It did much to encourage virtue, but little or nothing to restrain vice. A relish and taste for virtue was formed and cultivated, which attracted many to its practice; but in this, as in the case of all our other higher tastes, a nature that was once thoroughly vitiated became altogether incapable of appreciating it, and the transformation of such a nature, which was continually effected by Christianity, was confessedly beyond the power of philosophy. But the habit of dilating chiefly on the darker side ot human nature, while it has contributed much to the regenerating efficacy of Christian teaching, has not been 1 There is a remarkable passage of Celsus, on the impossibility of restoring a nature once thoroughly depraved, quoted by Origen in his answer to him.
Habitually measuring character by its aberrations, theologians, in their estimates of those strong and passionate natures in which great virtues are balanced by great failings, have usually fallen into a signal injustice, which is the more inexcusable, because in their own writings the psalms of David are a conspicuous proof of what a noble, tender, and passionate nature could survive, even in an adulterer and a murderer.
Partly, too, through this habit of operating through the sense of sin, and partly from a desire to show that man is in an abnormal and dislocated condition, they have continually propounded distorted and degrading views of human nature, have represented it as altogether under the empire of evil, and have sometimes risen to such a height of extravagance as to pronounce the very virtues of the heathen to be of the nature of sin.
But nothing can be more certain than that that which is exceptional and distinctive in human nature is not its vice, but its excellence. It is not the sensuality, cruelty, selfishness, passion, or envy, which are all displayed in equal or greater degrees in different departments of the animal world; it is that moral nature which enables man apparently, alone of all created beings, to classify his emotions, to oppose the current of his desires, and to aspire after moral perfection.
Nor is it less certain that in civilised, and therefore developed man, the good greatly preponderates over the evil. Benevolence is more common than cruelty; the sight of suffering more readily produces pity than joy; gratitude, not ingratitude, is the normal. The sympathies of man naturally follow heroism and goodness, and vice itself is usually but an exaggeration or distortion of tendencies that are in their own nature perfectly innocent.
But these exaggerations of human depravity, which. The sense of the sin was not yet accompanied by a denial of the goodness that exists in man. Christianity was regarded rather as a redemption from error than from sin,1 and it is a significant fact that the epithet 'well deserving,' which the Pagans usually put upon their tombs, was also the favourite inscription in the Christian catacombs. The Pelagian controversy, the teaching of St. Augustine, and the progress of asceticism, gradually introduced the doctrine of the utter depravity of man, which has proved in later times the fertile source of degrading superstition.
In sustaining and defining the notion of sin, the early Church employed the machinery of an elaborate legislation. Constant communion with the Church was regarded as of the very highest importance. Participation in the Sacrament was believed to be essential to eternal life. At a very early period it was given to infants, and at least as early as the time of St.
Cyprian we find the practice universal in the Church, and pronounced by at least some of the Fathers to be ordinarily necessary to their salvation. It is curious that those very noisy contemporary divines who profess to resuscitate the manners of the primitive Church, and who lay so much stress on the minutest ceremonial observances, have left unpractised what was undoubtedly one of the most universal, and was believed to be one of the most important, of the institutions of early Christianity. Bingham shows that the administration of the Eucharist to infants continued in France till the twelfth century.
At first the Sacrament was usually received every day; but this custom soon declined in the Eastern Church, and at last passed away in the West. From these circumstances there very naturally arose a vast system of moral discipline. It was always acknowledged that men could only rightly approach the sacred table in certain moral dispositions, and it was very soon added that the commission of crimes should be expiated by a period of penance, before access to the communion was granted. A multitude of offences, of very various degrees of magnitude, such as prolonged abstinence from religious services, prenuptial unchastity, prostitution, adultery, the adoption of the profession of gladiator or actor, idolatry, the betrayal of Christians to persecutors, and paideristia or unnatural love, were specified, to each of which a definite spiritual penalty was annexed.
The lowest penalty consisted of deprivation of the Eucharist for a few weeks. More serious offenders were deprived of it for a year, or for ten years, or until the hour of death, while in some cases the sentence amounted to the greater excommunication, or the deprivation of the Eucharist for ever. During the period of penance the penitent was compelled to abstain from the marriage bed, and from all other pleasures, and to spend his time chiefly in religious exercises. Before he was readmitted to communion, he was accustomed publicly,, before the assembled Christians, to appear clad in sackcloth, with ashes strewn upon his head, with his hair shaven off, and thus to throw himself at the feet of the minister, to confess 1 Plin.
No Christian, on pain of being himself excommunicated, might eat with him or speak with him. He must live hated and alone in this world, and be prepared for damnation in the next.
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Although confession was not yet an habitual and universally obligatory rite, although it was only exacted in cases of notorious sins, it is manifest that we have in this system, not potentially or in germ, but in full developed activity, an ecclesiastical despotism of the most crushing order.
But although this recognition of the right of the clergy to withhold from men what was believed to be essential to their salvation, laid the foundation of the worst superstitions of Rome, it had, on the other hand, a very valuable moral effect. Every system of law is a system of education, for it fixes in the minds of men certain conceptions of right and wrong, and of the proportionate enormity of different crimes; and no legislation was enforced with more solemnity, or appealed more directly to the religious feelings, than the penitential discipline of the Church.
More than, perhaps, any other single agency, it confirmed that conviction of the enormity of sin, and of the retribution that follows it, which was one of the two great levers by which Christianity acted upon mankind. Tertullian gives a graphic description of the public penances, Doe Pudicit. The Platonist exhorted men to imitate God, the Stoic, to follow reason, the Christian, to the love of Christ. It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which through all the changes of eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love, has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions, has been not only the highest pattern of virtue but the strongest incentive to its practice, and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
This has indeed been the wellspring of whatever is best and purest in the Christian life. Amid all the sins and failings, amid all the priestcraft and persecution and fanaticism that have defaced the Church, it has preserved, in the character and example of its Founder, an enduring principle of regeneration. Perfect love knows no rights.
It creates a boundless, uncalculating self-abnegation that transforms the character, and is the parent of every virtue. Side by side with the terrorism and the superstitions of dogmatism, there have ever existed in Christianity those who would echo the wish of St. Theresa, that she could blot out both heaven and hell, to. It was shown by the martyrs who sank beneath the fangs of wild beasts, extending to the last moment their arms in the form of the cross they loved;2 who ordered their chainw to be buried with them as the insignia of their warfare;2 who looked with joy upon their ghastly wounds, because they had been received for Christ;3 who welcomed death as the bridegroom welcomes the bride, because it would bring them near to Him.
Felicitas was seized with the pangs of childbirth as she lay in prison awaiting the hour of martyrdom, and as her sufferings extorted from her a cry, one who stood by said, ' If you now suffer so much, what will it be when you are thrown to wild beasts? Melania had lost both her husband and her two sons, kneeling by the bed where the remains of those she loved were laid, the childless widow exclaimed, 'Lord, I shall serve thee more humbly and readily for being eased of the weight thou hast taken from me.
Augustine as ' the 1 Eusebius, HI. Chrysostom tells this of St. Agatha, that as she lay in the prison cell, torn by the instruments of torture, St. Peter came to her in the form of a Christian physician, and offered to dress her wounds; but she refused, saying that she wished for no physician but Christ. Peter, in the name of that Celestial Physician, commanded her wounds to close, and her body became whole as before. In one respect we can scarcely realise its effects upon the early Church. The sense of the fixity of natural laws is now so deeply implanted in the minds of men, that no truly educated person, whatever may be his religious opinions, seriously believes that all the more startling phenomena around him-storms, earthquakes, invasions, or famines-are results of isolated acts of supernatural power, and are intended to affect some human interest.
But by the early Christians all these things were directly traced to the Master they so dearly loved. The result of this conviction was a state of feeling we can now barely understand. A great poet, in lines which are among the noblest in English literature, has spoken of one who had died as united to the all-pervading soul of nature, the grandeur and the tenderness, the beauty and the passion of his being blending with the kindred elements of the universe, his voice heard in all its melodies, his spirit a presence to be felt and known, a part of the one plastic energy that permeates and animates the globe.
Something of this kind, but of a far more vivid and real character, was the belief of the early Christian world. The universe, to them, was transfigured by love. All its phenomena, all its catastrophes were S' Definitio brevis et vera virtutis; ordo est amoris. Christianity offered a deeper consolation than any prospect of endless life, or of millennial glories. It taught the weary, the sorrowing, and the lonely, to look up to heaven and to say, ' Thou, God, carest for me. There can indeed be little doubt that, for nearly two hundred years after its establishment in Europe, the Christian community exhibited a moral purity which, if it has been equalled, has never for any long period been surpassed.
Completely separated from the Roman world that was around them, abstaining alike from political life, from appeals to the tribunals, and from military occupations; looking forward continually to the immediate advent of their Master, and the destruction of the empire in which they dwelt, and animated by all the fervour of a young religion, the Christians found within themselves a whole order of ideas and feelings sufficiently powerful to guard them from the contamination of their age.
In their general bearing towards society, and in the nature and minuteness of their scruples, they probably bore a greater resemblance to the Quakers than to any other existing sect. The scruple of Ter. The leading features of that period may be shortly told. From the death of Marcus Aurelius, about which time Christianity assumed an important influence in the Roman world, the decadence of the empire was rapid and almost uninterrupted. The first Christian emperor transferred his capital to a new city, uncontaminated by the traditions and the glories of Paganism; and he there founded an empire which derived all its ethics from Christian sources, and which continued in existence for about eleven hundred years.
Of that Byzantine Empire the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a si. Though very cruel and very sensual, there have been times when cruelty assumed tullian De Corond about Christians wearing, in military festivals, laurel wreaths, because laurel was called after Daphne, the lover of Apollo, was much of the same kind as that of the Quakers about recognising the gods Tuesco or Woden by speaking of Tuesday or Wednesday. On the other hand, the ecclesiastical aspects and the sacramental doctrines of the Church were the extreme opposites of Quakerism.
The Byzantine Empire was preeminently the age of treachery. Its vices were the vices of men who had ceased to be brave without learning to be virtuous. Without patriotism, without the fruition or desire of liberty, after the first paroxysms of religious agitation, without genius or intellectual activity; slaves, and willing slaves, in both their actions and their thoughts immersed in sensuality and in the most frivolous pleasures, the people only emerged from their listlessness when some theological subtlety, or some rivalry in the chariot races, stimulated them into frantic riots.
They exhibited all the externals of advanced civilisation.
They possessed knowledge; they had continually before them the noble literature of ancient Greece, instinct with the loftiest heroism; but that literature, which afterwards did so much to revivify Europe, could fire the degenerate Greeks with no spark or semblance of nobility. The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides.
After the conversion of Constantine there was no prince in any section of the Roman Empire altogether so depraved, or at least so shameless, as Nero or Heliogabalus; but the Byzantine Empire can show none bearing the faintest resemblance to Antonine or Marcus Aurelius, while the nearest approximation t-o lat character at Rome was furnished by the emperor Julian, who contemptuously abandoned the Christian faith. At last the Mahommedan invasion terminated the long decrepitude of the Eastern Empire.
ConAtantinople sank beneath the Crescent, its inhabitants. The Asiatic churches had already perished.
The Christian faith, planted in the dissolute cities of Asia Minor, had produced many fanatical ascetics and a few illustrious theologians, but it had no renovating effect upon the people at large. It introduced among them a principle of interminable and implacable dissension, but it scarcely tempered in any appreciable degree their luxury or their sensuality.
The frenzy of pleasure continued unabated, and in a great part of the empire it seemed indeed only to have attained its climax after the triumph of Christianity. The condition of the Western Empire was somewhat different. Not quite a century after the conversion of Constantine, the Imperial city was captured by Alaric, and a long series of barbarian invasions at last dissolved the whole framework of Roman society, while the barbarians themselves, having adopted the Christian faith and submitted absolutely to the Christian priests, the Church, which remained the guardian of all the treasures of antiquity, was left with a virgin soil to realise her ideal of human excellence.
Nor did she fall short of what might be expected. She exercised for many centuries an almost absolute empire over the thoughts and actions of mankind, and created a civilisation which was permeated in every part with ecclesiastical influence. And the dark ages, as the period of Catholic ascendancy is justly called, do undoubtedly display many features of great and genuine excellence.
In active benevolence, in the spirit of reverence, in loyalty, in co-operative habits, they far transcend the noblest ages of Pagan antiquity, while in that humanity which shrinks from the infliction of suffering, they were superior to Roman, and in their respect for chastity, to Greek civilisation. On the other hand,. They had their full share of tumult, anarchy, injustice, and war, and they should probably be placed, in all intellectual virtues, lower than any other period in the history of mankind.
A boundless intolerance of all divergence of opinion was united with an equally boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate fraud that could favour received opinions. Credulity being taught as a virtue, and all conclusions dictated by authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human mind, which for many centuries almost suspended its action, and was only broken by the scrutinising, innovating, and free-thinking habits that accompanied the rise of the industrial republics in Italy.
Few men who are not either priests or monks would not have preferred to live in the best days of the Athenian or of the Roman republics, in the age of Augustus or in the age of the Antonines, rather than in any period that elapsed between the triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth century. It is indeed difficult to conceive any clearer proof than was furnished by the history of the twelve hundred years after the conversion of Constantine, that while theology has undoubtedly introduced into the world certain elements and principles of good, scarcely if at all known to antiquity, while its value as a tincture or modifying influence in society can hardly be overrated, it is by no means for the advantage of mankind that in the form which the Greek and Catholic Churches present, it should become a controlling arbiter of civilisation.
It is often said that the Roman world before Constantine was in a period of rapid decay, that the traditions and. In all this there is much truth; but when we remember that in the Byzantine Empire the renovating power of theology was tried in a new capital free from Pagan traditions, and for more than one thousand years unsubdued by barbarians, and that in the West the Church, for at least seven hundred years after the shocks of the invasions had subsided, exercised a control more absolute than any other moral or intellectual agency has ever attained, it will appear, I think, that the experiment was very sufficiently tried.
It is easy to make a catalogue of the glaring vices of antiquity, and to contrast them with the pure morality of Christian writings; but if we desire to form a jusi estimate of the Lealised improvement, we must compare the classical and ecclesiastical civilisations as wholes, and must observe in each case not only the vices that were repressed, but also the degree and variety of positive excellence attained.
In the first two centuries of the Christian Church the moral elevation was extremely high, and was continually appealed to as a proof of the divinity of the creed. In the century before the conversion of Constantine, a marked depression was already manifest. The two centuries after Constantine are uniformly represented by the Fathers as a period of general and scandalous vice. The ecclesiastical civilisation that followed, though not without its distinctive merits, assuredly supplies no justification of the common boast about the regeneration of society by the Church.
That the civilisation of the last three centuries has risen in. Mechanical inventions, the habits of industrialism, the discoveries of physical science, the improvements of government, the expansion of literature, the traditions of Pagan antiquity, have all a distinguished place, while, the more fully its history is investigated, the more clearly two capital truths are disclosed.
The first is that the influence of theology having for centuries numbed and' paralysed the whole intellect of Christian Europe, the revival, which forms the starting-point of our modern civilisation, was mainly due to the fact that two spheres of intellect still remained uncontrolled by the sceptre of Catholicism. The Pagan literature of antiquity, and the Mahommedan schools of science, were the chief agencies in resuscitating the dormant energies of Christendom.
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The second fact, which I have elsewhere endeavoured to establish in detail, is that during more than three centuries the decadence of theological influence has been one of the most invariable signs and measures of our progress. In medicine, physical science, commercial interests, politics, and even ethics, the reformer has been confronted with theological affirmations which barred his way, which were all defended as of vital importance, and were all in turn compelled to yield before the secularising influence of civilisation.
We have here, then, a problem of deep interest and importance, which I propose to investigate in the present chapter. We have to inquire why it was that a religion which was not more remarkable for the beauty of its moral teaching than for the power with which it acted upon mankind, and which during the last few centuries. The question is not one of languid or imperfect action, but of conflicting agencies.
In the vast and complex organism of Catholicity there were some parts which acted with admirable force in improving and elevating mankind. There were others which had a directly opposite effect. The first aspect in which Christianity presented itself to the world was as a declaration of the fraternity of men in Christ. Considered as immortal beings, destined for the extremes of happiness-or of misery, and united to one another by a special community of redemption, the first and most manifest duty of a Christian man was to look upon his fellow-men as sacred beings, and from this notion grew up the eminently Christian idea of the sanctity of all human life.
I have already endeavoured to show-and the fact is of such capital importance in meeting the common objections to the reality of natural moral perceptions, that I venture, at the risk of tediousness, to recur to it-that nature does not tell man that it is wrong to slay without provocation his fellowmen. Not to dwell upon those early stages of barbarism in which the higher faculties of human nature are still undeveloped, and almost in the condition of embryo, it is an historical fact, beyond all dis'ie,that refined, and even moral societies, have existed, in which the slaughter of men of some particular class or nation has been regarded with no more compunction than the slaughter of animals in the chase.
The early Greeks, in their dealings with the barbarians; the Romans, in their dealings with gladiators, and, in some periods of their history, with slaves; the Spaniards, in their dealings with Indians;. In the days of the Tudors, the best Englishmen delighted in what we should now deem the most barbarous sports, and it is absolutely certain that in antiquity men of genuine humanity-tender relations, loving friends, charitable neighbours-men in whose eyes the murder of a fellow-citizen would have appeared as atrocious as in our own, frequented, instituted, and applauded gladiatorial games, or counselled without a scruple the exposition of infants.
But it is, as I conceive, a complete confusion of thought to imagine, as is so commonly done, that any accumulation of facts of this nature throws the smallest doubt upon the reality of innate moral perceptions. All that the intuitive moralist asserts is that we know by nature that there is a distinction between humanity and cruelty, that the first belongs to the higher or better part of our nature, and that it is our duty to cultivate it.
The standard of the age, which is itself determined by the general condition of society, con1 See the masterly description of the relations of the English to the Irish in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in Froude's History of England, ch. Now, there is no fact more absolutely certain, than that nations and ages which have differed most widely as to the standard have been perfectly unanimous as to the excellence of humanity. Now, it was one of the most important services of Christianity, that besides quickening greatly our benevolent affections, it definitely and dogmatically asserted the sinfulness of all destruction of human.
The influence of Christianity in this respect began with the very earliest stage of human life. The practice of abortion was one to which few persons in antiquity attached any deep feeling of condemnation. I have noticed in a former chapter that the physiological theory that the foetus did not become a living creature till the hour of birth, had some influence on the judgments passed upon this practice; and even where this theory was not generally held, it is easy to account for the prevalence of the act.
The death of an unborn child does not appeal very powerfully to the feeling of compassion, and men who had not yet attained any strong sense of the sanctity of human life, who believed that they might regulate their conduct on these matters by utilitarian views, according to the general interest of the community, might very readily conclude that the prevention of birth was in many cases an act of mercy. In Greece, Aristotle not only countenanced the practice, but even desired that it should be enforced by law, when population had exceeded certain assigned limits.
A long chain of writers, both Pagan and Christian, represent the practice as avowed and almost universal. They describe it as resulting, not simply from licentiousness or from poverty, but even from so slight a motive as SSee on the views of Aristotle, Labourt, Recherches historiques sur les Enifants trouves Paris, , p. They speak of a mother who had never destroyed her unborn offspring as deserving of signal praise, and they assure us that the frequency of the crime was such that it gave rise to a regular profession. At the same time, while Ovid, Seneca, Favorinus the Stoic of Arles, Plutarch, and Juvenal; all speak of abortion as general and notorious, they all speak of it as unquestionably criminal.
The language of the Christians from the very beginning was very different. With unwavering consistency and with 1 'Nunc uterum vitiat que vult formosa videri, Raraque in hoc vevo est, que velit esse parens. The same writer has devoted one of his elegies ii. It was not without dangers, and Ovid says, ' Sepe suos utero que necat ipsa perit. Favorinus, in a remarkable passage Aulus Gellius, Noct.
Juvenal has some wellknown and emphatic lines on the subject: SSed jacet aurato vix nulla puerpera lecto; Tantum artes hujus, tantum medicamina possunt, Que steriles facit, atque homines in ventre necandos Conducit. There are also many allusions to it in the Christian writers. Thus Minucius Felix Octavius, xxx. Sunt que in ipsis visceribus medicaminibus epotis, originem futuri hominis extinguant et parricidium faciant antequam pariant. In the penitential discipline of the Church, abortion was placed in the same category as infanticide, and the stern sentences to which the guilty person was subject imprinted on the minds of Christians, more deeply than any mere exhortations, a sense of the enormity of the crime.
By the Council of Ancyra the guilty mother was excluded from the Sacrament till the very hour of death, and though this penalty was soon reduced, first to ten and afterwards to seven years' penitence,' the offence still ranked among the gravest in the legislation of the Church. In one very remarkable way the reforms of Christianity in this sphere were powerfully sustained by a doctrine which is perhaps the most revolting in the whole theology of the Fathers.
To the Pagans, even when condemning abortion and infanticide, these crimes appeared comparatively trivial, because the victims seemed very insignificant and their sufferings very slight. The death of an adult man who is struck down in the midst of his enterprise and his hopes, who is united by ties of love or friendship to multitudes around him, and whose departure causes a perturbation and a pang to the society in which he has moved, excites feelings very different from any produced by the painless extinction of a new-born infant, which, having scarcely touched the earth, has known none of its cares and very little of its love.
But to the theologian this infant life possessed a fearful significance. The moment, they taught, the foetus in the womb acquired animation, it became an immortal being, destined, even if it died unborn, to be raised again on the last day, responsible for the sin of Adam, and doomed, if it perished without baptism, to be excluded for ever from heaven 1 See Labourt, Reclzerchies sur les Enfans trouves, p. It is probably, in a considerable degree, to this doctrine that we owe in the first instance the healthy sense of the value and sanctity of infant life which so broadly distinguishes Christian from Pagan societies, and which is now so thoroughly incorporated with our moral feelings as to be independent of all doctrinal changes.
That which appealed so powerfully to the compassion of the early and mediaeval Christians, in the fate of the murdered infants, was not that they died, but that they commonly died unbaptised; and the criminality of abortion was immeasurably aggravated when it was believed to involve, not only the extinction of a transient life, but also the damnation of an immortal soul. Quia diuturnam postquam incarnationem suscepit anima quamvis ad nativitatis lucem minime pervenisset, patitur poenam, quia sine sacramento regenerationis abortivo modo tradita est ad inferos.
The first foundling hospital of which we have undoubted record is that founded at Milan, by a man named Datheus, in A. Muratori has preserved Antich. There is a story told of a Queen of Portugal sister to Henry V. Ferdinand that, being in childbirth, her life was despaired of unless she took a medicine which would accelerate the birth but probably sacrifice the life of the child.
She answered that 'she would not purchase her temporal life by the eternal salvation of her son. Stung by remorse, the murderer fled to the desert, and passed the remainder of his life in constant penance and prayer. At last, after many years, the voice of God told him that he had been forgiven the murder of the woman. But yet his end was a clouded one. He never could obtain an assurance that he had been forgiven the death of the child. The natural history of this crime is somewhat peculiar. In nations that have passed out of the stage of barbarism, but are still rude and simple in their habits, the practice of infanticide is usually rare; but unlike 1 Tillemont, Mlmoires pour servira i l'Histoire ecclsiastique Paris, tome x.
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There are also many details on the subject in Godefroy's Commentary to the laws about children in the Theodosian Code, in Malthus On Population, in Edward's tract On the State of Slavery in the Early and Middle Ages of Christianity, and in most ecclesiastical histories. Regarding the community as a whole, they clearly saw that it is in the highest degree for the interests of society that the increase of population should be very jealously restricted, and that the State should be as far as possible free from helpless and unproductive members; and they therefore concluded that the 1 It must not, however, be inferred from this that infanticide increases in direct proportion to the unchastity of a nation.
Probably the condition of civilised society in which it is most common, is where a large amount of actual unchastity coexists with very strong social condemnation of the sinner, and where, in consequence, there is an intense anxiety to conceal the fall. A recent writer on Spain has noticed the almost complete absence of infanticide in that country, and has ascribed it to the great leniency of public opinion towards female frailty. Foundling hospitals, also, greatly influence the history of infanticide; but the mortality in them was long so great that it may be questioned whether they have diminished the number of the deaths, though they have, as I believe, greatly diminished the number of the murders of children.
Lord Kames, writing in the last half of the eighteenth century, says, 'In Wales, even at present, and in the Highlands of Scotland, it is scarce a disgrace for a young woman to have a bastard. In the country last mentioned, the first instance known of a bastard child being destroyed by its mother through shame is a late one.
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The virtue of chastity appears to be thus gaining ground, as the only temptation a woman can have to destroy her child is to conceal her frailty. The last clause is clearly inaccurate, but there seems reason for believing that maternal affection is generally stronger than want, but weaker than shame. The very sensual tone of Greek life rendered the modern notion of prolonged continence wholly alien to their thoughts, and the extremely low social and intellectual condition of Greek mothers, who exercised no appreciable influence over the habits of thought of the nation should also, I think, be taken into account, for it has always been observed that mothers are much more distinguished than fathers for their affection for infants that have not yet manifested the first dawning of reason.
Even in Greece; however, infanticide and exposition were not universally permitted. In Thebes these offences were punished by death. Passages from the Greek imaginative writers, representing exposition as the avowed and habitual practice of poor parents, are collected by Terme et Monfalcon, Hist. Tacitus notices with praise Germania, xix. He also notices Hist. The legislators then absolutely condemned it, and it was indirectly discouraged by laws which accorded special privileges to the fathers of many children, exempted poor parents from most of the burden of taxation, and in some degree provided for the security of exposed infants.
Public opinion probably differed little from that of our own day as to the fact, though it differed from it much as to the degree, of its criminality. It was, as will be remembered, one of the charges most frequently brought against the Christians, and it was one that never failed to arouse popular indignation. Pagan and Christian authorities are, however, united in speaking of infanticide as a crying vice of the Empire, and Tertullian observed that no laws were more easily or more constantly evaded than those which condemned it.
The latter, though probably condemned, was certainly not punished by law;2 it was practised on a 1 Ad Nat. These words have given rise to a famous controversy between two Dutch professors, named Noodt and Bynkershoek, conducted on both sides with great learning, and on the side of Noodt with great passion. Noodt maintained that these words are simply the expression of a moral truth, not a judicial decision, and that exposition was never illegal in Rome till some time after the establishment of Christianity. His opponent argued that exposition was legally identical with infanticide, and became, therefore, illegal when the power of life and death was withdrawn from the father.
See the works of Noodt Cologne, and of Bynkershoek Cologne, It is at least certain that exposition was notorious and avowed, and the law against it, if it existed, inoperative. Gibbon Decline and Fall, ch. See, too, Troplong, Influence du Christianisme sur le Droit, p. They were brought systematically to a column near the Velabrum, and there taken by speculators who educated them as slaves, or very frequently as prostitutes. Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 6 by Edward Gibbon
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