Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/17

 Christianity was introduced into the world at a period when the cup of human wickedness was full to overflowing. The inequalities of human condition were then greater than at any antecedent epoch. Wars the most bloody and brutal, and on the most extensive scale, had just ravaged the whole civilized world, ending with the destruction of the Roman Republic and with the erection of a military empire which threatened all nations and all future generations with irredeemable bondage. The long internecine struggles of Marius and Sylla, of Julius Cæsar and Pompey, and afterwards of Anthony and Augustus, had crimsoned three parts of the globe with human blood, and let loose such a universal torrent of rapine, lust, proscriptions, conspiracy, and crime of every sort throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, that hardly any nation or people escaped the general demoralization. Direct human slavery—the personal subjection of man to man as property—was at its height as a social institution. Thousands and hundreds of thousands who had been free citizens were taken prisoners and sold as slaves during those horrid wars. To escape similar disasters, whole nations and races without number placed themselves under the protectorate of Rome, paid tribute to the imperial exchequer, and basely bartered their independence and the rights and liberties of their subjects to win the smiles or to court the pleasure of Augustus and his successors. Rome herself was a mass of incarnadined corruption. To reconcile the Romans to their newly forged fetters it became the policy of their government to brutalize their minds with gladiatorial shows, or with the familiar sight of human beings torn to pieces by wild beasts, or by shedding each other's blood with a ferocity unknown to wild beasts, and to corrupt their hearts and manners with importations of all that was most debasing in the systematized lewdness and debaucheries of the Grecian stage.

It was at this peculiar crisis of human affairs that Christianity made its appearance in the world. Need we say the divine mission of its Author was to rescue humanity from the scourges we have been describing, to bind up its bleeding wounds, and to infuse into it a spirit the opposite of what had produced the appalling vices and evils so rife at the time of His advent? Need we expatiate upon the marvellous successes which attended the labours of Himself and his apostles in the early propagation of the Gospel, or upon the amazing revolution which His followers wrought in the minds of men during the three first centuries? It is quite unnecessary to do so: history has made the world familiar with the prodigies of those days. Suffice it to say that anything like so extraordinary and so universal a revolution in the opinions and manners of men had never before been conceived, much less operated. Upon this point, at least, all historians of credit and all true philosophers are agreed.

Amongst the greatest of these marvels was the gradual but rapid extinction of direct human slavery, which took place throughout the greater part of the Roman empire during the three first ages. Antecedently to the preaching of the Gospel, the emancipation of slaves was but of rare and casual occurrence: it happened only on