Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/95

 doors of preferment open for themselves. Such, at least, was the effect of the legal establishment of Christianity; and they know but little of men and of politics who would attribute that event to other motives or causes.

In truth, the progress of real Christianity—the Christianity taught by Christ and his disciples—received its death-blow from its legal establishment by Constantine. As long as it had the enemies of human rights for its foes, it attracted to itself the friends of human rights; but the moment it became a state religion—the religion of courts and courtiers—the religion of emperors and aristocrats—the religion of ambitious priests and sanguinary soldiers—the religion, in short, of the rich and powerful,—from that moment it repelled sincere believers from all communion with the church. It either plunged them into despair for humanity, or else forced them, by their necessities and passions, to become servile and hypocritical professors of what in their hearts they despised, as being a libel upon the Redeemer and a fraud upon humanity. It was, in effect, paganism under a new name and with somewhat new forms.

Altogether the propagation of Christianity assumed a new aspect after it became the religion of the Roman empire. Pride and hypocrisy took the place of humility and zeal. Ambition, corruption, and servility entirely supplanted in the hearts of men the virtues which the Gospel had hitherto consecrated in the eyes of Christians. Not a shred of democracy, not a vestige of fraternity nor of the love of liberty and equality, could survive in a religion patronised by courts, professed by its parasites and prostitutes, made a stepping-*stone for the purposes of lucre and ambition, guarded and defended by prætorian bands, and surrounded with the munificence and corruption of imperial power.

The effects of the change soon became visible and palpable to all. During the three first centuries every extension of the Christian propagandism was followed by the most beneficial social consequences. It brought rich and poor, gentle and simple, high and low, learned and unlearned, Jew and Gentile, into terms of the closest and most cordial communionship. All distinctions of wealth and talent, of rank, station, office, intellectual and personal endowments—all, all sank before the beneficent spell of a religion which declared all men equal and brothers, and which promised to all a heaven both here and hereafter, upon the sole condition of keeping its commandments and carrying into effect its precepts. In the face of such a religion, no man who believed in it could be a tyrant; no man would be a slave a moment longer than he could help. "My service," says Christ, "is perfect freedom." Thus was it understood by the Christians of the first three centuries. Under the Heaven-bred influence of the new dispensation, masters manumitted their slaves in thousands. The slaves so manumitted loved their masters to distraction, and would die rather than betray or disoblige them. The rich converts divided their substance freely with the poor; the poor as freely bestowed their services, and administered comforts to the rich, renouncing or losing all feelings of envy and distrust towards