an account of the mitigating influences 
 of Christianity should occupy the greater part of an essay 
 on the present subject, while its contributions to the cause 
 of abolition will naturally come in for notice by implication 
 and incidentally. 
 
 Such an account falls naturally into two parts, (I) an 
 a priori treatment of the subject, containing an examination 
 of the principles of Christianity, the objects at which it 
 aimed, and the powers which it wielded in reference to 
 slavery, so far as these are common to all times and places ; 
 (II) an a posteriori treatment, which will include the special 
 circumstances which at different times increased or di- 
 minished the forces of the Church, as well as the use which 
 she made of her weapons, the extent of her successes, and 
 the reasons of her failures. This second part, being 
 historical, must be divided according to the three great 
 periods already alluded to : (i) The period of the Empire ; 
 (ii) the Middle Ages ; (iii) the era of Modern or Negro 
 Slavery. 
 
 I. The key to the relations which Christianity in the abstract 
 bears to slavery is to be found in the fact, almost surprising 
 but quite characteristic, that it contains no positive or direct 
 prohibition of slavery by Christ or His Apostles. Christians 
 of different centuries have pledged themselves to a declar- 
 ation of the absolute sinfulness of the institution at certain 
 times and in certain places — their own age, or their own 
 country. They have done so, and have been justified in
 
 6 
 
 doing so. For though Christianity is identified with no 
 political system, it must be possible that a political insti- 
 tution should reach a point of degeneracy and evil which 
 the Church, as guardian of Christian interests in its own 
 generation, can not look upon in silence. But the Founder 
 of Christianity, and his immediate followers, were in a 
 different position. They spoke to their own age, but they 
 spoke also to all times and to every nation of the future. 
 They had to lay everlasting foundations. They were in- 
 augurating a religion which was to be fit for every condition 
 in which human nature might be found. To admit any 
 directly political matter into their teaching, would have been 
 equivalent to limiting its possible sphere. Political philo- 
 sophers tell us, that to certain nations slavery may be 
 necessary ; and it is certain that in other cases states (of 
 which Rome may have been, and probably was, one) may 
 have come to a condition in which the sudden destruction 
 of their slave-institutions would be the destruction of 
 society. Had Christianity lain under the obligation which 
 the registration in her original documents of a positive 
 prohibition against slavery would have involved, she 
 must have constantly inaugurated revolutions, which would 
 have always cost her opportunities of work for more im- 
 portant objects ; and would sometimes have been actually 
 pernicious, either impossible in the existing state of 
 things, or premature, or sudden at a crisis when the gene- 
 ral good demanded that they should be gradual. She 
 would have irrevocably alienated one part of society ; she 
 would have led the other part to fix their eyes on political 
 objects, while they would have postponed any attention to 
 her spiritual teaching. The anarchy of a slave insurrection 
 is not the most promising field for the Christian missionary. 
 This would have been her history, if she had lived to see it. 
 But at the outset she would have bad to give battle to the 
 institutions of the Roman Empire, and (with reverence be
 
 it said — with reverence it may be said, since the hypothetical 
 case docs not represent the course which God's providence 
 had marked out for her — ) she must have perished in the 
 encounter. 
 
 How different was the method actually adopted at the 
 foundation of Christianity, the precepts of the New Testa- 
 ment, which regulate the conduct of the slave and of the 
 master, are enough to show. As regards the system, there 
 is not a word of approbation, or of condemnation ; it is 
 assumed to exist, and individuals are shown how to comport 
 themselves under it. In the Apostolical Constitutions a 
 revolutionary reputation is deprecated''. Similarly, when 
 the Church became dominant, the laws as to the ordination 
 of slaves are her witnesses, that she gave no encouragement 
 to anarchical or revolutionary attempts. Rather than do 
 so, she went so far as to retract the spiritual gift once 
 given. The slave ordained without his master's consent 
 was to be unfrocked. These laws occur early, and they 
 come not merely from Christian Emperors c, but from Popes^ 
 and Ecclesiastics. 
 
 The canons of the Council of Gangra in Paphlagonia 
 held about the middle of the fourth century, against the 
 Eustathians, a local sect of mystical and ascetic opinions, 
 exhibits the orthodox Church contending against the 
 anarchical teaching of the heretics. The Eustathians set 
 great value on prayer, and would have had men desert their 
 duties to spend their time in praying. The Council lays 
 an anathema upon all who in this way, " pra^textu divini 
 cultus," desert their masters. In this way Christianity 
 behaved to slavery as she has behaved to all other esta- 
 blished institutions. It was the boast of the apologists 
 
 ^ AiSdcTKecrdo} evxcipttrreiy t^ Seffirorfj, 'Iva fii] fi\a(r<prifj.TJTat b AJyos, Lib. 
 viii. c. 32. 
 = Valentinian, iii. Novell. 12. 
 ^ S. Loo. Ep. i. cap. 1. Can. Apost. in Nov. 123, §. 17.
 
 8 
 
 that the Christians were in all respects faithful subjects of 
 the laws. 
 
 But not only did Christianity not forbid slavery, she had 
 few specific rules about the treatment of slaves. Hence it 
 might seem that her influence was similar to that of the 
 philosophical schools, theoretical in the main, and only 
 incidentally practical. This would be a misleading com- 
 parison ; but to dwell for a moment upon the action of 
 philosophy upon slavery will illustrate, in more than one 
 way, the distinctive characteristics of that of Christianity. 
 Roman philosophy alone needs to be considered. Usually 
 philosophy has but a remote bearing upon practice, because 
 its doctrines are abstract, and its pupils men of speculation 
 rather than of action. In both respects the school of 
 Roman Stoicism differed from its Greek predecessors. 
 Exhausted by the variety and ill-success of previous specu- 
 lative attempts, driven in upon themselves by the jealousy 
 of a despotism which closed the avenues of a political 
 career, and stimulated by the revolting corruption of the 
 times to seek more earnestly for an antidote, men looked for 
 a spiritual director rather than an ingenious thinker ; they 
 preferred precept to theory, practical advice to soaring 
 speculation. Philosophy, deferring to their altered mood, 
 ceased to be metaphysical and transcendental, and became 
 moral. The change brought to her knees a new class of 
 pupils, and an enlarged sphere of influence. 
 
 Among the Stoics were practical men, a large section of 
 the Roman bar, statesmen, like Cicero — great nobles, who, 
 if ignorant themselves, at least conformed to the fashion 
 and kept a philosopher ; — and, in the case of Marcus 
 Aurelius, even the emperor himself. To these men, phi- 
 losophy, no longer the speculative pastime of a few, but 
 the guide and director of practical life, spoke in the 
 practical language of moral precept. Thus it was an 
 exceptional moment. In earlier times slavery had had to
 
 9 
 
 deal with less practical forms of philosophy, and had defied 
 them, or won their support. In modern Europe philosophy, 
 if political economy be excepted, has hardly exercised, if it 
 now exercises, any influence apart from Christianity. 
 
 The claim of Stoicism, therefore, to be regarded as one 
 of the forces which anticipated the action of Christianity, 
 and acted " in unconscious alliance" with it, depends upon 
 the character of the moral ideas for which, in its didactic 
 phase, it secured practical influence. These moral ideas 
 drew their life from two master-beliefs : 
 
 a. The belief in the dignity and self-dependence of 
 
 human nature. 
 /3. The belief in the equality of mankind as citizens of 
 the world. 
 
 The last has been often dwelt upon. It was the re- 
 flection upon thought of external events, of the extension 
 of Roman citizenship completed by Caracalla, and the 
 destruction by Macedonian and Roman conquests of the 
 barriers between nations. The notion of universal equality 
 was opposed to all the most cherished ideas of the ancient 
 world, their municipal, local, and corporate traditions ; and, 
 therefore, although it followed logically from the appeal 
 to Nature {<p6(rig) which the Stoics made, it was only esta- 
 blished in public opinion when circumstances enabled it to 
 appear as the mere expansion of an earlier notion. Rome 
 made it easy for people to grasp the conception of the 
 world, as a reality to which all belonged, by making her 
 own Empire and her own citizenship world-embracing. 
 This notion thus introduced became the central truth of all 
 thought and belief under the Empire : or, rather, all 
 thought caught from it its form and colour. Hence its 
 importance is not that which attaches to the assertion of a 
 single truth, however significant. It is that of a spirit 
 pervading all literature and opinion, which gives a clue to 
 the temper and tendencies of the day. The theory con-
 
 10 
 
 stantly recurring in the pages of the heathen writers passed 
 into christian thought to culminate in Augustine's City of 
 God. 
 
 Taken by itself, it shattered the old defences of slavery. 
 Beside it, the theories of inferior races, of " the natural 
 ruler," and the ** natural servant" disappeared; its influence 
 is to be seen in the change of position adopted by those who 
 were still obliged to defend slavery as a political institution, 
 namely, the lawyers. Slavery is contrary to the law of 
 nature, said Ulpian ; and his school were obliged to apologize 
 for it as the result of conquest — a barbarous theory, because 
 it condemned to slavery, according to the caprice of for- 
 tune, those whom nature least intended for it: but perhaps, 
 on that very account, ready more easily in its turn to 
 collapse. Slavery is contrary to the law of nature, repeats 
 Justinian ; and when he proceeds to derive it from the law 
 of nations, people must have been struck by the disparity 
 in a single instance of two codes otherwise perfectly har- 
 monious, and must have drawn the obvious moral. 
 
 Such were the effects of the theory by itself. The 
 philosophers gave it new influence, when they drew from 
 it an inference of moral obligation. This either took the 
 religious form : according to which, all alike were chil- 
 dren of one celestial father, a Jupiter, whom none knew, 
 yet in whom many tried vainly to believe ; and, in virtue of 
 this common tie, owe «' duties, heaven-imposed, to one 
 another : or it appeared in a strictly moral shape, according 
 to modern language, as a Philosophy of Benevolence. Men 
 were taught that they were equals, and bidden to treat each 
 •other with the courtesy and respect due to equals. They 
 were taught that they were fellow-citizens of the common- 
 wealth of the world, and therefore owed duties and mutual 
 assistance to one another. 
 
 The last-mentioned theory lowered the individual. It 
 set all men on an equal level ; each man might seem lost
 
 11 
 
 among the many. But such a tendency was counteracted 
 by the other great doctrine of the Stoics, which asserted the 
 need of self-dependence and self-respect. Artificial dis- 
 tinctions were nothing ; the real distinction was that which 
 a man conferred upon himself — the difference between the 
 wise and foolish, between the good and the uncontrolled or 
 evil. This bore at once upon the case of the slave, for in a 
 country to which Greek slaves had, in great measure, 
 brought learning and philosophy — where these very doc- 
 trines were being taught by the slave, Epictetus — could 
 any one doubt that this true inward dignity might be a 
 slave's possession ? Could it be right that accident should 
 subject such an one to the capricious cruelty of a master ? 
 The attack upon existing institutions was symbolized by 
 the rejection of ordinary language. Slavery so-called, says 
 Seneca over and over again, the slavery of the body, is not 
 slavery at all ; there is but one true slavery — the thraldom 
 of the soul to passion and evil. This doctrine had a double 
 effect. The master felt that he had no moral superiority 
 over his slave, and that if he retained his legal rights over 
 him, they must be exercised in the most moderate way. 
 The slave was taught to care less for the outward slavery, 
 which was merely nominal : he fell back in magnanimous 
 confidence upon his inward liberty. Such, at least, was 
 Seneca's frequent exhortation, if the voice of Seneca ever 
 reached him. 
 
 These are the doctrines of Stoicism : noble and humane, 
 bearing, as we cannot doubt and can partly trace, practical 
 fruits. But there are two objections to a system based on 
 self-respect. First, it does not draw out sympathies ; a 
 man relies on himself; as to others, he would be inde- 
 pendent of them. Pity was a weakness with the Stoics : 
 pride is not akin to tenderness, and self-reliance easily 
 becomes spiritual pride. Secondly, such a system brings 
 to bear upon a man only one class of motives ; the external
 
 12 
 
 motives are forgotten : to the influence of an inward ideal 
 everything is entrusted. 
 
 After these two criticisms, to which others will be added 
 incidentally in the sequel, this survey of Stoic teaching may 
 be used to bring out Christian methods by comparison and 
 contrast. Now the gist of the diiference between the two 
 lies in this, that Christianity did not so much teach men 
 new doctrines, as put them into a new position. Stoicism 
 had faintly anticipated this characteristic, when it awoke 
 men to the consciousness of their position as citizens of the 
 commonwealth of the world : yet this was not a new 
 position, nor was it expressed by anything new in outward 
 facts. But Christianity proclaimed that with the Incar- 
 nation * all things had become new ;' and in regard to men 
 the great novelty lay in the Membership of Christ. This 
 great doctrine underlies probably more of the New 
 Testament than is commonly supposed. The true vine, 
 the body which hath many members % are the metaphorical 
 expression given to it by Christ and His Apostle. Not only 
 did Christ die for men : it was by becoming part of Him 
 that they obtained the benefits of His redemption. Through 
 this men are brought into unspeakable nearness to God^ 
 They seem almost to lose their individuality, in order to 
 live again with a life that was Christ's lifes. From 
 this, as from the great first premise '', St. Paul seems 
 to deduce all the duties of Christians to one another, the 
 destruction of all arbitrary distinctions between men, among 
 them of this very one between freemen and slaves'. The 
 passages, which by themselves seem merely to speak of 
 unity, imply, if their phraseology is examined, nothing less 
 than this unity in membership. Moreover, this doctrine 
 gave a new expression, and a deeper meaning, to old beliefs. 
 
 e 1 Cor. xii. 12. et passim in S. Paul. 
 
 f Col. iii. 3. s Gal. ii. 20. 
 
 h Col. iii. 10. (cf. Gal. iii. 27.) and perhaps J7. * Gal. iii. 28.
 
 13 
 
 As members of Christ, men were made more truly children 
 of God'^. By conformity to His image^, by being changed 
 into His likeness, they revived the traces, never wholly 
 obliterated, of the primal likeness between God and man". 
 Even the bond of common humanity was drawn closer when 
 they became one in the new man, " putting on Christ 
 Jesus." Lastly, the members of that Being, in whom 
 dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead, were, as well their 
 bodies" as their spirits, temples of the Holy Spirit, and of 
 the Blessed Trinity : each soul a temple by itself, or, in a 
 changed figure, each soul forming one stone in the great 
 Temple, whose corner-stone is Christ". Thus both the 
 doctrine itself, and each of its consequence, gave to 
 each Christian soul an infinitely valuable and sacred cha- 
 racter : the privileges drew men to God ; the common 
 participation in them drew men to one another. 
 
 But Christianity did more than tell men of their new 
 position ; she placed them in it, and impressed it upon their 
 senses as well as upon their reason. By an outward rite she 
 admitted them to her privileges, and while this produced 
 the closest possible tie between those who were baptized i*, 
 it did not beget exclusiveness towards those without, 
 because Christianity taught that all men, even heathens, 
 were already in part, and might at any time become by 
 baptism completely, possessed of the benefits of redemption 
 and the rights of membership''. Thus admitted, the mem- 
 bers of the Christian society were reminded of their unity 
 among themselves, and equality before God, by a common 
 worship. For this, Christ Himself had instituted a rite, which 
 renewed, while it expressed with solemn and startling vivid- 
 ness, that union of men which flowed from a common partici- 
 pation in His own nature. The circumstances with which 
 
 '' Rom. viii. 15, with the whole context. ' Eom. viii. 29. 
 
 ™ Gen. i. 26. Col. iii. 10. ■> 1 Cor. vi. 1!) ; iii. 10. 
 
 o Eph. ii. 20-22. i' 1 Cor. xii. 13. 
 '1 cf. Aug. in Ps. XXV. 2. sect. 2.
 
 14 
 
 the early Church surrounded this feast, the Agape and the 
 kiss of peace, only developed the intrinsic character of the 
 Divine ordinance itself. Yet, so close was this intimacy, 
 that the heathen could not give to it anything but a sensual 
 meaning ; and that in later times actual corruptions, which 
 too nearly justified these suspicions, made the abolition of 
 the ceremonies necessary. One distinction, and one only, 
 was known in the Church, the distinction of spiritual gifts ; 
 whether, as in early times, resulting from direct and 
 anomalous inspiration, or from the ordinary endowments of 
 the Ministry. To these distinctions, slave and freeman, 
 high and low, were alike eligible. Even in her worldly 
 days, and in times when everywhere else class distinctions 
 had taken a caste-like rigidity, the Church did not alto- 
 gether, though she did almost, desert her noble principles 
 of equality in this respect. In the ninth century a high 
 ecclesiastic! still complains of the detestable practice, " ut 
 ex vilissimis servis fiant summi pontifices ;" and, in the 
 twelfth, the proudest of the Hohenstauften is obliged to 
 hold the stirrup of the poor scholar of St. Albans. 
 
 Thus to the Christian his relation to his fellow members 
 was constantly brought home by the associations amidst 
 which he lived : the citizenship of the City of God upon 
 earth was something far more palpable than the Stoic's 
 citizenship of the world; just as the membership of Christ 
 was a living reality, to which there is no parallel among the 
 Stoics, but a faint surmise ^ 
 
 But he was not left to the influence which his realization 
 of the doctrines of the Faith and of their bearing upon life 
 might exercise upon his conscience. He was worked upon 
 by example and precept. His Lord Himself had, we may 
 be sure, followed the manual labour which the freemen of 
 
 <i Thegan, biographer of Louis le Debonnaire. Cit. ap. Milman, Lat. 
 Christ, ii. 330. 
 
 ■■ V. Denis Idees Morales dans Antiquite, ii. 109.
 
 15 
 
 the empire thought fit only for slaves : His Apostle was not 
 afraid to say that He had taken upon Him the form of a slave 
 {(^optpijv SowAou) s : He died by a slave's death, and His disciples 
 were drawn from the class to which He had condescended to 
 belong. Like Him the Apostle of the Gentiles laboured 
 with his hands, and men of low class and slaves became 
 preachers of the Gospel. So much for the examples which 
 rescued slavery from its contempt. In the way of direct teach- 
 ing the Apostles did not allow the general exhortations to 
 love and mercy toward others, which cover the pages of in- 
 spired Scripture, to remain without specific application to 
 the case of slavery. They taught slave and master alike to 
 raise their eyes to heaven, and' to treat slavery according to 
 the revelations of Faith. The master learnt his respon- 
 sibility to God for any cruelty to one of God's children*: 
 the slave saw that by diligent service he was serving God, 
 and not man, and that in due time his reward would be given 
 to him". Both alike knew that (in a phrase which obtained 
 a significant degree of currency in the Apostolic Church) 
 with God there was no " acceptance of persons"." These 
 precepts too come, as is usual with S. Paul, close upon the 
 statement of the great doctrines which give them forces'. 
 Upon the difi'erences between true and false slavery S. Paul, 
 like Seneca, frequently ^r^sists in language borrowed from 
 the schools. The bondage to sin% and similarly bondage 
 under the law% is contrasted on one side with the outward 
 slavery which to Christ's freeman is as nothing ; and, on the 
 othei-, with the bondage to Christ, which is itself perfect 
 freedom''. But the inspired writer avoided the paradoxes 
 
 » rhil. ii. 7. ' Col. iv. 1. Epb. vi. 9. 
 
 " Col. iii. 22, 24. Eph. vi. r^—S. 
 
 » S. Paul, Col. iii. 25. S. Peter, Acts x. 84. S. James, ii. J. 
 y See, for instance, the connection between Col. iii. 22. and vv. 10, 11. of 
 the same chapter. ^ 
 
 '^ Kom. vi. 17. * Gal. iv. 3. ^ 1 Cor. vii. 21.
 
 16 
 
 of the Stoic. He docs not say that it matters nothing to a 
 man whether he is a slave or free, for he bids Christian 
 freemen not to become slaves, and Christian slaves to seize 
 any opportunity of escaping from slavery. Such at least 
 is the interpretation usually set upon the words *' use it 
 rather," (ju,aAXov ;:^^yi(ra«.) But the support given to the other 
 rendering, " prefer thy present position", by such men as 
 Chrysostom, Theoderet, &c., shows how completely they 
 recognized the triumph of Christianity over the opprobrium 
 of slavery. Finally, the trade of the slave dealer is con- 
 demned in a catalogue of heinous crimes. 
 
 It is impossible at this point to omit all notice of a doctrine 
 which, though it cannot be said to have any direct authority 
 from inspiration, was through a great part of Church history 
 so generally accepted c, that it acquired some of the influence 
 of the more certain and genuine parts of Christian teaching — 
 the doctrine that slavery was the effect of sin. The principle 
 was remarkable for its many-sidedness. Christ has redeemed 
 us from sin, and so has cancelled the best title deeds of 
 the slave-holder. Since all are sinners, the master cannot 
 oppress the slave who bears the burthens of a sin of which 
 he was not alone guilty: the slave was not a sinner above all 
 the Galilaeans. The slave must bear patiently a yoke which 
 his sins have deserved. Here were three different inferences : 
 it was possible to draw one of rather a different kind, and 
 extract from the principle a justification for the continuance 
 of slavery among Christians'^. But a slave system which 
 consciously adopted this defence, could not be other than 
 humane. 
 
 Two points remain to be observed. First, that Christi- 
 anity, unlike the philosophies, undertook to supply super- 
 natural assistance for the discharge of charity, as of other 
 
 c It is lau{:;lit by Aug. and Chrys. It reappears in a Canon of Aachen, 816, 
 Hard. iv. 1110, as an accepted tiuth. • 
 
 d C. of Aaclien, sup.
 
 17 
 
 virtues. She taught that such grace was necessary for holi- 
 ness : and thus, while Stoicism inculcated a self-reliance, 
 which, as has been seen, was apt to harden the heart, Chris- 
 tianity doubly abased the man whom it was to exalt, by 
 showing him that, without the original gift of redemption, 
 no effort of his own could restore him, and that even as it is, 
 those efforts could not be made, except by a strength which 
 was not his own. Lowly, and therefore tender, — forgiving, 
 because forgiven. This is one of the most attractive aspects 
 of the christian character, and one in which other beliefs 
 have been least able to imitate it. Secondly, and lastly, it 
 is to be observed that the Christian was not left to his own 
 conscience, but was roused by a sense of responsibility to 
 a God, in whose hands lay infinite issues of reward and 
 punishment. 
 
 The evidence which has now been adduced, is sufficient 
 to supply, so to speak, a solution a priori to the present 
 question. There can be no doubt how a religion founded on 
 such principles, and teaching such doctrines would " affect 
 slavery." Its influence would be of a twofold character. 
 So it often happens when a new doctrine takes hold of men's 
 minds. They see at once its most patent consequences : 
 they remedy those details of their conduct, or of things 
 about them, which are glaringly inconsistent with their new 
 principles. This comes quickly. But slowly, after a long 
 interval, as the principles work more deeply into their mind, 
 as they use and dwell upon them for the purpose of their first 
 contest, they perceive that the changes which they really 
 demand are far more comprehensive : that nothing less than 
 an entire reconstruction will be sufficient : that things 
 hitherto unquestioned, and assumed as Jiatural, universal, 
 and necessary facts, must give way. This is the second 
 harvest of results; it comes later, but it is often the wealthiest 
 of the two. So it was when Christianity met slavery. The 
 selfishness, cruelty, and corruption, which were the abuses of 
 
 c
 
 18 
 
 the institution, were at once attacked : they could be main- 
 tained by no one who called himself a Christian. But with- 
 out slavery in some form men could not conceive of society; 
 it would not have occurred to any one to question it. It was 
 only as the fight went on that Christians learnt that the 
 arguments which they advanced against the abuses of slavery 
 were radically inconsistent with its existence. Thus Christi- 
 anity had its two harvests, — the first, while it was engaged in 
 ameliorating the abuses of slavery ; the second, when the 
 conviction matured itself that slavery itself was unchristian. 
 
 II. From this enquiry, which indicates how Christianity 
 ought to afiect slavery, it is necessary to turn to history and 
 seek there a solution a posteriori; to enquire how far Chris- 
 tianity has obtained its two harvests ; to what purpose, 
 and under what special circumstances of advantage or dis- 
 advantage, it has wielded its weapons: in a word, looking 
 backwards to decide how it has affected slavery. 
 
 And thus (i) in the Roman Empire, (ii) in the new nations 
 of the Middle Ages, (iii) in modern times. 
 
 (i) In tracing the effects of Christianity upon Roman slavery, 
 we look first to the law. This had been for some time in a 
 transitional state. It had entered its scientific stage. The 
 rigours and anomalies of the old law were stubbornly resist- 
 ing the attempt made to simplify the Corpus Juris by har- 
 monizing it into conformity with certain leading principles, 
 and to pervade it with the milder tone, the cosmopolitan and 
 levelling spirit, which these principles of the philosophical 
 jurists brought from their origin in Stoicism. In the case 
 of slavery the old system had at present a decided advantage 
 over its assailants ; since it had the double support of legal 
 conservatism, and of the necessities, hereafter to be dwelt 
 u^jon, of the existing social system. Thus when Christi- 
 anity came in contact with the law the case stood thus, that 
 slavei'y as an institution was intact, and so were many of its 
 harsher incidents ; but that a change had begun, and that
 
 19 
 
 certain small improvements had been achieved by the action 
 of principles, which really demanded nothing less than 
 abolition for their complete satisfaction, and were only kept 
 at bay by the causes which made slavery a political neces- 
 sity. Christianity took up the change and continued it, 
 but she too failed to complete it ; and when the Western 
 Empire fell after a century and half of dominant Christianity, 
 its slave laws bore at least as much trace of their original 
 character, as of the modifications by which this has been 
 softened. The most we can claim for Christianity is, that 
 she pushed on the alterations with more vigour than had 
 been the case before, and in ways which made them more 
 effectual and beneficent. 
 
 We have therefore to see (a) what changes had already 
 been achieved, (/3) what Christianity added, (y) what it left 
 undone. 
 
 a. It is perhaps impossible, certainly difficult, to ascertain 
 whether or in what degree the law felt Christian influences 
 before the Emperors became Christian ; for instance, in the 
 great Antonine period. This difficulty will be avoided and 
 the matter simplified here, if nothing is ascribed to Christi- 
 anity, except those changes which were made after the period 
 of Constantino. 
 
 The old theory which denied to the slave the simplest 
 rights of a human being had been first invaded by Sulla, 
 when he provided that the murder of a slave by a stranger 
 should be considered as homicide, and not merely as an 
 injury to the master's property; but the Lex Cornelia in no 
 way affected the case in which the arbitrary power of his 
 own master decreed the death of the slave. Against this, 
 as against the same right which, we must admit, the father 
 exercised over his own son, public feeling seems to have 
 revolted from the earliest days of the Empire ; but not till 
 the time of Hadrian <= and Antoninus^ had the Emperors the 
 ■ Spart. Adr. 18. ' Quoted by Gaius, Dig. i. VI. 1. 
 
 c 2
 
 20 
 
 humanity or courage to enact that a magistrate's sentence 
 should be necessary, before a slave could be killed. The 
 barbarous practice which cast aside the worn-out servant, as 
 a broken or useless tool, was attacked by the two provisions 
 of Claudius 8, which gave liberty to the sick slave whom his 
 master had abandoned if he recovered, and punished the 
 master as a homicide if he died. It was a step further when 
 the Imperial legislation ventured to interfere with the ordi- 
 nary relation of the slave and his master, and opened to 
 hopeless misery a gate of relief. Antoninus'' allowed that 
 a slave who fled to the altar from his master's ill-treatment 
 should not be restored, but be sold by the magistrate. 
 
 The rescript to ^lius Martianus, which contains this 
 provision, deserves careful notice. It provides only for an 
 extreme case ; it takes care that the master shall be indem- 
 nified by the proceeds of the sale ; but even then it seems 
 hardly to dare allude to the slave, still less to appeal to con- 
 siderations of humanity, in its anxiety to show that it is 
 prompted only by regard for the master's interests. A suffi- 
 ciently significant illustration of the condition of Roman 
 opinion at the time, and of the powerlessness of nobler ideas 
 to overcome a selfish and therefore cruel prejudice: yet in- 
 complete, until it is added that the appointment by Nero, 
 three-quarters of a century earlier, of an officer to watch 
 over the treatment of slaves had not made such a remedy 
 superfluous and impossible ^ This is one of the cases not 
 uncommon in the legislation upon this subject, in which the 
 reiteration of a law shows its practical nullity and the resist- 
 ance offered to it by public opinion, and so diminishes its 
 historical importance. 
 
 Such another instance was the law of Hadrian'^, reenacted 
 by Diocletian', which limited the application of torture to 
 
 6 Cod. J, Lib. VII. V. sect. 3. h Just. Inst. I. viii. 2. 
 
 J Senec. de Ucnef. III. 22. Dig. I. xii, 1. sect. I & 5, 
 
 k Dig. XLVIII. xviii. 1 pr. ' Cod. Just. IX. xli. 8.
 
 21 
 
 the slave. Simpler and easier methods of enfranchisement 
 exhibit the simplifying tendencies which inspired the philo- 
 sophical jurists with an aversion of formalities. The Lex 
 Petronia", attributed diversely to Augustus and Nero, and 
 followed up by a law of" M. Aurelius, which forbade the 
 use of slaves for combats with the beasts, the prohibition 
 of Hadrian to employ them as gladiators, and the infer- 
 ence drawn by the jurisconsult from the rescript of 
 Antoninus above quoted, whereby they brought the case 
 of the application of a slave to labour for which he was 
 unfit, within the scope of the rescript, all helped the ameli- 
 oration of the slave's condition. 
 
 In a multitude of small questions which arose with regard 
 to status, the lawyers, in deference to their principle of 
 shewing " favour to liberty," gave a claim of freedom the 
 benefit of every doubt, and allowed to the " law of nature," 
 in the decision of these narrower issues, the full play which 
 in the government of the whole question was denied to it. 
 The case where slaves, whom a will enfranchised, were 
 allowed to act as heirs, if no one else came forward to sup- 
 port the will, is one among many of the same sort. The 
 direct advantages thus gained were solid, though small ; but 
 doubtless there was a greater indirect effect in the improve- 
 ment of public opinion due to the habit of deferring to 
 liberal principles of the kind. The possibility that a slave 
 might in rare cases acquire not only liberty, but the position 
 of a freeborn man [ingenuus), shews what breaches these 
 principles had made in the old law. Such a slave was 
 restored to his natal condition. By this, said the lawyers, 
 is meant not the condition in which he was actually born, 
 viz. that of a slave ; but the condition into which all men 
 are naturally born, viz. that of liberty". The Roman 
 jurists had reached higher notions of humanity than the 
 
 " L. ii. §. 2. (Modest.) D. XLVIII. viii. Ad Leg. Cornel, de Sicariis. 
 ■> L. ii. §. l.id. ib. <> Dig. XL. xi. 2.
 
 moderns, who insist on natural differences of race. Certain 
 elementary family rights were obtained by the slave, as will 
 be mentioned in the next section : it was a great thing that 
 in legacies P and certain transactions, the wives and families 
 of the slaves are allowed to pass with them, and that, in 
 one case at least, from motives of humanity, the separa- 
 tion of families was recognized as a hardship and an 
 injustice^. 
 
 Nevertheless, strange as it may seem, slavery was not 
 appreciably nearer its abolition. It would be wrong to 
 treat the modifications of detail above quoted as steps 
 towards the destruction of the institution, or as the con- 
 cessions by which an institution, consciously nearer its end, 
 compromises for its existence with public opinion. 
 
 jS. Did Christianity achieve more complete success ? The 
 answer will be disappointing. Christianity carried on the 
 changes, but she too left them incomplete, as a few in- 
 stances will show. 
 
 The slave's condition is improving, he rises out of the 
 category of things, so soon as it is allowed that he can 
 engage in family relations. Constantine partly recognized 
 this when he forbade, in very distinct words, the separation 
 of families as a result of actions on partnership"^; but the 
 same thing had been already done in what was probably a 
 more usual case, that of legacies. Also he allowed these 
 servile relationships to guide the succession in case the 
 persons related afterwards became free'; but before his time 
 they were so far recognized, as to be a bar to the inter- 
 marriage of persons so related. An equal penalty of death 
 for rape, whether committed upon a slave or free woman*, 
 might seem to imply a high degree of respect for the rights 
 
 p Dig. XXXIII. ^^i. 1-2, 7. t Dig. XXXII. 41. 2. 
 
 ' Cod. Just. III. xxxviii. 1 1. 
 
 > Inst. III. vii. pr., " humanitato suggerente." 
 
 « Cod. J. IX. xiii. I.
 
 of our common human nature : the inference is checked 
 by the discovery that, spite of the protests of the Christians 
 and the declamations of Chrysostom, the adultery of a slave 
 woman was still no crime : as to them, says Constantine, 
 " vilitas vitas dignas legum observatione non credidit"." 
 The restrictions on the use of torture begun in heathen 
 time were increased % but the practice was still employed. 
 The laws of Constantine y, regulating the exercise of masters' 
 powers, shew clearly enough how futile past laws of the same 
 kind had been, and how little public opinion was even then 
 favourable to the cause of humanity. The edicts of the 
 Christian Emperor have little enough of the Christian spirit, 
 yet for centuries to come they remained the standing law 
 of the Christian Empire. The barbarity of the acts which 
 they proscribe is terrible; but perhaps the greatest barbarity 
 lies in the shortness of the catalogue. Take as proofs these 
 
 words, "si virgis aut loris servum dominus afflixerit 
 
 nullum criminis metum mortuo servo sustineat." 
 
 In all these cases we see improvement, but no radical 
 change. Probably on the question of enfranchisement 
 Christianity won greatest successes : and enfranchisement 
 implied the permanence of the institution to which it intro- 
 duced an exception. It could be performed in Churches : 
 the clergy could perform it anywhere ^ By such enact- 
 ments Christianity secured the announcement in the most 
 formal possible way of the Christian character of these acts. 
 In the Lower Empire, if an inheritance reverted to the fire, 
 all the slaves comprised in it became free. 
 
 On specific points, such as the use of slaves for gladia- 
 torial shows, for fights with beasts, for the vile purposes of 
 sensuality, for the degrading services of the theatre, 
 Christianity through the law strikes at abuses which she 
 hated with twofold hatred. The practices were abominable 
 
 " Cod. Th. IX. vii. 1 . » Cod. Theod. ix. 1. 14. 
 
 y Cod. Th. IX. xii. de Emend. Servorum. ^ Cod. Th. IV. vii.
 
 24 
 
 to her, she declaimed against them, even when voluntarily 
 entered upon ; but they were doubly abominable when 
 maintained by compulsion. Yet in the gladiatorial shows 
 captives were employed to the last ; and Christian influence 
 only destroyed the shows through a deed of startling de- 
 votion — the gallant self-sacrifice of Telemachus in the fifth 
 century — leaving the fights with beasts to remain to the 
 end. Even in the extreme case of the "ludicra ministeria," 
 Christianity was powerless to remove the stigma, which 
 degraded, both socially and morally, the wretched instru- 
 ments of the public pleasures, or to abolish the displays 
 which needed instruments confessedly so vile. To these, 
 even hope was denied ; they could not be enfranchised. 
 Christianity could not abolish the disability ; she limited 
 her efl^orts, and, according to the general law, when con- 
 centrated they achieved more : for the female slave of the 
 theatre, (male gained no benefit from the law,) if converted 
 to Christianity, might be withdrawn from the stage*. By 
 rescuing Christians, the Church established her protest; and 
 the spirit of Christianity is naturally so liberal, that the 
 benefits conferred on her own members could hardly 
 become barriers of exclusion towards those without. So it 
 proved, for Leo" extended to all women, what his prede- 
 cessor had granted to Christian women, that, without their 
 own consent, they could neither be put upon the stage nor 
 kept there. The objections to the stage were founded 
 mainly on grounds of morality. And the rescue of women 
 shows that the law had imbibed the spirit, and carried out 
 with some vigour the purposes, of Christianity. In the 
 same spirit is another law (one of 385 A.D.) forbidding 
 the training or sale of female slaves as musicians'. But 
 Christianity attempted further to secure the triumph which 
 it had won. In tracing the history of any progress, such, 
 
 ^ Cod. Thcod. Lib. xv. VII. i and 8. ^ Cod. J. Lib. i. IV. 14. 
 
 « Cod. Th. XV. vii. 10.
 
 25 
 
 for instance, as that of constitutional freedom in England, 
 the value of a concession, or a charter, is greatly enhanced 
 by a guarantee for its observance. It was, therefore, a 
 double victory for Christianity that the power of guaran- 
 teeing the laws relating to the slaves of the theatre was 
 intrusted to her own officials. The extension of the laws 
 was to be superintended by magistrates, " with the help 
 and surveillance of the Bishop." This was not the only 
 case to which such a guarantee was allowed. After the 
 Empire became Christian, the confusion of spiritual and 
 temporal functions soon began ; and many duties were 
 assigned by the Government to the Bishops, no doubt as 
 being commonly the most trustworthy local officers. So 
 in the case of the sale of slaves for prostitution, Constantine 
 had already allowed ecclesiastics, or even prominent laymen, 
 to rescue Christians at a fair price, when Theodosius and 
 Valentinian, in 428, forbade any master so to use his power, 
 under penalty of slavery in the mines ; and provided, as a 
 guarantee, that the slave so threatened might appeal to the 
 Bishop*^. Unfortunately, the inadequacy of the first law 
 is proved by the passing of the second. Again, it was to 
 the Bishop that Justin entrusted the power of freeing 
 prisoners from those private prisons, destroyed*^ by his 
 rescript, which were so connected with the horrors of 
 slavery. Again, to the Bishop, Honorius^ gave the right 
 of guarding against a fraudulent abuse of the law, by which 
 he allowed the finder of an exposed child to take him up 
 and keep him as a slave. On this question of exposure 
 Christianity was still awaiting its more signal triumph, when 
 Justinian enacted that all children exposed, even thoutJ'h 
 slave by birth, should be frees. Laws of tremendous 
 
 <■ Cod. Th. XV. 8. The words of this law show its source: " qui suis ancellis 
 peccandi iiccessitatem iinpouunt." This is a Cliristian phrase. 
 « Cod. J. i. IV. 2;J. f Cod. Th. V. vii. 2. 
 
 K Cod. J. VIII. lii. 3.
 
 26 
 
 severity against kidnappers showed the value which 
 Christian and philosophical teaching had given to liberty, 
 and by their side a harsh fugitive law seems the more 
 odious. 
 
 This short view of the Christianized Imperial Law con- 
 cerning slavery and some of its abuses, to which perhaps a 
 desire not to seek lucidity by pressing the facts into an 
 arrangement based on any preconceived theory, has given 
 a somewhat desultory and unmethodical appearance, seems 
 to confirm the view already taken. The Roman law, from 
 its developed and elaborate character, detected and threw 
 off with greater ease any foreign influence. It was, there- 
 fore, a hard battle which Christianity had to fight ; and 
 scarcely touching the main principles of the system, she was 
 content with improvements of detail, themselves in part 
 suggested or begun during the Pagan period. 
 
 y. A recapitulation of the main features of the slave law of 
 the Empire at the time of the barbarian invasion, will serve 
 to prove this conclusion more irresistibly, and will conclude 
 this part of the subject. 
 
 The slave, then, in the last days of the Imperial Juris- 
 prudence had no rights of marriage : his ' contubernium' 
 was still unrecognized by law ; the slave woman could not 
 commit adultery ; the intermarriage of free and slave was 
 still, in some cases at least, branded by stigma and penalty. 
 The laws which checked the master's use of his authority 
 over the slave left an arbitrary power of inflicting punish- 
 ment so severe, that it was no surprise if the slave died from 
 its effects. The courts of justice subjected him to torture in 
 the trials to which he was summoned as a witness, while 
 they denied to him, except in the single case of a claim to 
 freedom, a plaintiff''s rights to justice and protection. Male 
 slaves might be forced to the still more debasing slavery of 
 the public stage ; and Honorius, in the last days of the
 
 21 
 
 Roman Empire, seems to have repealed the edicts which 
 saved women from the same doom. 
 
 Clearly, if we determine to rest the credit of Christianity 
 or its effects upon the Roman Law, these last facts warn us 
 that the claim must be moderate if it is to be successful''. 
 
 Turning to the other aspect of the question in this 
 earlier period, the difficulty of arriving at tangible results 
 is greater. A statute book explains itself; even the 
 amount of obedience which the laws i*eceive may be fairly 
 estimated from the frequency of their repetition. But a 
 change in society, in manners, in morals, leaves behind no 
 such definite records. Those who seek to trace it are 
 perplexed by the various exaggerations of the zealous 
 partizan who recounts the successes of his own party or 
 his own generation; and of the querulous cynic who 
 depreciates his contemporaries to justify either a general 
 scepticism about human nature, or an invidious comparison 
 with an ideal past. Yet such an enquiry is, for two 
 reasons, most important. First, because laws are an im- 
 perfect index to the condition of society. A nation may 
 be happy and free under laws the provisions of which seem 
 harsh and unsatisfactory, while a system professedly liberal 
 and fair may be so worked as to become, in fact, oppressive. 
 Political and legal forms must be judged, not according to 
 their letter, but in view of their actual working. Thus, 
 e.g., harsh as the Pagan law of slavery was, we will under- 
 take to say that by itself it would not reveal to any one the 
 
 ^ The laws of the Byzantine Empire, however, added some improvements ; 
 and these Laws are evidently Ecclesiastical in spirit. Basil and Alexius 
 Comnenus sanctioned the marriage of slaves by the Christian rite. Leo 
 allows them the free use of their peculium, and broke down some of the 
 restrictions upon the intermarriage of slaves and free, turning such marriage 
 into a source of freedom. The fisc under Basil and Constantine Porphyro- 
 genitus refused to treat slaves as pait of the profit which it derived from the 
 death of intestate proprietors, and emancipated them. But still somo points 
 remained untouched : c. g. the incapacity of slaves as witnesses ; and law 
 seems to have been struggling with public opinion.
 
 28 
 
 abomination of tlie slave system ; and we suspect, on the 
 other hand, that the legal improvements of the Christian 
 period give a very inadequate idea of the improvement in 
 the treatment of slaves, and in the state of public opinion 
 with regard to them which Christianity produced in 
 Christianized Rome. Secondly, this is the sphere in 
 which Christianity is most at home. Her genuine office, 
 her natural place is that of the still small voice which 
 pleads from within with the hearts of men ; or, if she appears 
 in public, it is as the preacher who arraigns men at no 
 tribunal but that of God and of their own conscience, and 
 speaks with no authority but that of Religion and Truth. 
 
 It must be remarked in a prefatory way, that, in the 
 period at present under consideration, Christianity passed 
 through changes, both of fortune and of character, perhaps 
 more rapid than those which at any other time she has 
 undergone. At first the Church contained a small body, 
 outcasts from society for the sake of religion, whose 
 sincerity was put to constant proof by the test of perse- 
 cution. But after a time persecution ceased; the Emperors 
 became Christian ; the hitherto hostile influences of fashion 
 and high example were now ranged on the side of Christi- 
 anity. From henceforth the action of the Church, which 
 had been that of a single-hearted body full of almost 
 inspired earnestness, took a new character. The voice of 
 sincere believers was partly drowned, and their action 
 impeded, by the crowd of half-hearted and worldly converts. 
 These professed members, while they cared little for the 
 principles and doctrines of Christianity, cared much for the 
 system to which they owed wealth, luxury, and power. 
 Recruited from such materials, the Church's action became 
 less steady, her protests less indignant and energetic, the 
 inclination to compromise with prevailing tastes or insti- 
 tutions grew stronger, political prudence cooled the glow 
 of missionary zeal ; and, if her dominant position gave
 
 29 
 
 her surveillance, moral and religious, over society at large, 
 yet in its diflusion her influence became less impetuous and 
 effective. These reflections throw light on what has gone 
 before, and we are reminded that the Christianity which 
 casts its influence upon the law was the Christianity of the 
 fourth, and not of the first, century, — Imperial, rather than 
 Apostolic, in its temper. In regard to what follows, they 
 indicate that statements with regard to the influence of 
 Christianity upon society within the Empire must be 
 qualified according as they are applied to the earlier or 
 later parts of the Imperial period : the guiding rule being 
 this, that in the early period its influence is more un- 
 adulterated ; in the latter, more extensive in its scope. 
 
 In the primitive days, evidence need hardly be sought. 
 If a common worship has been deemed likely to remind the 
 Christian master of his brotherly relation to his slave, how 
 much more would it be so when that worship implied a 
 risk of martyrdom, performed secretly in the catacomb or 
 cave in order to avoid the persecutor's notice ! The de- 
 pendence on a common Father's love and care could not 
 then be forgotten. With death constantly before their 
 eyes, suffering together for the same Lord, the distinction 
 of earthly ranks must have sunk into utter insignificance. 
 The ideal picture which imagination would thus draw is 
 realized in the facts as they are preserved to us. It is 
 surpassed in the sublimely loving and tender pleading of 
 the Epistle to Philemon. In that Epistle, the first docu- 
 ment of Ecclesiastical History on this subject, St. Paul 
 does not forget to refer to his own imprisonment, and to 
 the affectionate relations into which it had brought him 
 with the slave Onesimus, as a ground on which to base his 
 plea that Onesimus may be treated with the love and con- 
 sideration due to a brother in Christ. Or passing to 
 uninspired Christians, what can realize more vividly the 
 way in which Christianity dissolved all the evil and misery
 
 30 
 
 of slavery, than the touching story of Perpetua and Feli- 
 citas, the noble matron and the poor ancilla sharing 
 together the troubles and joy of martyrdom, sustained by 
 one another's love; or that of Blandina, the slave of Vienne, 
 whose voice, in the midst of her agonies, aniniated the 
 courage of her highborn fellow-sufferers, with whom she 
 had been associated by the persecutors for the increase of 
 their ignominy. Nor were these cases exceptional : Christi- 
 anity in its despised beginnings was no luxury, like Stoi- 
 cism, of the higher classes, or of those few among the slaves 
 who, being possessed of some education, were employed for 
 higher purposes, and least needed defence and consolation. 
 The case was rather the other way. It was the hackneyed 
 reproach of the Church, made, for instance, by Celsus^, that 
 its members were of the viler sort : translated, as Origen 
 replies'', that reproach means that the privileges and con- 
 solations of Christianity were brought home to the most 
 miserable and the most hopeless. In the same spirit, and 
 for the same reason, Origen defends Christianity against the 
 taunt levelled by the cultivated heathen, at the absence of 
 taste, the rudeness and simplicity which characterized its 
 manner of teaching. By that simplicity, he answers, it 
 has done what philosophers never did : they taught truth 
 to the few, Christianity has made it the property of man- 
 kind. Its doctrine exercises the faculties of the highest 
 intellect : it is intelligible to the meanest slave. It was this 
 universal character which Gnostic and Manichaean exclu- 
 siveness would have destroyed. 
 
 These passages from early Church History suggest one 
 aspect of the present question common to all periods, on 
 which it may be well to say a word once for all. In treat- 
 ing of slavery men are apt to dwell too exclusively upon 
 the conduct of masters, and to scrutinize only the treatment 
 to which by law or custom they subject the slave. The 
 
 i Orig. cont. Cels. III. 50. t Orig. cont. Cels. III. 54.
 
 I 
 
 31 
 
 condition of the slave himself is often neglected : and the 
 reason being that it is harder to obtain statistics or in- 
 formation. So in action, when benevolence takes up the 
 slave's cause, more stress is laid upon the attempt to control 
 and mitigate the master's despotism, than upon schemes for 
 elevating the condition moral and spiritual of the slave him- 
 self. Yet this is surely the higher object : the end for the 
 sake of which other changes are valuable as means. If it is 
 harder to trace, this is not because the effects are less real ; 
 but because they operate in the nobler, that is, the invisible, 
 parts of man, his mind and spirit. It is a great thing to 
 alleviate misery, and to raise the degraded : but it is far 
 greater to infuse into the human soul that which makes it 
 triumph over misery, and turn its degradation by spiritual 
 victory into its discipline and its boast. The influence of 
 Christianity has been, and in this Essay no attempt is made 
 to disguise the fact, sometimes and in some respects over- 
 rated: but it is no exaggeration to say that the triumph 
 over slavery in the heart of the slave is a victory which she 
 alone has either won, or attempted to win. By the magic 
 of her influence she has transmuted that which was a badge 
 of vileness, and a sign of exclusion from every high and 
 animating hope, into a discipline in which the soul of the 
 faithful slave finds wherewithal to fit itself for immortal 
 destinies of glory. That which was once a vista of vacant 
 and painful drudgery, closed only by a death of extinction, 
 is now but one form of the thankful service which His 
 intelligent creatures pay to God, until He transfers them 
 to a higher service in the courts of Heaven. As we analyse 
 fully alterations in the law the improvements effected by 
 Christianity may seem to elude our grasp : with the de- 
 clamations of the later fathers before us we may begin to 
 grow sceptical about the positive influence which it exercised 
 upon the morality and humanity of the slave-holding classes: 
 but the change which carried human souls across the gulf
 
 32 
 
 which divides the ignominious and despised condition of the 
 Roman slave from the inward exaltation of Onesimus or 
 Blandina remains unimpeachable in evidence and historically 
 unique, the greatest moral miracle ever worked by purely 
 spiritual forces, unassisted by any change in circumstance 
 or external condition. 
 
 The Christianity of the Empire owed this success to the 
 imitation of her Master's example. She began as He had 
 begun, from the poor. They were established in the full 
 privileges of membership before the Churches included many 
 of the richer converts, who brought in with them some of 
 their exclusive prejudices. But as this was the greatest 
 triumph of Christianity, and implied the greatest exertion 
 of spiritual energy to overcome the influence of all other 
 forces, social and external, it was natural that it should be 
 soonest tarnished, and that the decrease of life within the 
 Church should show itself early in the failure fully to main- 
 tain before high and low the standard of spiritual equality. 
 Hence in the Empire the respect of persons, of which even 
 an Apostle has to complain, must have increased in the 
 Church: much more was it so in the Middle Ages. For, 
 in the second period of conversion, the old rule was inverted 
 and conversion began from the top. The vassals followed 
 the king into the font, and were in turn imitated by their 
 own followers. Thus the Church wore an aristocratic cha- 
 racter, and the conversion of the peasantry, among whom 
 heathen customs long lingered, was a very different thing 
 from the admission of the Roman slaves into the close 
 brotherhood of the Primitive Church. Yet in a degree 
 Christianity still did its holy work among those whom man 
 despised ; and among the lost pages of ecclesiastical history 
 there are many which would contain the unobtrusive and 
 unrecorded labours of the parish priests, themselves esteemed 
 little higher than their flocks, to make the precepts and 
 consolations of Christianity realities to the poor.
 
 Will it be said, that, judged by its modern history, Chris- 
 tianity is powerless to raise the condition of those whom 
 other influences degrade and depress ; that it becomes to 
 them little more than a form of hysterical excitement ? It 
 might be replied, that the circumstances were particularly 
 unfavourable, since the negro race was one which demanded 
 the highest missionary skill and energy, while the Church 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was specially 
 destitute of such qualities : or, that the charge is not en- ' 
 tirely true, witness such attempts as those of the Quakers 
 in Barbados in the seventeenth century, under whose Chris- 
 tian influence sober and civilized congregations were rapidly 
 formed. But the simplest answer is, that Christianity was 
 not a free agent : it was often banished by the planters, as 
 in the case of these Quakers, whose benevolent schemes were 
 abruptly terminated, and they themselves forbidden the 
 island : or, if admitted, it was fettered by their control. A 
 slave-holding class is quick to see a revolutionary tendency 
 in anything which raises the slaves in cliaracter and self- 
 respect ; and the planters, who forbade instruction in read- 
 ing, suspected danger from the spiritual equality which 
 Christianity taught. Nor were they far wrong : for such 
 was the slavery which they maintained, that if Christianity 
 had been allowed to awaken in the slaves the least sense of 
 the rights and dignity of man, the least spark of the indig- 
 nation which kindles at their violation, Christianity herself 
 could hardly have preached resignation and submission with 
 success. With the planters, therefore, or at worst with the 
 " respectable" religion of the planter class, and not with 
 Christianity, lies the responsibility of the negro's continued 
 degradation. The separate worship of free and slaves, the 
 official attendance of a single white as an overseer at the 
 worship offered to a God with whom is no distinction of 
 bond or free, the signal for prtiyers given by the whip, the 
 slave-auction following by public announcement " at the 
 
 D
 
 Si 
 
 end of Mass," these indicate the causes which have made 
 Christianity fail to raise the slave in his own eyes and in the 
 respect of others. This is the dark side of the picture, and 
 the dark side almost covers the canvass ; but there is room 
 for hope, that in spite of every obstacle the irresistible in- 
 fluence of Gospel Truth here and there filtered through, 
 and where the Bible was allowed, and instruction in reading 
 not prohibited, reached the hearts of some 
 
 " Who touched God's right hand in the darkness, 
 And were lifted up and strengthened." 
 
 But to return. The Primitive Church had thus raised 
 the spiritual dignity of the slave as a member of Christ's 
 body, in his own, and in others' eyes. Time passed on, and 
 the Church entered on its more worldly period : yet the 
 Fathers hardly allowed the Apostolic teaching to degenerate 
 * in their hands. Perhaps they are sometimes more anxious 
 than the New Testament writers to justify the existence of 
 slavery. BasiP, for instance, seems almost to borrow totidem 
 verbis Aristotle's argument, which treats slavery as a benefit 
 to the slave. But this anxiety was itself a proof of their 
 increasing consciousness that the system was inconsistent 
 with Christianity. And nothing can be more lofty than 
 the view which they conceive of the behaviour and of 
 the relations of masters and slaves one toward another. 
 Addressing a public opinion professedly Christian, they 
 wrought out with wonderful fulness and breadth the bearing 
 of Christian doctrine upon the position of the slave. Am- 
 brose"" and Augustine" appealed to the old name of pater- 
 familias, Chrysostom" reminded the mistress that her slave 
 is also her sister : if slavery is to exist among Christians, at 
 least, they all agree, it must involve no forgetfulness of those 
 other and higher ties, not of property or service, but of 
 
 • De Spiritu Sancto, xx. " Ep. I. ii. 31. (ed. Migne.) 
 
 " De Civ. Dei, xix. 16. (ed. Migne.) 
 
 o a5€A<^7) <xov yiyouiv el ^ iriar^. ad Eph. IV. Homil. xv. 
 
 1
 
 35 
 
 brotherhood and love, of common service and common son- 
 ship, which unite the master and the slave, and be disfigured 
 by no conduct incompatible with such relationship p. Like 
 the Apostles too, they give these precepts their twofold 
 application. They enjoin tenderness and care on the 
 masters ; but they also exhort the slaves to be active for 
 conscience sake in the freewill service which is really 
 freedom. 
 
 Tliere was in all this a double novelty. First, the teach- 
 ing itself was superior, by all the interval which separates 
 Stoicism from Christianity, to anything which had gone 
 before ; its principles more deep and exhaustive, its ex- 
 hortations more definite and moving. But a greater novelty, 
 if possible, was the machinery which gave the teaching 
 vogue and influence. It was possible to speak publicly 
 to large mixed congregations, and it was possible to speak 
 with the authority of doctrines to which all were bound 
 by their profession to shew respect. The manners and 
 opinions of the day were tried by an acknowledged standard, 
 and the preacher might rouse the conscientious and shame 
 the indifferent by denunciation of the abuses which belied 
 the common Christianity. The pulpit was a new power ; 
 and it is interesting to observe that much of the teaching 
 of the Fathers is contained in their homilies and sermons. 
 It would be a paradox to maintain that a public opinion 
 so challenged was not in some degree elevated by the pro- 
 cess. The declamations of Chrysostom against the abuses 
 of Byzantine society may cost him his see, but the hatred 
 of the people shewed that he had reached their consciences ; 
 and while the many expelled the preacher, some few would 
 profit by his lessons. 
 
 It is necessary to lay some stress on the fact that this 
 
 must have been so, because when the question arises in 
 
 what degree did an improvement actually shew itself; how 
 
 P Ambr. ut sup. ; he adds, " quasi animse cousortos." cf. Apost. Const, iv. 12 
 
 d2
 
 36 
 
 far did practice at all correspond to the lofty ideal which 
 the Church proclaimed, the positive evidence seems to be 
 weak. In all such matters the negative cases are always 
 the easiest to find : lives of quiet obedience to duty pass 
 unnoticed and unrecorded, while the memory of the bad 
 is preserved in the denunciations which they elicit. But 
 we have certain recorded instances in the works of Jerome, 
 whose correspondence was the fruit of an intercourse 
 with a very large part of the Christian society of his time, 
 of mistresses who treated their slave-women in a Christian 
 spirit, joining in their occupations; so that, according to 
 his strong expression in one casei, the mistress could hardly 
 be singled out from among the slaves about her. Chry- 
 sostom' " knew" himself *' many houses which had gained 
 much from the virtue of their slaves." Manumission, and 
 that of large numbers at a time, became a popular act of 
 piety ; it was made the subject of a special exemption in 
 the laws which forbade legal transactions upon Sunday'. 
 Masters were to see that their slaves had been baptized*; 
 and the Church declined, with magnanimous confidence in 
 the master's uprightness, to baptize any one without his 
 consent, assuming that this would not be withheld except 
 for reasons which also disqualified for the rite". They 
 were responsible for the religious instruction of their slaves, 
 and their attendance on divine worship. Chrysostom, in 
 one of his sermons, bade the members of his congregation 
 adopt the practice of reading to their households from some 
 sacred book, and allow the slaves to listen. '* Make a 
 church of your house," he cried ^; and the acclamations 
 
 q Hieron. Ep. xxiii. ed. Migne. 
 
 f In 2 Ep. ad Thess. Homil. v. 3. ed Migne. 
 
 " Cod. Theod. II. ^iii. de Feriis. i. As other business on Sundays is * in- 
 dignissumum : ita gratura et jucundnm est eodie quae maxime sint votiva 
 conipleri : atquo ideo cmancipandi, &c.' 
 
 'Cod. Justin. " Const. Apost. viii. 32. (Labbe i. 495 D.) 
 
 * 'EKKKr)(Tlav iroir)aov aov t))v oiKtav, in Genes. Serm. vi. 2.
 
 37 
 
 with which his hearers greeted y his epigrammatic phrase 
 shewed that at least in their better moments their hearts 
 responded to the call. It was perhaps in part for the same 
 reason that the Apostolical Constitution secured rest for 
 the slave on Saturdays, Sundays, and the great days and 
 seasons of the Church ^. The Church might hope by throw- 
 ing these duties on the masters to make them realize more 
 vividly their Christian responsibilities ». The authority of 
 the Bishops, who were now both by law and custom the 
 recognized defenders of all helpless and oppressed classes, 
 often interposed for the protection of the slave. In the 
 73rd and 74th letters of S. Basil '^ a case of this kind occurs. 
 S. Basil pleads with admirable tact and courtesy (he must 
 have studied the Epistle to Philemon to good effect) for 
 certain slaves who had committed an offence and then 
 sought his protection. He asks that they may be spared 
 and left to him for moderate chastisement. 
 
 The slave might avail himself of the privileges of sanc- 
 tuary to defend himself from injury : and though law, secular 
 and ecclesiastical, required the consent of the master before 
 a slave could enter a monastery or take Orders, yet three 
 years in one case and one in the other was sufficient to 
 establish a presci-iption in favour of liberty, and we may 
 reflect without much compunction that the Church was 
 probably not too careful in observing the restriction which 
 guarded the master's rights. If consent had been given 
 he became free at once : the holy place raised its silent 
 protest against the system. 
 
 Again, the care of the early Church for the poor and 
 distressed must have included the slaves '', since they con- 
 
 y V. the Sermon of the next day, in Genes. Serm, vii. 1. 
 
 » Const. Apost. viii. 33, 
 
 ' V. the whole tone of the passage in the Civ. Dei, xix, 15, 16. 
 
 ^ Migne Patrol, vol. xixii. 439—443. 
 
 = Just Nov. V. 2. ] , and cxxiii. 17. ^ cf. C. Just. VII. vi. 3.
 
 38 
 
 stituted so large a portion of the lower orders. This took 
 its first form in the community of goods providing a 
 common treasury, whence the deacons distributed daily 
 ministrations to the widows. It reappears in the collec- 
 tions for the poor saints, about which St. Paul, in the 
 midst of his spiritual duties, is so much occupied : it sug- 
 gested a subject for Lucian's cynicism, in the retinue of 
 widows and orphans who wait upon their Christian bene- 
 factor ® : Julian recognized it by his imitation in the pagan 
 revival ; it embraced in a degree those outside the Christian 
 pale ; it founded in the more settled days of the Church a 
 whole range of institutions for the relief of the distressed ; 
 and it acquires and retains throughout Mediaeval History a 
 formal and legal shape in that third part of the tithes and 
 other customary offerings which the Bishop was bound to 
 administer to the poor. It is useless, where space is short, 
 to accumulate the proofs of this charitable action of Chris- 
 tianity. It is only needful to remark that the slaves must 
 have received benefit from it, and that others, were saved 
 by it from slavery. 
 
 One form of charity peculiarly connected with slavery — 
 the redemption of captives, the slaves who felt slavery 
 most — will be mentioned again, in connection with the time 
 at which it becomes most important, and is alluded to here 
 only in order to refer to a single conspicuous instance of it 
 belonging to the present period, in which Cyprian ^ writing 
 in behalf of some African captives makes appeal in a very 
 remax-kable manner to the great presiding doctrines of Chris- 
 tianity, whose application to slavery was partly shewn in the 
 earlier part of this Essay. 
 
 The denunciations of the Fathers against the games, the 
 theatre, the practice of exposing infants, were all so many 
 attacks upon sources or aggravations of slavery. 
 
 '^ Lucian Peregrinus, cap. xii. Pressense H. des 3 Prem. Siecles 2 serie 
 ii. 99. ' Ep. Ix.
 
 39 
 
 But, in point of fact, draw out as we may the beneficial 
 influences of Christianity, they can hardly be comprehended 
 without fully realizing the condition of Roman society. 
 No description of that society can be given here : suffice it 
 to indicate, that among its prominent characteristics were 
 the two which are at all times the most fruitful parents of 
 cruelty — sensuality and panic ; and that it owed both to 
 slavery. It was sensual, because the person of slaves was 
 at the mercy of their masters, and because they ministered 
 to the most extravagant and sensualizing luxury. It was 
 panic-stricken, because they were numerous and disaffected, 
 gathered from all countries, and bound to the governing 
 classes by no ties of sympathy or interest^. Men said that 
 if a peculiar dress had been allowed to disclose to the slaves 
 their own numbers, the revelation would have imperilled 
 the State**. This ever-present alarm was invoked to justify, 
 and can alone now explain, the vote by which the most 
 august assembly of Rome, turning a deaf ear to the pleas of 
 " sex, age, and undoubted innocence," sacrificed, by a 
 judicial murder, 400 slaves of a master whom one of the 
 number had assassinated. Without that explanation, a 
 modern reader would draw even exaggerated inferences 
 from cruelty so detestable, not confined to a single instance 
 or due to special reasons, but repeated as a common practice, 
 sanctioned and regulated, as extant' documents prove, by 
 the authority of the laws. But explanation does not affect 
 the inferences which the practice suggests as to the con- 
 dition of the society in which it is found. Our conception 
 of it will be more complete when we remember that the 
 cruelty, which fear prompted and sensuality fostered, was 
 whetted and brutalized by the bloody scenes of the arena, 
 
 6 Postquam nationes in familiis habemus, quibus diversi ritus externa 
 sacra aut nulla sunt, colluviem istam nonnisi metu cocrcueris. Tac. Ann. 
 xiv. 44. 
 
 ^ Senec. de Clem. I. 24. 
 
 ' V. S. C. Silanianum and Paul's comment S. III. v. 6.
 
 40 
 
 and in a sceptical and materialistic age was unchecked by 
 any sanctions of a settled religion or a settled morality. 
 
 A glance at this horrible picture seems to supply two 
 hints for a right judgment upon this part of the question. 
 First, it confirms the belief already expressed, that Christi- 
 anity cannot but have worked much improvement. It was 
 impossible for men to flatter themselves that all was well 
 with society ; every zealous Christian must have been fired 
 by such a state of things to attempt some reform ; and 
 such efibrts cannot have been wholly vain. But, secondly, 
 it explains the existence of the darker side of the picture, 
 which has still to be drawn. For, speaking generally, 
 under the Christianized Empire the whole of the society 
 just described entered the Church. What material for 
 Christianity to mould ! A society in the last stage of 
 corruption, and whose corruption seemed to flow, as an 
 inevitable consequence, from its political and economical 
 condition! Tacitus had said of it, in hackneyed words, 
 that it could neither bear its evils nor their remedies ; 
 and its history to the end justified his prophecy. How 
 certain that the Christian standard must infinitely de- 
 generate ! — that the ministers of Christianity would 
 struggle vainly against the overwhelming flood of evil : 
 that an ideal of conduct, which implied the highest 
 triumph of grace and Cliristian forbeai'ance in both master 
 and slave, should be hopelessly neglected ; and that, spite 
 of a few faithful souls whose now-forgotten lives preserved 
 the traditions of the Primitive Church, the general conduct 
 should compel us to the verdict that Christianity failed to 
 regenerate the slavery of the Roman Empire. 
 
 Here, alas! there is no difficulty in obtaining the evi- 
 dence. The real difficulty is, to distinguish the Christian 
 society from its Pagan predecessor. We have to remind 
 ourselves that the good has often left no record, and that 
 Christianity probably had more influence in the households,
 
 41 
 
 which contained a few slaves for necessary service, than in 
 the palaces of the great. In these, everything seems un- 
 changed : the Christian master still rules his hosts of slaves 
 for every conceivable purpose of service, luxury, or display; 
 (could he be to them what S. Paul wished Philemon to be 
 to Onesimus ?) the taste for eunuchs witnesses to a degraded 
 morality, the fantastic curiosity which paid high prices for 
 dwarfs and monsters to hearts hardened by luxury and 
 sensuality. S. Chrysostom confirms these inferences by 
 his direct testimony. He declaims against the numbers of 
 slaves : he thunders against their treatment. Take a single 
 one of his Sermons •'. He speaks of the cruelty of women 
 towards their female slaves. They accost them with every 
 term of obscenity and reproach ; they expose them naked 
 to be flogged by their husbands ; they uncover their heads, 
 and drag them by their hair; and for all this they dare to 
 set up pleas of defence. The allusion to the cries which 
 attract the passers by in the street below, seems to set this 
 before us as a sketch from the every day life of the capital. 
 We must hope that the blush which covered the faces of his 
 hearers', if in many it was the sign of a guilty conscience, 
 yet showed that there were some who listened with shame 
 and indignation to the description of conduct so atrocious. 
 A word from Jerome suffices to show the state of morality 
 which slavery still produced. The female slave was too low 
 for virtue, " passim per ancillulas libido permittitur"." 
 
 Or turn to the slaves themselves. The Fathers confess 
 that they are guilty of every vice and every crime : pro- 
 fligate, thieving, treacherous, brutish. Only they asked", 
 and history repeats the question, how could they be other- 
 wise ? How could they learn the duties and temper of 
 
 t ad Eph. iv. Horn. XV. 
 
 ' tI TipvOpidarare traaai; ad Epb.iv. Horn. XV. 
 
 ■» Hieron. Ep. LXXVII. 3. cd Migne. 
 
 ° Cf. Chrys. iu Ep. ad Eph. v, Horn. XX.
 
 Christian slaves, when their masters had so entirely for- 
 gotten the corresponding obligations ; when cruelty and 
 contempt destroyed their self-respect, and neglect deprived 
 them of access to Christianity"? As it was, even the Fathers 
 could not help countenancing the use of the rod and 
 scourge P. A Christian system of slavery would have 
 bound the slaves in close allegiance to their masters, and, 
 through them, to the State ; but when Alaric approached 
 Rome the slaves deserted to him by thousands. 
 
 The sight of this condition of society suggests the 
 question, why there had been so little change, and why the 
 latent tendencies of Christianity towards abolition had borne 
 no fruit. 
 
 The first cause was fear. The authority of masters was, 
 in fact, the police which kept in order a large, fierce, and 
 disafiected population. As in the Slave States of America, 
 the citizens were few among many, and were united by no 
 ties to their subjects. Christianity had offered to furnish a 
 bond of union and sympathy ; but the offer had been re- 
 jected, and it was only too true, that if the strong hand of 
 power had relaxed its grasp, there were no other restraints 
 to which it was safe to trust. 
 
 The second was the depreciation of free labour. This 
 was partly due to the opportunities for money-making opened 
 by commerce, foreign service, and provincial appointments ; 
 partly to the ancient contempt for handicraft, which, in 
 consequence of these openings, all the citizens could afford 
 to share ; partly to the drain of men for military purposes : 
 it was completed by the cheapness of slave labour, which 
 the increasing dearth of free men willing to work made it 
 necessary to employ, and of which incessant war and con- 
 quest insured an economical supply. When labour had 
 
 " Chrjs. ad Epli. VI. Horn, xxii. 
 
 p Po)35ij) /col ■K\r)ya7s ou(pp6viaov. Chrys. ad Eph. TSf. Homil, xv. Seu 
 verbo seu verbere. Aug. de Civ. Dei, xix. 16.
 
 43 
 
 thus been consigned to slaves, the old contempt for it 
 increased; and so it came about that no one would work 
 who was not obliged, and that slavery was a necessary 
 institution. The character of the freed-men of the Empire 
 was not likely to encourage emancipationist schemes. All 
 this applies most truly to domestic slavery ; for, during the 
 times of the Empire, a gradual change in economical con- 
 ditions was raising the agricultural slave-gangs to the rank 
 which is just above that of the slave, namely, the colonate. 
 But this was not the result of Christianity ; and some of 
 the characteristics of slavery, to which Christianity was most 
 opposed, attached to the colonus. 
 
 The third reason was the influence of traditional ideas. 
 Slavery always had existed. As has been seen, the Roman 
 lawyers said that it was sanctioned by the jus gentium; in 
 other words, it was one of the customs common to all 
 nations. To the Romans it had been handed down with 
 the institutions which, for want of something better, they 
 almost literally worshipped ; and no doubt, to a Roman, 
 slavery seemed as natural and necessary as the relation of 
 master and servant, employer and employed, seems now. 
 In the ancient case, as in the modern, a few speculators 
 might question this. Chrysostom, to pursue the parallel, 
 might hint at an ideal society, founded on a communistic 
 interchange of services "^j as now men talk of a social state, 
 based on cooperation ; but then, as now, the ordinary run 
 of men had no doubts about the necessity and permanence 
 of the existing state of things. 
 
 For these reasons, among others, Christianity did not 
 achieve a result which it never set itself directly to attempt, 
 and which, if it had been achieved, would have been the 
 effect of the slow operation of its doctrines and their con- 
 sequences in the minds of men, viz. the abolition of slavery; 
 and the general proposition, which was assumed at the 
 1 ad Eph. Horn. xix. 141.
 
 44 
 
 outset, seems to be verified in the case of Rome, viz. that 
 Christianity affects slavery by mitigating its rigours; and 
 not, unless other influences concur, by abolishing the 
 institution. 
 
 In the earlier part of this Essay, two propositions have 
 been advanced. First, that Christianity does not, unless 
 under exceptional circumstances, abolish slavery, but only 
 mitigates it. Secondly, that this mitigation is effected 
 more by the complete triumph of Christian principles in a 
 limited number of cases, than by their diffusive influence 
 over society at large. 
 
 The first of these is verified by the history of Roman 
 society ; and the second derives special support from a 
 history in which striking examples of self-denial and love 
 stand out to rebuke, by striking contrast, the general 
 selfishness and cruelty of society. 
 
 (ii) It is necessary to apply the same generalizations more 
 briefly to the test of Mediaeval History. For continuity's 
 sake, the order of this part of the subject shall be altered, 
 and the question which was asked last in the case of Roman 
 slavery shall be put first here. What were the causes which 
 maintained slavery, and prevented Christianity from abo- 
 lishing it until they had themselves ceased to act ? 
 
 In point of fact this question is part of the larger one, 
 which seeks the explanation of the many relations of 
 dependence and inferiority which are covered by the word 
 feudalism. If one might venture to describe briefly a 
 feudalized society, it would be in some such way as 
 this : that it was the product of a period in which there 
 was no balance of forces. It is to an equipoise that 
 order and freedom are commonly due ; if one force be- 
 comes overpowerly predominant, the men who can wield 
 it are sure to become oppressors : and this, true at all 
 times, is true especially of such a period as that of which
 
 45 
 
 we speak, when violence was universal and unchecked by 
 the traditions of an established society. For self-defence 
 against violence, each man needed the command of some 
 force, and there was but one kind available, which was 
 monopolized by the few. Ordinarily wealth, intellectual 
 ability, spiritual power, represent each of them a social 
 force ; and the force of numbers is generally lodged with 
 those who are destitute of the other kinds. But intellect 
 was not a force, for, at a time when there were no learned 
 professions, and when want of communications and igno- 
 rance prevented the existence of a public opinion on which 
 intellect might build its power, wealth could not supply 
 force to a great middle class of merchants or traders, for 
 insecurity made commerce and industry as yet impossible. 
 Spiritual powers did indeed assure authority and influence 
 to those who possessed them : but their voice was often un- 
 heard amid the stormy violence and the uncontrolled ferocity 
 of semibarbaric times. The total failure of such insurrec- 
 tions of the villeins as that which occurred in Normandy in 
 about 1000 A.D., shews that, in a time of proof armour, 
 the mass of the people drew as little strength for the phy- 
 sical superiority of numbers, as they did from the yet 
 unknown of doctrines of the rights of labour. No, there 
 was but one kind of force in society : the small number of 
 men who found themselves in possession of a stone castle, 
 a landed estate, and a band of dependents whom the land 
 would feed, had society at their mercy. The poorer men of 
 their own rank became tlieir vassals, and were treated with 
 some consideration due to the fact that they constituted the 
 sinews of the lord's power: the first beginnings of a mer- 
 chant class submitted to be plundered by one lord that he 
 might protect them against the rest. Even the Church 
 (though in her case there is another side to the picture) 
 had in great measure to bow before the dominant class :
 
 46 
 
 her great corporations, the cathedrals or the monasteries, 
 admitted under the soft names of ' Advocacy' or protection, 
 the interference and rapacity of the Seigneur : her indivi- 
 dual clergy, ordained from the lowest classes, find their 
 place as mass-chaplains, despised and without authority, 
 among the retainers at the lower end of the baronial hall'. 
 
 Is there here no explanation of mediaeval serfdom ? What 
 was the fate of the poor man when even classes above him 
 in the social scale were dependent on the nobility ? He had 
 less force than they ; he must sink into a subjection still 
 more complete. He became the serf whose labour, pro- 
 perty, and person were placed at the arbitrary disposal 
 of the lord. Thus mediaeval serfdom was so necessary a 
 consequence of the principle, so to call it, on which society 
 was built, it was so intimately connected and matched so 
 nicely with the other institutions of the period, that neither 
 Christianity nor any other power could abolish it. The 
 system was built by the selfishness, avarice, and violence of 
 the barbarian conquerors and the aristocracies which they 
 founded ; and these are faults so universal among mankind 
 that Christianity, though she may battle with them, can 
 never overcome them in society at large. When once built, 
 the system was too coherent and too strong to be assailed. 
 
 Christianity then did not abolish serfdom in the early 
 middle ages. The above description was vague as to date. 
 It was intended to delineate features which were more or 
 less characteristic of all the European nations from the sixth 
 to the twelfth centuries. To dispose of this part of the 
 subject, nothing remains but to deal with the suggestion 
 that Christianity did abolish serfdom, because in the interval 
 between the thirteenth and the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries 
 serfdom disappeared. It might well be answered, that this 
 implies one of two assumptions equally paradoxical, — 
 
 ' Agobard of Lyons De Pxivilegio et Jure Sacerdotii, c. 11. Ducange 
 vi. 224.
 
 47 
 
 either that the Christianity of the Avignonese Papacy ac- 
 quired suddenly in the fourteenth century the power to 
 do what that of Gregory I. and the German Missionaries in 
 the sixth and seventh had failed to accomplish ; or, that 
 Christianity laboured for seven or eight centuries at a pro- 
 gressive reformation, of which for three quarters of that 
 time there is not a tittle of historical evidence. But in fact 
 the idea is chimerical, since serfdom declined with the causes 
 which gave it birth. 
 
 Those causes have been assigned above ; and if it has 
 been truly alleged that serfdom resulted from the monopoly 
 of force by a single class, then it would disappear in pro- 
 portion as counteracting forces gathered strength, and the 
 helpless parts of society acquired the means of self-assertion 
 and self-defence. Now the history of Mediaeval Europe, 
 from a period such as that of the Crusades, displays a 
 development of this kind, the rise of new political and 
 social forces, and the consequent redistribution of the power 
 once engrossed by the nobility alone. Every one knows 
 the causes of this change. From the time of the first 
 Crusade inter-communication becomes more frequent, com- 
 merce rises, the towns obtain privileges, wars are waged on 
 a larger scale by more extensive combinations. Learning 
 becomes a power, and the man of ability or education, what- 
 ever his birth finds his sphere, either in the chair of a 
 University crowded by students of all countries, or as a 
 lawyer, the counsellor and supporter of the king. Abelard 
 and Gratian are contemporaries. The change was universal ; 
 in a thousand ways it affected the lower classes : four may 
 be selected. First, the middle classes acquired power through 
 money, they broke down exclusive privileges, and to some 
 extent they secured an equal law, the benefits of which were 
 not unfelt by the peasantry. Secondly, the rule which 
 established that serfs residing a year and a day in a town 
 became free, made the rise of the cities a great boon to the
 
 48 
 
 serfs; the lords felt that they must be careful in their 
 treatment of those whom despair might drive to seek even a 
 perilous means of escape. Thirdly, it is plain that as the noble 
 proprietors were called upon to make increasing efforts to 
 maintain their position, they were led to tend more carefully 
 all the sources of their power. True, this very cause would 
 have made them averse to emancipation, which was equi- 
 valent to the surrender of so much property. But then 
 serfdom did not come to an end by way of emancipation. 
 The history of copyhold tenures shows that it faded away 
 gradually and imperceptibly, the whole class slowly rising 
 in privilege and consideration, and coming to possess as 
 right what had been granted to them as favours. And the 
 anxiety of the lords to propitiate and attach them must 
 have been fruitful of these boons. Lastly, with the change 
 in the methods of warfare, the lower classes acquired a 
 fighting value ': their importance was increased, and their 
 spirit raised. Witness the intimate relation between the 
 French wars and the insurrection of Wat the Tyler. 
 
 On the whole there is no case in history in which it is 
 more certain that a great change has been the outcome not 
 of any single cause or agency, but of the general movement 
 and progress of society. 
 
 Christianity then upon this reasoning was not able in the 
 mediaeval any more than in the ancient times to " affect 
 slavery" by abolishing it. As in the earlier case, its in- 
 fluence was mainly displayed in its power to modify and 
 mitigate the harsher features of the institution which it was 
 compelled to tolerate. 
 
 (1) In the crisis of transition from ancient to modern 
 history, the sudden and piteous vicissitudes of fortune which 
 accompany conquest stimulated into fuller activity a form 
 of charity which Christianity had never neglected, and for 
 which, during the centuries immediately preceding, border 
 
 ' On the connection of fighting power and political influence, v. Ar. Pol.
 
 49 
 
 raids and partial incursions of the barbarian tribes had pro- 
 vided an ample sphere*. This was the redemption of cap- 
 tives, a virtue never more necessary than at a time when 
 those who had been brought up in wealth and comfort were 
 liable to be suddenly overwhelmed by the miseries of cap- 
 tivity, and one with which the biographers of the sixth 
 century saints specially delight to adorn their heroes. 
 " Gratias agamus," says S. Germanus, " divinas clementiae 
 nam unde fiat redemptio appropinquavit." " How often," 
 says the biographer of S. Eligius, " would he become a debtor 
 himself, that he might rescue those who were in debt"!" For 
 this purpose no sacrifice was too costly. Ambrose had 
 deprecated the blame which his enemies had thrown upon 
 his pious sacrilege to the sacred vessels, when he needed 
 their price to pay for redemption : the redemption of captives, 
 he had said, will be the ornament of the mysteries'". So in 
 the same spirit the Council of Rheims, held in 625^, made 
 one exception to its injunction to preserve the sacred vessels. 
 " Nisi evenent," it says, " ardua necessitus pro vedemptione 
 captivorum." It is wrong, says another authority, to allow 
 *' anything, even, in a great strait, the preservation of sacred 
 property," to interfere with the constant exercise of this 
 duty. There were instances of a yet higher sacrifice, when 
 a man sold himself for another's redemption. The Council 
 of Orleans in 511 % and after three centuries the Council of 
 Aachen in 816% mention this as one of the objects of the 
 possession of property by the Church. As has been said, 
 Christianity has in every age repeated this charitable prac- 
 tice. For completeness' sake it may be well to quote here, 
 from different periods, the story of Otto, the apostle of 
 Pomeranea in the twelfth century, who redeemed captives 
 
 ' Ozanam, Civ. du S"^ Sicclc.ii. 41. Eng. Trans. 
 
 •• Scr. Gall. III. 381, 385, 552. 
 
 » De Off. Mhiistr. ii. 28, 138. ed. Migne. 
 
 y Harduin. iii. 574 A. Can. XXII. ^ Harduin. ii. 1000. Can. \, 
 
 « Harduin. iv. 1132 A. Can. 110.
 
 50 
 
 as one way of exhibiting his Christianity to the heathen '^j — 
 the practice connected with the Crusades of redeeming 
 Christians from the Mussuhnan ; the redemption of Indian 
 serfs by Las Casas ; and of the slavegangs of South Africa 
 in our own day by Mackenzie. 
 
 (2) But, to return, in spite of what individuals might do to 
 soften the shock, to rescue some whom in the anarchy of 
 society nothing but the placid spirit of Christian charity 
 would have saved, the change was nevertheless accomplished, 
 and new societies were formed, in which the arrogance of 
 class was increased by the antipathy of race and the inso- 
 lence of conquerors. Any one who would appreciate the plan 
 of the battle which in these societies the Church had to fight 
 afresh on behalf of the slaves, must have the character of 
 the times vividly before him. The governing classes were 
 barbarians, among whose, force was almost the only power, 
 and spiritual influences took the form of superstitious 
 terrors acting violently but fitfully. They w'ere Christians, 
 but Christianity had not yet softened their characters, or 
 moulded their ideas : their minds were not yet open to 
 its pure principles, its genuine spiritual influence. Nor 
 would they have accorded deference to a clergy which, desti- 
 tute of the external symbols and instruments of power, should 
 have claimed reverence in virtue of the spiritual powers and 
 truths which it possessed and represented. The Church 
 accommodated itself to the contingency : it put on the armour 
 of the times, and it coped with this wild aristocracy of 
 chiefs by transforming its own great officers into the cha- 
 racter of secular lords. They acquired lands and retinue ; 
 they became a powerful political order; and by their judi- 
 cious use of this political force, so no doubt the best of them 
 hoped, as well as by the skilful employment of the super- 
 stitious terrors which awed even the irreligious, they in- 
 tended to advance the interests of true Christianity. 
 ^ Neander, vii. 16 and 24. Eng. Trans.
 
 51 
 
 The result in some degree corresponded to the expecta- 
 tion. But the Church, when it adopted a secular position, 
 was invaded by a secular spirit : and while she acquired new 
 powers, she lost the clearness and simplicity of vision, which 
 would have enabled her to discern the purposes for which 
 she should employ her strength. Her aims ceased to be 
 wholly Christian. They became in great measure political ; 
 and in truth the mediaeval history of the Church is the 
 record of the contest between the spiritual and political in- 
 fluences within her, and of the inconsistencies which re- 
 sulted from an anomalous and amphibious poHion. At 
 times, as in the Merovingian period in Gaul, or in the tenth 
 and early part of the eleventh centuries, the religious cha- 
 racter seems almost lost, till it is reasserted, as in the time 
 of Louis le Debonair, or of Hildebrand, by a revival whose 
 narrow ecclesiastical character indicates reaction from a 
 secularized system. In this twofold character of the Me- 
 diaeval Church, of which the warrior bishop and the monk 
 bishop represent each a side, we recognize the explanation 
 of its ambiguous attitude towards slavery. The Church, 
 because it represented Christianity, combated serfdom, at 
 least in its abuses : it becomes itself a serf-holding power, 
 because it had identified itself with the existing political 
 system, and the dominant political class. It encouraged 
 emancipation, yet it held serfs whom it had no intention to 
 emancipate. Recognizing the paradox, we see that the 
 Christianity which encountered serfdom was not of a kind 
 to employ Christian principles, without considerable reserve, 
 or careful accommodation to the political conditions to 
 whose maintenance the Church was so deeply pledged. 
 
 The action of the Mediaeval Church upon serfdom falls 
 then naturally under two heads: 1. its action as a political 
 and serf-holding power, 2. its action as a spiritual power, 
 outside the political system, and claiming over it rights of 
 surveillance and correction. 
 
 E 2
 
 52 
 
 1. The Church held serfs as early and as late in medi- 
 aeval history as the secular proprietors. " The devout," 
 says Gibbon'', " crowded to shelter themselves around the 
 shrine of a popular saint," as " under the battlem.ents of a 
 powerful chief: their submission was accepted by these 
 temporal and spiritual patrons, and the hasty transaction 
 irrevocably fixed their own condition and that of their 
 latest posterity." Thus ecclesiastical and lay serfdom began 
 together ; and the earliest testimony to the kind influence 
 of the Church in this its more political form, is the eager- 
 ness with which those upon whom hard times were forcing 
 serfdom of some kind preferred ecclesiastical to lay masters. 
 
 The possession of serfs by the Church, whatever may be 
 thought of it in principle, found a justification in two great 
 benefits which it conferred on that class. First, it offered 
 to a very large number of them, large in proportion to the 
 vast extent of the Church lands, a service far more tolerable 
 than that of the lay masters. But, secondly, this gentler rule 
 was a standing example and pattern for other proprietors. 
 
 We must prove this superiority in the condition and 
 treatment of the ecclesiastical slaves. 
 
 a. From them the clergy were drawn : thus they enjoyed 
 the privilege of hope. They could look forward to some- 
 thing better than their present position. It is true that the 
 position of the lower clergy had lost in dignity ; that the 
 secular relation of lord and serf was apt to reproduce itself 
 under an ecclesiastical shape in that of the prince; bishop, >-^' 
 and the low-born parish priest: that we must not neglect ---Jr 
 such evidence as that of the 119th Canon of the Council of 
 Aachen ''j held in 817, which enjoins the Bishops to refrain 
 from their habit of ordaining the lower clergy from among 
 the serfs of tlie Church, with a view to enforce their sub- 
 mission to ecclesiastics by the stripes to which as serfs they 
 were liable. All this is true, and it is only one instance of 
 « Chap. XXXVIII. <> Harduin, iv. 1133 A.
 
 53 
 
 the way in which the intrusion of secular ideas and preju- 
 dices interfered with the operation of Christian principles. 
 Yet the most despised priest was in a condition at least less 
 mean than that of the serf; and, doubtless, at all times he 
 had some chance of promotion, if he had the ability or piety 
 to deserve it. The importance of individual ecclesiastics, 
 unquestionably low-born, is a proof of this : there is other 
 evidence, in the complaint of Thegan quoted above, " that 
 the highest offices in the Church were filled by persons the 
 vilest." 
 
 This chance of rising to a high place as an ecclesiastic 
 was a hope of distinction, and the only one, which was 
 more or less available to the serfs generally : but it specially 
 belonged to the ecclesiastical serfs, because a greater care 
 for their education had rendered them more fit for it, and 
 there was no obstacle, such as the reluctance of masters, 
 constituted in other cases. For the Church carefully re- 
 spected the rights of property, would allow no ordination 
 of serfs without their master's leave ; condemned to a two- 
 fold penalty the ordaining Bishop ®, or cancelled the orders 
 which he had conferred ^ In this the Mediaeval Church 
 only followed the law of Valentinian, and the rule of Leo 
 the Great in the ancient period. Proofs are not cited on 
 account of their abundance. The regulation is constantly 
 repeated by the Councils — a repetition from which it is 
 natural to infer that in this respect the serfs often obtained 
 advantage from an illicit relaxation of the rule. 
 
 ,6. The Church recognized a higher responsibility to- 
 wards its serfs. The clergy were not allowed to regard 
 them merely as property ; they were not to be sold «. The 
 Council of Merida in 666 checked the arbitrary power of 
 
 e Cone. Aurel. Hard. ii. 1010 ; repeated, Cone. Worms, 8G8, Can. 40. Hard. 
 V. 743. 
 
 f Council of Aachen, 817. 
 
 8 Council of Soissons, Hard. v. 55 E.
 
 54 
 
 individual ecclesiastics over their serfs, prescribed light and 
 decent punishments, and gave the Bishop the sole authority 
 to punish. The Uth Council of Toledo (675) gives the 
 reason for a similar prohibition, when it forbids such 
 punishments inflicted " his a quibus Domini sacramenta 
 tractanda sunt." In the monastic and cathedral schools 
 they were provided with education : this was, as has been 
 seen, a reason for their promotion to Holy Orders. 
 
 y. The Church may have neglected, no doubt it did often 
 neglect, its own responsibilities and duties towards its serfs ; 
 but it did not forget to defend them against others. The 
 meanest ecclesiastical serf was safe under the guarantee 
 which secured everything that belonged to Holy Church. 
 His master's charity might sleep : not so the vigilance with 
 which the Church guarded against any breach, however 
 small, of her privileges and immunities. There is a curious 
 letter of Pope Paschal II.,'' written in 1114, which at once 
 exhibits this vigilance, and shews what were the secular 
 privileges which the Church claimed for its serfs. It was a 
 mistake, we find, to confound them with other serfs by 
 applying to them the same name, " Ecclesiee famuli, qui 
 apud vos (he is writing to the Bishop and Chapter of Paris) 
 servi vulgo improprie nuncupantur." And this verbal 
 confusion had been the sign of an actual abuse ; the evi- 
 dence of these ecclesiastical "domestics" against freemen 
 had been rejected in judicial proceedings : this was to treat 
 them as if they were common serfs, and to violate a privi- 
 lege which was as old as the era of the Ripuarian Laws '. 
 Paschal prohibits, as King Louis VI. had already done, 
 this innovation, " neque enim asquum est ecclesiasticam fa- 
 miliamusdievn conditionibus coerceri quibus servi sa9cularum 
 hominum." In the Synod of 744, the " servi clericales " 
 are allowed the same privilege as the " clerici " themselves : 
 
 b Ep. LXII. quoted by Harduiu, vol. vi. pt. II. 1819 E. 
 ' Baluze, i. 13. Rip. Law, LVIII. xx.
 
 55 
 
 they are exempted from the vexation of " judices et actores 
 publici." 
 
 8. The serfs of the Church were doubtless exposed to 
 fewer exactions, owing to the character of their masters. 
 Making all allowance for exceptions in the shape of fighting 
 bishops and political ecclesiastics, the ecclesiastical lords 
 stood more aloof than the lay fi'om war and its expenses : 
 there were fewer cases in which contributions had to be 
 levied for their ransom : their serfs were less often called 
 out to serve in war, and were less liable to the incursions of 
 an exasperated enemy, or the exactions of an impoverished 
 master. 
 
 These seem to he some of the definite advantages which 
 raised ecclesiastical serfs to a position of superiority over 
 their fellows. That in some way they were superior would 
 be proved by the mere fact of the eagerness with which the 
 serfs of others seized the opportunity of passing into the 
 hands of the clergy •>. The increase of the Church lands 
 distributed the boon more widely, while all danger of its 
 withdrawal was removed by the rule which prohibited all 
 alienation of Church property, making, in the case of the 
 serf, the single significant exception that ecclesiastics can 
 part with their serfs in favour of liberty alone''. 
 
 2. It is time to pass to the influence exercised upon 
 serfdom generally by the Church, as a spiritual power en- 
 forcing Christian principles upon the proprietors. It is best 
 at once to admit that as it has been already allowed that 
 Christianity could not abolish slavery, so it must be allowed 
 that it failed to remove many of its harsher features. The 
 absolute rights of the lord over the body and property of 
 the slave, the violation of his family ties, the distinction as 
 to satisfaction (wehrgeld) and punishments (the slave would 
 
 J Motley's Dutch Eepublic, i. 32. Even freemen seem to have preferred 
 sometimes ecclesiastical serfdom. Baluze, t. i. coL 725. 
 ^ Councils of Agde 506, Orleans 541, Soissons 853.
 
 56 
 
 be beaten, where the free man was fined '), the rejection of 
 his evidence in law courts, all these remained. Yet the 
 clergy were not powerless to mitigate, whether by laws 
 issued at their instigation, or by their own ecclesiastical 
 canons, or by their influence over individuals, the hardships 
 of the lowest class. It was easier to modify the laws than 
 it had been in Imperial days, because there was no sys- 
 tematic and logical jurisprudence which repelled change; 
 and it was easier to command society and opinion, at least 
 in a superficial way, because all were now in name Chris- 
 tians ; and almost all in some degree, or at some moments, 
 amenable to the terrors and promises of the Church. On 
 the other hand, it is of most importance to notice,, and it 
 may be done at this opportunity, that this universality of a 
 nominal Christianity destroyed the esprit de corps which had 
 existed among Christians, most powerfully while they were 
 an isolated and despised body, but to some degree so long 
 as there were pagans from whom to distinguish them, and 
 which served greatly to make men realize the doctrines of 
 brotherhood taught by Christianity. That which is uni- 
 versal is apt to be unobserved : it is contrast that awakens 
 attention. 
 
 The title " defenders of slaves," which was sometimes 
 given to the Mediasval Clergy, inaugurates well this part of 
 the subject. 
 
 a. The Church defended them against ill usage. Le- 
 gally the masters had absolute power, but the Church inter- 
 posed to check its exercise by her authority over conscience. 
 The privileges of " sanctuary " were the means by which 
 this became an effectual control. The slaves took refuge in 
 the precinct: and the Church, though it recognized the ob- 
 ligation to return them, assumed the right of imposing con- 
 ditions. For this there were precedents in Roman history. 
 The pagan shrine had secured something to its suppliant 
 ' Council of Berkhampstcad, Cann. xi. xii. Hard. MI. 1819.
 
 57 
 
 after the rescript of Antoninus : and in regard to Christian 
 sanctuaries it had been provided that the clergy should 
 intercede with the master before returning the slave. 
 Among the new nation, it became the custom to exact a 
 definite oath of amnesty from the masters. There is no 
 rule about slaver}'" so often repeated as this. One example 
 will suffice : that of the Council of Orleans, held in 549, 
 by whose 22nd Canon "" this oath is exacted, and a pagan 
 master is required to find Christian security for its ob- 
 servance". Besides this sacred shelter, the Church inter- 
 fered directly by penal regulations to prevent ill-treatment 
 of the serf. Imitating the law of the Empire, the Council 
 of Epaone, in the sixth century, forbade in a Canon, repeated 
 at Toledo in 694, at Worms in 8(o8 °, the execution of a 
 slave by his master without the magistrate's authority. 
 From the old Jewish Law the capitularies of Charlemagne 
 borrowed verbatim the provisions which gave freedom to the 
 slave who lost his eye by his master's violence, and punished 
 the master whose ill-treatment caused his slave's immediate 
 deaths. It is worthy of note that this Carolingian legis- 
 lation, in which ecclesiastics had so great a share, abounds 
 in provisions in favour of the slaves ; such, for instance, as 
 the mitigation of the fugitive slave laws''. Similarly, the 
 Council of Worms repeals a Canon of Illiberis (305), in- 
 flicting heavy penalties on the mistress who caused the 
 death of her attendant (ancilla) by beating. In an early 
 English regulation the character of the penalty betrays its 
 source: the master who kills or wounds his slave is punished 
 by a three years' fast. Sad revelations these of a state of 
 
 ■n Hard. II,U47. 
 
 " Some interesting examples of the flight of slaves to sanctuary in Anglo- 
 Saxon England are quoted, but without authorities, by Wright, Hist, of 
 Domestic Manners and Sentiments, p. 50. 
 
 Capitularies, Add. IV. 40. Baluzc. 
 P vi. 11 and 11, ed. Baluzc. 
 
 1 Baluzc, vol. 1. passim. Ilallam's Mid. Ages, I. lOR, n.
 
 58 
 
 society where such regulations were needed ; yet testifying 
 to the incessant beneficence of the Christian Church. 
 
 /3. However small the family rights of the serfs, there 
 was a point at which the Church undertook their defence. 
 It is time that the codes of the new nations fully adopted 
 the never conquered prejudice of the Roman Law against 
 the intermarriage of slave and free% so that our own learned 
 Abp. Theodore lays down', that the free shall marry with 
 the free ; and that in the laws of France and many nations 
 of Europe, though not of our own, the free man who 
 married a slave woman became himself a slave', the Me- 
 diaeval law herein outdoing the Roman, since Alexander 
 Severus had secured the man's freedom in such a case " : 
 that the Church withdrew from the convicted slave rights of 
 marriage which she had herself conferred, as she recalled for 
 a similar reason her ordination gifts"; allowing a man or 
 woman married as free, to be discarded if the freedom was 
 afterwards disproved. But in the same period, the time of 
 the Carolinguians, to which the two last mentioned rules 
 belong, it is enacted in the capitularies y, that the marriage 
 of slaves, to which masters have once consented, cannot 
 afterwards be annulled. This is done with an appeal to the 
 religious principle, " What God hath joined together, let not 
 man put asunder." The serfs then are capable of legitimate 
 marriage, only such marriages must not be made in a way 
 which would defeat the lord's rights. 
 
 y. Misery is not complete till hope is lost : and the 
 mediaeval serf owed to the Church his hopes of freedom. 
 Nor were these hopes shadowy. For the Church consistently 
 extolled and enjoined the practice of manumission : it was one 
 of the acts of charity which she steadily taught, and which, 
 
 ' Salic and Visigothic Laws, Ducange, Art. Sem. 
 » Capitula XVII. « Ducange, vi. 222. 
 
 <■ C. J. vii. XVI. 3. » Cone. Wormat. 742. 
 
 y Baluze, 1. 1. Col. 1166, &c.
 
 59 
 
 especially, she recommended in opportunities, when those 
 wild fits of panic-stricken remorse, which in an age of half- 
 tamed and uncontrollable characters alternated constantly with 
 the reckless excesses of unbridled crime, secured obedience. 
 The Mortmain Statutes remain to prove how great was 
 the effect of recommendation offered at such times. Men 
 grasped eagerly at the works of charity, which might, as 
 they hoped, cover the multitude of sins : and among these 
 works the sacrifice of property by the donation of freedom 
 was conspicuous. It is mentioned as the practice of the 
 kings of the Franks, that at the birth of a son they emanci- 
 pated three slaves on each of their domain : the Church 
 watched for the joy of the day of festivity, as she did for 
 the agony of death-bed penitence, and turned them both to 
 the same account. It is said, that in France a pretty custom 
 long lingered to preserve the memory of the manumissions 
 which had so fitly celebrated the great festivals in earlier 
 times : when there was no longer human captivity to relieve, 
 they would open the dove-cotes on the great days and let 
 the birds go free''. 
 
 The preambles of the charters of manumission best prove 
 their Christian origin, as when one says that he does this 
 for the safety of his soul^: or another, that he frees his 
 slaves and obeys the commandment, "Be not ye called 
 masters," in order that God may release him from his own 
 sins. *' We give and grant A.B.," says a third, " to the 
 Lord God, and the Blessed Virgin, and all the saints •>." 
 In their control over the courts of law the clergy could 
 and did favour emancipation by turning the scale, as their 
 Roman predecessors had done before them, in favour of 
 liberty in doubtful cases". 
 
 But the times were lawless. The manumitted slave had 
 
 ^ Ozanam Civ, du 5""= Siucle, ii. 57. 
 
 » MarcuM Formulae, II. 32— 3i. Sciipt. rer. GaU. IV. 498, 499. 
 
 ^ Ducange, vi. 223. = Littleton, 205, 6.
 
 60 
 
 much to fear for his newly-acquired freedom. The Church 
 came to his rescue. Here she was sure of her ground. She 
 was on the side of the law. Accordingly she acted vigorously, 
 renewing over and over again her anathemas against the rob- 
 bers of liberty, and intrusting the execution of these edicts 
 to her clergy, the only organized and vigilant police in the 
 middle age. Certain classes of freedom had a special right 
 to this defence. Some had been manumitted in the Church 
 or within its precinct. Some had commended themselves or 
 been commended to its protection. In making a charter of 
 freedom a master would often add, with an almost whimsical 
 distrust of his own intentions and a wholesome uncertainty as 
 to those of his successors, a clause invoking spiritual penalties 
 upon himself or any of his posterity who should try to with- 
 draw the gift of freedom. There was often a clause in testa- 
 ments which specially commended those emancipated under 
 them to the protection of the Church — another proof by 
 the way as to the quarter from which the influences favour- 
 able to emancipation came. All these the Church lay under 
 special obligation to protect. But in the seventh canon of 
 Macon (585) this protection is extended to other freedmen 
 who had no such special claim to it, and we learn how much 
 it was needed: the secular judges were partial; and, as a 
 remedy, the council enacted that to bishops alone, or to 
 others with their leave, the cognizance of cases of status 
 should belong'^. 
 
 8. As Christianity, on the one hand, helped slaves to 
 become free, so, on the other, she defended freemen from 
 the danger of becoming slaves. Against the slave trade, as 
 carried on with unbelievers, she steadily set her face. Her 
 prohibitions were frequent and peremptory*^, and seem to 
 have been supported by public opinion. The sentiment of 
 
 <i V. to same effect, Cone. Agd. 50C. Can. 29. 
 
 « Cone. Lept. 743,4; Macon. 581, Can. C; Toledo, 589. Can. 14; ^nhiam, 
 1009 ; Lanfranc and Wulfstan, in Gul. Malmesb. p. 302, (ed. Bohn) ; Laws 
 of Fiederitk II.
 
 61 
 
 the brotherhood, which unites all Christians in a unity 
 deeper than all external differences, started into life at 
 the contact of Jew and Saracen, and in the new phrase 
 " Christendom," found an appropriate symbol and ex- 
 pression. The sentiment of exclusiveness, natural to an 
 aristocratic society, made this feeling something too defiant 
 to those outside the pale: but, inside, it did nothing but 
 good, and anything which stimulated it served the cause of 
 humanity and civilization. Venice, one of the few places 
 where the trade was common, was, of all European cities, 
 the one least influenced by the Church. But, even within 
 Christendom, the trade was not unopposed. Next to the 
 trade with unbelievers, the sale of men outside their own 
 country seems to have been considered its worst form. In 
 the seventh century, tliis is forbidden by the Frank queen, 
 Bathildis ; and the Council of London, in 1102'^, denounced 
 the extensive commerce by which English slaves were 
 poured into Ireland. The Council of Coblenz, also, in 
 922s, forbade the slave trade in general terms. A tale is 
 told of a saint who meets one whom formerly he had sold 
 into slavery. He prostrates himself in penitence before his 
 injured servant, and insists on receiving public punishment 
 at his hands'*. 
 
 The real importance of these acts of abolition is due to 
 the fact that they forwarded the disappearance of pure 
 slavery from the Western Countries. It is impossible not to 
 allude to this distinction between slaves and serfs, though, 
 in what has been said, the laws and actions regarding 
 them have been treated indiscriminately. This treatment 
 is, probably, justified by the difficulty of finding out in each 
 case to which class the obscure and not precise language of 
 mediaeval documents intends to refer ; and by the fact that 
 
 f Can. 27. (Wilkins I. •']83. ) " it hath hitherto heen the common custom 
 of England." 
 
 g Can. 7. h Acta Sanct. Ord. S. Benedicti TI. 400.
 
 62 
 
 the Church acted much in the same way towards both, and 
 that they were really, in many ways, in the same condition. 
 The serf had a home of his own, and even lands of his own ; 
 and though these were absolutely at his master's disposal, 
 yet even so precarious an independence raised him morally 
 above the domestic slave, or the agricultural gang-slave of 
 the Empire, stalled and fed, like the animal, in his master's 
 house, and at his expense. If the serf's comforts were 
 perhaps fewer, yet the responsibilities of a home and its 
 maintenance raised him higher in the scale of humanity ; 
 and his connection with the soil, from which, usually, he 
 was inseparable, gave scope for the humanizing influence of 
 local and family attachments. Otherwise he would seem to 
 have been in most essential respects as destitute of rights 
 as the slave. That the two classes were quite distinct, is, 
 however, proved by direct statements. The Anglo-Saxon 
 Theowes, for instance, were very different from the Ceorls, 
 who afterwards sank into serfdom ; and the slaves whom the 
 Franks, like the other Teutonic nations described by Tacitus, 
 possessed and brought into Gaul, were distinct from the 
 mass of the peasantry, whose condition rapidly became that 
 known as serfdom, or villeinage. 
 
 Slavery proper seems to have been uncommon after the 
 eleventh century ; in England, the Norman conquest was 
 an important stage in its downfall, since the villeinage, 
 which under them became more general, elevated the 
 theowe as much as it depressed the ceorl. Now, although 
 the substitution of serfdom for slavery is another case of a 
 change due rather to alterations in the general condition of 
 society than to any single cause, yet the Church may claim 
 the credit of having helped it. The attacks upon the slave- 
 trade struck at its supplies ; and the contempt for labour, 
 which would have sunk the serf to the level of the slave, 
 was mitigated by the teaching of Christianity, and the 
 eminent example of the monks. In a word, it was pro-
 
 63 
 
 bably Christianity which prevented the distinction between 
 freeman and villein from being a caste distinction — it was 
 very nearly this, but not quite — and in the end thus 
 made all the difference: the dividing barrier was one 
 which it was not necessary to overleap or to storm, but 
 which could be silently effaced ; and serfdom passed im- 
 perceptibly into freedom, without the need of a sweeping 
 measure, changing at once the condition of the whole class, 
 such as tradition, interest, and prejudice would have made 
 it hard or impossible to carry. There are other smaller 
 matters : the peculium guaranteed to the slave, at least for 
 the purchase of his liberty', or given him upon emanci- 
 pation'', the Sunday's rest, for which the Council of 
 Berkhampstead stipulated', are instances of boons which 
 might easily be multiplied beyond the limits now possible. 
 In a thousand ways the serf was better off by reason of the 
 Church's help. If neither her Services nor her sacred 
 buildings presented so vividly, as in primitive times, the 
 spectacle of equality before God, if in her doctrinal teaching 
 about the Eucharist, and in the method of celebration, its 
 character as an act of Communion between Christian 
 brethren, was less regarded and less impressed upon the 
 congregation than its sacrificial or sacramental qualities, 
 yet the gorgeous ceremonial, the magnificent architecture 
 of cathedral and abbey, or the quiet repose and simple 
 exhortations of the parish Church, in which he approached 
 God, and received divine gifts, could not but elevate and 
 console the serf. The dignity of the human soul was 
 preserved; and the serf was acquainted with that which 
 gave to life, however wretched, its value and interest. 
 On the other hand, the masters too listened to the Church's 
 voice. They heard the precepts of love and mercy reiter- 
 
 ' Capitula of Theodore, cxNii. Cone. Tolet. 633. Can. 72. 
 
 '' Script. Rer. Gall. vi. 657. 
 
 1 Harduin, III. 1819. A.D. 097.
 
 64 
 
 ated : they could not be ignorant of their duty, though 
 they might ignore it. Some listened and obeyed: to others, 
 the echo of the words came back in other days, when danger 
 or sickness had softened and alarmed their hearts; and even 
 the more reckless and defiant were not so impervious but 
 that the general standard of opinion and practice was raised. 
 If it was the weakness of mediaeval Christianity that it was 
 too universal, and therefore too conventional, yet, for that 
 very reason, it influenced more irresistibly the tone of 
 worldly and general society. 
 
 In her beneficent action, which dealt to each generation 
 its measure of help and comfort, the Church had no system 
 of distant policy. Yet none the less did she advance 
 unconsciously the brighter future ; and, as she awoke the 
 courage and sustained the endurance of the serf, or pleaded 
 with the masters the rights of men, who, if in law their 
 chattels, were in religion their brethren, she smoothed the 
 way for the quicker and more prosperous course of the social 
 revolution, which invested the serfs with the rights and 
 duties of freedom. Unaided, she could not have accom- 
 plished, nor was she inclined to attempt, a great act of 
 Emancipation : be it her credit that through the dark and 
 gloomy times, which would have extinguished or wearied 
 any energy less divine, she sowed in silence, uncheered by 
 any ambitious visions, unconscious of the full tendencies of 
 what she did, simply because she strove to fulfil the plain 
 duties of the day, the harvest of the unimagined future. 
 
 iii. To the Christian apologist, nothing in the history of 
 slavery is more disheartening, and, to the lover of Christi- 
 anity, nothing sadder, than to turn from exultation over 
 the fall of mediaeval serfdom, and find himself witness to 
 the formation, and to the maintenance through three 
 centuries, in Christian countries and under the eyes of 
 Christian governments, of a slave system entirely new, and.
 
 65 
 
 if possible, more complete, odious, and stubborn than any 
 of its predecessors. 
 
 In face of this, it might seem useless to talk any more of 
 the power of Christianity against evil. Yet, in the short 
 space left, the endeavour will be made to clear Christianity 
 from this charge ; and to show that, although powerless to 
 prevent the establishment, or, single-handed, to achieve the 
 abolition of slavery, she has yet not wholly neglected her 
 duty, nor failed of success. 
 
 In the first place, according to the view maintained 
 throughout this Essay, the Church has not power to defy 
 all other forces, and violently change the course of history : 
 the reason being, that only the few are thoroughly religious, 
 and that the course of the world is mainly decided by other 
 motives (usually those of selfishness and interest), which 
 sway men more generally. 
 
 Armed with this assumption, we approach the case of 
 modern slavery, and now see that its foundation was not 
 surprising, since (a) the circumstances were very ex- 
 ceptional ; (/3) the selfish and interested motives over- 
 poweringly strong ; (y) and the conditions specially un- 
 favourable to Christian influence. 
 
 a. The circumstances were exceptional. In other words, 
 they were quite unlike anything in the old countries : and 
 therefore the substitution of free for slave labour in Europe 
 afforded no precedent. Voluntary labour was not to be 
 had : the division of classes was as strong as it always is 
 when it coincides with the division between conquerors and 
 conquered ; and therefore it might seem that both for the 
 supply of food, and for the maintenance of order, a slave- 
 system was the only resource. 
 
 ^. If this seemed politically desirable, it also commended 
 itself to every selfish interest. The conquerors were few, 
 and the mines offered them inexhaustible wealth ; each 
 individual among them might expect a fortune, if he was 
 
 E
 
 66 
 
 allowed to gather this wealth by the employment of slaves, 
 of whom an indefinite supply was secured by the infinite 
 disparity in military skill and equipment, which put the 
 conquered races at the mercy of their victors. These races 
 had themselves enslaved their captives : they could not 
 complain if by a turn of the wheel they shared the fate 
 which they had been accustomed to inflict. They would 
 not work unless compelled : and, if idle, they might be 
 dangerous. Moreover, there was no alternative ; the climate 
 made labour impossible to European constitutions, so that 
 the toil of his own hands, while it brought in but small re- 
 turns, would have exposed the white to almost certain death. 
 The excitement of conquest and adventure disinclined him 
 to a settled and toilsome life : the booty of rich countries 
 made him impatient of the slow profits of industry, and as 
 a conqueror he despised the conquered. Thus avarice, 
 insolence, and pride combined to establish a system which 
 might be plausibly justified even on grounds of prudence. 
 
 y. Lastly, the noise of this wild and turbulent life was 
 no happy sphere for Christian influence. It is curious that 
 in each period of slavery, Christianity has had special difii- 
 culties to encounter in the character of the men with whom 
 she has dealt. In Rome she struggled with men exposed 
 to the hardening and corrupting influences of elaborate 
 civilization and extravagant luxury : in the Middle Ages 
 with the wild, untamed natures which had hardly emerged — 
 they had not emerged — from the condition of barbarians. 
 And now again, having known at Rome and Byzantium 
 the special obstacles which the crowd and conventionalities 
 of a metropolis offer to a reformer, she had to deal in the 
 sixteenth century with the wild licentiousness of distant 
 dependencies, which attracted the criminals and desperadoes 
 of every nation under the sun. Evil travels faster than 
 good: and it is only when life and heat are unusually glowing 
 in the heart that its impulse is strong enough fully to supply
 
 67 
 
 the extremities. The offscourings of civilization, men who 
 hunted Indians with blood-hounds, as masters, and degraded 
 pagan races as slaves, were unpromising material for Christian 
 energy. It is hardly possible not to see here an instance of 
 the rule, that the worst evil is that which the highest good 
 produces by reaction, or itself becomes. The atrocities of 
 American slavery, perhaps, could hardly have been com- 
 mitted by any but those who, having known the light of 
 Christianity and its ideal of mercy, had wilfully turned away 
 to the works of darkness. 
 
 If, in this way, an answer in any degree satisfactory has 
 been given to the difficult question suggested by the exist- 
 ence of American slavery, it only remains to point out what 
 Christianity has done in regard to it, and to credit her with 
 the praises which she rightly deserves. This will be most 
 simply and shortly done by observing how the periods of 
 Christian history coincide with phases in that of slavery. 
 It may be shown that the times of the Church's more active 
 life are those in which slavery was either mitigated or 
 attacked, that the era of darkest iniquity coincided with 
 that of her torpor. Not, of course, that Christianity is 
 guiltless of this lethargy, but only that it is unfair to draw 
 from such a time any inferences as to the power of genuine 
 and active Christianity. 
 
 At starting a paradox arises. The sixteenth century, 
 from which the slavery of the negroes dates, was remarkable 
 for a special development of religious life. Never for 
 centuries had there been a time of so much sincerity and 
 zeal : the new communities and the old Church were 
 animated by the same warm rush of fervent life, and 
 kindled it again by their competition into fresh activity. 
 The spread of conquest and discovery seemed for the time 
 hardly to outstrip the activity of the Church ; Xavier 
 and the Jesuit missionaries were spreading the Gospel in 
 the farthest East : the New Indies of the West swarmed 
 
 F 2
 
 68 
 
 with the cowls of the Franciscans and Dominicans. It 
 seems that if this was the time at which negro slavery was 
 inaugurated the suggested parallel must be quite delusive. 
 The answer is, that this is the truth, but not the whole 
 truth. Negro slavery was established at that time : but 
 by whom ? and why ? By Christian missionaries, for the 
 defence of a helpless people. The fact that Las Casas was 
 the father of negro slavery, is one of the paradoxes of 
 history : but it can hardly deceive any one for a moment, 
 as to the action of the Christianity which he represented. 
 It was, one may say, a pure accident : and the blame of 
 it falls upon the foresight, and not on the humanity, of the 
 apostle of the Indies. It was a political blunder: not a 
 fault. The real question with which Las Casas had to 
 deal, and by the attitude to which the Christianity of his 
 time must be judged, was the treatment of the conquered 
 races of the New Countries. This was no easy task : the 
 converging force of the causes alluded to above, tended 
 almost irresistibly towards a slave system : and the diffi- 
 culty of resistance is proved by the acquiescence of a man 
 so fervent and unflincliing as Las Casas, in the compromise 
 which saved the red man by enslaving the black. Con- 
 sidering these difficulties, the Christianity of the sixteenth 
 century was not unworthy of its name. It shewed itself 
 in popes and ecclesiastics, in statesmen and commanders. 
 Pius II. had already denounced those who entered the 
 missionary settlements of the Guinea Coast, and reduced 
 the neophytes to slavery; in 1537, Paul III. published 
 a bull against all who should in any wise enslave the 
 Indians of the East or West. Among lower ecclesiastics, 
 Las Casas, whose life was spent in voyages between the 
 two worlds for the prosecution of schemes on behalf of the 
 Indians, or in the attempt to realize some of these schemes 
 by practical experiment, was, although the most eminent, 
 by no means the only champion of the natives ; the com-
 
 69 
 
 mission sent out from Spain at Las Casas' instigation was 
 composed of friars ; if there were some of the orders who 
 fell into luxury and sloth, yet many assisted Las Casas, 
 or set on foot the missions which have played so much part 
 in South America. They have been bright spots, when all 
 else has been dark: and have shown that the Cliurch could 
 not only declaim against the iniquities of others, but could 
 set an example of another method, by which she did 
 what slave institutions have professed to do, but have never 
 done : she trained the natives into fitness for a higher grade 
 of religion and civilization. In men of the world we find 
 with even more interest, because with greater surprise, 
 proofs of the influence of Christianity. The vigorous 
 policy with which Ximenes entertained and acted upon 
 the representations of Las Casas, his bold demolition of 
 some of the worst features of the system, his frank de- 
 claration of the free condition of the Indians, were the acts 
 and words of a cardinal, as well as of a statesman. But 
 his policy was maintained in some degree by his successors. 
 The government annulled the repartimientos which Cortes 
 had granted : it issued commissions which produced volu- 
 minous blue books. " It is impossible to peruse them," 
 says one of the few who has done it, " without a deep 
 conviction of the pains taken by the Crown to ascertain 
 the nature of the abuses in the domestic government of the 
 Colonies, and their honest purpose to amend them"." 
 " Unfortunately," he adds, " it was found much easier to 
 get this information, than to profit by it"." The attempt 
 to do so was made in 1542, at the instigation of the in- 
 defatigable Dominican, by the publication of a code : a 
 certain date was fixed at which all slavery was to be 
 abolished : compulsory labour under the repartimiento 
 system, now recognized as a necessity, was limited in 
 amount. Turning from the home governments to the 
 •n Prescott, rem, ii. 228, ii. » Prescott, Peru, ii. 23).
 
 70 
 
 officers whom they sent out, the great Gasca, Viceroy 
 of Peru, himself an ecclesiastic, and once a member of the 
 Council of the Inquisition, is an eminent example of a 
 Christian ruler". Entrusted with the task of re-settling 
 Peru, he published regulations very similar to those just 
 mentioned. His beneficence was attested by the voluntary 
 testimonial which the Indians pressed upon him at his 
 departure. And here, at least, the good was more than 
 temporary : the Government steadily persevered in its 
 charitable designs, and no discontent among subjects has 
 ever been more creditable to the Government than that 
 which was excited among the Peruvian Spaniards " by the 
 constancy of the Audience in enforcing the benevolent 
 restrictions as to the personal services of the natives." 
 Thus the humane policy of the Spanish Government was 
 no temporary result of the gentle and pious disposition of 
 Isabella, but was maintained by Charles V., and bore, 
 perhaps, its best fruits in the stern reign of Philip II. 
 Even among the adventurers who led the conquests, we 
 have an eminent example of the authority of Christian 
 principles. Cortes had, as has been said, sanctioned the 
 principle of repartimientos, which the Government after- 
 wards fruitlessly annulled : but he witnessed by the pro- 
 fessions of reluctance P with which he accompanied his 
 sanction to the religious feeling of the time, and he gave 
 it practical effect in the regulations "J by which he strove to 
 prevent the worst abuses of the system. One of these 
 rules, charging the master with the duty of supplying 
 religious insti'uction to his Indians, proves, like his suc- 
 cessful appeal to the Home Government for a body of pious 
 and earnest clergy to convert the JMexicans, the character 
 of the motives which actuated him. 
 
 The difficulty with regard to the sixteenth century is, 
 
 ° Prescott, Peru, ii. 414. i> Prescott, Mexico, iii. 232, 3. 
 
 ■1 Prescott, Mexico, iii. 2:33.
 
 71 
 
 therefore, one which vanishes on examination. The great 
 feature of the time was the conquest of the great countries 
 of the new world : the great problem how to deal with their 
 inhabitants. The colonists, as might have been expected 
 from their character, tried to give that problem the solution 
 which passion and avarice suggested ; but Christian govern- 
 ments, and the representatives of the Church, addressed 
 themselves to it in a manner not unworthy of Christianity. 
 If, while so absorbed, they allowed another evil, of which 
 it was impossible to foresee the future proportions to creep 
 in, this can hardly be a matter of surprise, still less of blame. 
 The government of Ximenes or of Gasca would have known 
 how to deal with negro slavery in its turn, had that come up 
 for settlement during their tenure of power. And though 
 unfortunately the spirit which had inspired them did not 
 live in their successors, still, while yet the sixteenth century 
 continued, the strength of the prejudice against slavery in 
 Christian Europe is avouched by the history of the begin- 
 nings of the slave trade. Montesquieu says"^, that Louis 
 XIII. of France, when he made his edict, which provided 
 that all Africans coming into his colonies should be made 
 slaves, was only reconciled to the step by the argument that 
 this method opened the best prospect of their conversion; 
 an argument which had already imposed on Ferdinand and 
 Isabella, and which had to be urged upon the wretched 
 Louis XV. before even he could be induced to tamper with 
 the principle that slaves landing in France should be made 
 free. Queen Elizabeth, when she heard of the beginning 
 of the slave trade by Hawkins, raised her protest against it. 
 There followed a dark and gloomy time. At home the 
 glow of religious enthusiasm, after being kindled for a time 
 during the seventeenth century into a devouring flame by 
 the fuel of political animosity, had burnt itself out, and a 
 time of deadness, torpor, and conventionality succeeded, in 
 ' Esp. des Lois W. 4.
 
 72 
 
 which infidelity only spread the more certainly and easily, 
 because a superficial veneer of Christianity deceived men 
 into the belief that all was well with religion, as of old. 
 Lethargy and indifierence at home were naturally accom- 
 panied by inaction abroad. The Church of England per- 
 mitted cities to spread and population to increase, without 
 rousing herself to consider and meet their spiritual wants : 
 no wonder that the American Church had to go unprovided 
 with an Episcopate, until, despairing of help from England, 
 they turned to seek the consecration of Bishop Seabury 
 from the despised Episcopalians of Scotland. The Christian 
 apologist will not be surprised, he will even in a sense 
 rejoice, to find that in this period there was little energy 
 to remedy or abolish slavery. Unopposed by any active 
 Christian efforts, it developed into a system so atrocious 
 that no plea of exaggeration can possibly palliate it, and so 
 deep-rooted that it has hardly yet given way. Yet we enter- 
 tain with pleasure one or two reflections upon a period which 
 otherwise we willingly dismiss. The first is, that all through 
 this tiuie the opinion of the Christian world was in theory 
 hostile to slavery : such opinion, for instance, is that which 
 finds expression in literature. Of poets and writers of fic- 
 tion, Clarkson has quoted Steele, Pope, Thomson, Savage, 
 Shenstone, Cowper, and Sterne ; among philosophers, 
 Hutcheson, Montesquieu, Smith, and Paley, as lifting their 
 voice against it. Not that all this came to anything, the 
 protests were worthless so far as action went ; but they shew 
 the fibre, so to say, of the ideas congenial to a society bred 
 in the traditions of many centuries of Christianity. The 
 second reflection is, that if the connection between Christian 
 influence and attacks upon slavery is supported by the ab- 
 sence of the latter, during a time when Christianity was 
 singularly sluggish, the proof seems almost complete upon 
 finding that such exceptions as these existed precisely 
 in those quarters in which the flame of true Christianity
 
 73 
 
 still burnt most brightly. We have spoken of the missions 
 of the Jesuits and others abroad : if we look to England, 
 the most genuine Christianity is to be found among the 
 Nonconformist bodies, the Quakers, and afterwards the 
 Methodists. Now the Quakers, from the time of their 
 foundation as a society till the abolition, set themselves 
 with increasing steadiness to oppose slavery. Fox, their 
 founder, preached to the planters of the West Indies, ex- 
 horted them to be merciful to their slaves and release them 
 in due time ; his companion, Edmonson, had addressed the 
 negroes with success, and made a fair beginning in the work 
 of bringing them to religion and civilization, only to bring 
 down his own arrest, and an act forbidding Quakers to take 
 negroes to their religious meetings. This policy, inaugu- 
 rated by their founders, was maintained by a series of discus- 
 sions and resolutions on the part of their general assembly 
 in England, which were repeated at intervals during the 
 first three quarters of the eighteenth century. Their 
 phraseology, when they speak of those "redeemed by one 
 Saviour," " made equally with ourselves for immortality," 
 testifies that they drew their charity from its one perennial 
 source. Their brethren in America were not less zealous. 
 From 1688 onwards, thej worked their way steadily to a 
 clearer acceptance and bolder enunciation of the necessity 
 of abandoning slavery. Pennsylvania began the protest — 
 it was taken up by other parts; in 1754 they publiished 
 a general manifesto which takes the golden rule for its 
 principle. Whatever their faults, the Quakers have never 
 failed in dealing trenchantly with society and opinion when 
 these have seemed to them to conflict with religious prin- 
 ciple : having accepted the principle, they did not shrink 
 from carrying it out; in 1774 they enacted that any Quaker 
 holding a slave should be excluded from the society, and by 
 1787 there remained none to whom the sentence would have 
 applied. To the same effect, in regard to the present argu-
 
 74 
 
 ment, are the protests of Wesley expressed in his " Thoughts 
 oa Slavery," and frequently introduced into his sermons : 
 the denunciations of Whitfield, who had been in the slave 
 countries, against the cruelties there practised : or, going 
 back to a somewhat earlier period, the fact that Massa- 
 chusetts, in its origin the most religious of the American 
 colonies, and in all its history and institutions bearing wit- 
 ness to its origin, was the first of all the States to raise her 
 voice against slavery. As early as 1645 its general court 
 rescued a negro who had been "fraudulently and injuri- 
 ously brought from Guinea %" and returned him to his 
 native country; in 1701 the representatives of Boston were 
 requested to promote action with a view to 'putting a period 
 to negro slavery*,' and in 1712 it was forbidden in a law, 
 which seems nevertheless to have required repetition in a 
 more complete form in 1788^. 
 
 Thus in secular opinion however listless, and in active 
 though isolated religious efforts, the elements of a greater 
 movement already existed. The century did not close 
 before the day of awakening came. The noise and horrors 
 of the French Revolution must not blind us to the cha- 
 racter of the general movement, of which that was but one 
 and the most lamentable of the effects. In truth, in the 
 last quarter of the eighteenth century, it seemed that the 
 evil brought its own remedy ; society woke in indignation 
 against itself, it rose in rebellion against its own lethargy : 
 and the movement of enthusiasm for reform which seized 
 the upper and ruling classes in France, in the ten years 
 preceding the Revolution, would have won a larger share of 
 the attention of history if it had not come too late : the 
 voice of thunder, in which the lower people spoke their 
 protest against society, drowned the candid self-accusations 
 by which society was eagerly exposing its own defects. 
 
 • Holmes, Anil, of America, i. '278. • id. ib. 48 J. 
 
 " Id. ii. 368.
 
 75 
 
 The greatness of this convulsion, that which, liowever 
 long history may last, will make it yield to none in interest 
 and importance, lay in its universality. Thus, although it 
 truly brought with it a violent outburst of infidelity, it 
 seemed that religion roused itself in presence of the danger. 
 Aggressive and violent unbelief was met by a more vigorous 
 assertion of Christian faith. These considerations render 
 the great crisis, which took place coincidently in the history 
 of slavery, more intelligible. The year 1787 has already 
 been mentioned, but it was marked by more than one event. 
 Two years before the outbreak of the Revolution it bears 
 evidence of the great upheaving. In that year the Penn- 
 sylvanian Abolition Association, containing Quakers and 
 others, was extended and made general ; while, on this side 
 of the water, the little Quaker Society, formed in 1784, 
 was expanded under the auspices of Wilberforce into a 
 general association of all interested in the subject. 
 
 It is unnecessary to pursue the steps which ended in the abo- 
 lition of the trade and the Acts of Emancipation, or to dwell 
 on the motives to which those acts were due. Undoubtedly, 
 an increased zeal for political liberty roused a righteous 
 indignation against a gigantic system of odious tyranny. 
 But, on the one hand, ancient history, proving that this 
 affection for liberty may well coexist with a slave system, 
 enforces the belief that the more comprehensive and philan- 
 thropic character of its modern form is the outcome of a 
 society saturated more deeply than it will acknowledge by 
 Christian influence : and, on the other hand, the records of 
 Wilberforce and his friends (to which public attention has 
 recently been again called) show that where it is possible 
 most definitely and directly to trace the motives which 
 brought about the change, they prove to be those of tiie 
 simplest and purest Christianity. The apologists of slavery 
 have sneered at the sight pf a great nation abolishing, amid 
 lofty religious professions, an institution which every sound
 
 76 
 
 argument of cool reason would defend, and which it was no 
 sacrifice to them to abandon. Grant that every argument 
 would defend it, that the nation was misled by its con- 
 science, still the glory of the act, as a public acknowledge- 
 ment of the claim of duty in the sphere of politics, remains 
 as certainly as the successful resistance of interests for twenty 
 years vindicates its self-denying character. 
 
 A word remains to be said on the defences set up for 
 slavery within recent times. They bear testimony to Chris- 
 tianity in more ways than one. The pleas which satisfied 
 Louis XIII. and Isabella have been repeated, and the slave 
 trade has been defended for its missionary^, slave institu- 
 tions for their educational value. Or, the Bible has been 
 ransacked for arguments ; and not only has Noah's curse 
 been made a ground for the perpetual degradation of the 
 negro race, but St. Paul has been quoted on behalf of the 
 fugitive slave laws. Because (as has here been shown) 
 Christianity was not revolutionary, therefore every existing 
 institution, however iniquitous, has claimed the right to 
 dress itself in the livery of her protection. The value of 
 these pleas has not been discussed here ; that has been done 
 too recently and too well. They might have weight, if 
 urged to shew that a hasty or sweeping measure, if for 
 other reasons undesirable or dangerous, is not imposed by 
 any intemperate dogmatism on the part of Christianity : 
 urged, as they commonly are, in defence of the indefinite 
 perpetuation of a system like that of the American slave 
 states, they must be ascribed either to gross hypocrisy or 
 gross self-deception. But they exhibit irrefragable proofs 
 of the force of Christian influence. A party never testifies 
 to the power of its adversaries so clearly as when it begins 
 to take their principles, and to attempt by paradoxical 
 inferences to turn them into the grounds of its own defence. 
 
 " V. Granier tie Cassagnac. v. aux Antilles, ii. 480.
 
 • 77 
 
 These men pay homage in another way when they find it 
 necessary, in making use of Aristotle's old doctrine that 
 slavery is justified by the existence of certain races natu- 
 rally slave, to seek a proof of this from the evidence of 
 anatomy, ethnology, and other sciences. Christianity has 
 planted the notion of the unity and brotherhood of men 
 so deep, that these philosophers have much to do before 
 they can eradicate it. 
 
 Public opinion is now, on the whole, hostile to slavery ; 
 yet there are not wanting indications that the reaction from 
 the enthusiasm for liberty, in the direction of despotism, 
 has been accompanied by a tendency to regard the oppo- 
 sition to slavery as sentimental, and to rehabilitate the old 
 theory that these races require the beneficent care of owners 
 to lead them by gentle compulsion to higher things''. It 
 is impossible to foresee how much this opinion may gain 
 ground: to be sure that there will be no failure in the 
 active charity which has in so great degree already tri- 
 umphed over slavery, nor a reaction of public sentiment 
 in its favour. If this should prove to be the case, the 
 great abolition movement of the first half of the nineteenth 
 century would only be another instance of that which seems 
 to be the moral of the whole history — that the influence 
 of the Church over the world at large is only at excep- 
 tional moments strong enough to produce great results, 
 and is always liable to turn out more specious than real. 
 Perhaps enemies and friends have alike missed thei guid- 
 ance which the declaration, " that many are called but 
 few chosen," affords in the study of Ecclesiastical History; 
 It is vain to suppose that Christianity can exercise her in- 
 fluence upon the world, except through the disciples who 
 are in heart and will wholly hers ; vain to dream that while 
 these are, as they must be, few, she can sway the world 
 
 * Pall Mall Gazette, March 13, 18C9.
 
 78 
 
 or shape its course. Any success over the mass of man- 
 kind is a matter for joy ; but such success is not to be 
 generally expected, nor its absence regarded as an evidence 
 of failure.

 
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