Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/73

 CHAPTER X.

PROGRESS OF EARLY CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA.

Opposition from corrupt Slave-Caste—Detestation of Christian Doctrines by Slave-*owners—Incomprehensibility of new Doctrine of Equality—Absence of a destitute Free People a Drawback on Reform—Spread of the New Teachings—Alarm, and Persecution of the New Faith.

We have seen, in the preceding chapter, what apparently insurmountable difficulties the early Christians had to struggle with in the ignorance, contentment, traditional habits, and deep-rooted prejudices of the slave-class. To these hereditary bondsmen, who knew no gods but their masters' gods, no law but their masters' will, the sublime dogmas of the Gospel appeared altogether incomprehensible and out of nature's course. Slavery they had ever regarded as decreed for them by fate; and as they had no wants, spiritual or temporal, but such rude ones as were abundantly provided for by their owners' care, they regarded with alarm and distrust the apostles of a new faith, which was characterised as subversive of everything human and divine. In a word, the slave-class was, of all classes existing at the time, the least accessible to evangelical doctrine,—the least susceptible of the new dispensation so freely and so bountifully offered, for the first time, to the whole of humanity in the name of the Creator of all. Undoubtedly, this, if not the first, was the greatest stumbling-block in the way of the new reformers.

That the master-class and the civil magistrate should encounter such unheard-of innovations with the fiercest resistance was but what might naturally be expected. To these the new religion was at once sedition and rank blasphemy. A religion which treated their gods and oracles as the offspring of fraud, begotten upon the body of folly, was subversive of everything they deemed conservative of society and wished to be held sacred by the multitude. A religion which taught there was only one true God, the common Father of all, in whose sight all men were equal,—that this God was no respecter of persons or of classes, but would judge all alike, without regard to rank, family, or condition,—that His worship demanded the practice of all the virtues, and a renunciation of pride, lust, covetousness, ambition, injustice—in short, of all the vices inseparable from tyranny and slavery,—that, to be acceptable in His sight, men should be as brothers, loving Him above all things, and their neighbours as themselves,—a religion which told masters and rulers that whoever would be foremost should be the servant of the rest, and which enjoined upon all that whatsoever they would have others to do unto them, even so should they do unto others,—a religion of this (till then) new and singular character must of necessity have appeared a medley of abominations to masters and rulers. And