Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/96

 them. Everywhere collections were made amongst the brethren for distressed members—for members even of churches or congregations in far-off countries; and these collections were always superabundant, because from the heart, and inspired by a power greater than the power of pelf. In many of the primitive congregations a real equality prevailed amongst all the members—a veritable reciprocity of benefactions and sacrifices—a bona fide community of goods and of friendly offices.

This it was which gave such an extraordinary impulse to Christianity at its first outset:—the total absence of selfishness; the perfect sincerity of the members; their unbounded faith in their new religion and in one another; their sovereign contempt for worldly advantages obtained by trickery and fraud; and their firm belief that it needed only their example and precept to change the face of entire humanity, and assimilate the rest of the world to themselves in virtue and innate happiness. In a word, they abounded and superabounded in the three cardinal virtues—

FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY!

faith in their principles—a perfect hope of seeing them realised—and a charity prepared to make the most unbounded allowances for the weaknesses and follies of all who might oppose themselves to the new dispensation. No wonder, with such principles, they accomplished such marvels.

But all was changed with the change that took place under Constantine. Masters, it is true, still continued to manumit their slaves; but, alas! it was in a very different spirit, and for very different purposes from those which actuated the true or early Christians. It appears from the concurrent testimonies of the Fathers of the church, and of legal documents still extant, that vast numbers of slaves were manumitted, in the first three centuries, through the pious zeal of their masters; and that those slaves and their progeny fell into great poverty and want through the absence of any legal provision for them, to compensate for the loss of their masters' protection and support. The early Christian missionaries, who caused their liberation from slavery, never, of course, contemplated such a result. They looked to a complete renovation of society, which would dispense the blessings of creation to all God's creatures alike, according to their services and deserts. They never imagined a state of things in which to be free would imply ''freedom only to starve''. Yet such, unfortunately, was the result they unconsciously brought about. The myriads of manumitted slaves, once deprived of their masters' homes and protection, had thenceforward no other means of providing a subsistence, but to betake themselves to one or other of the four courses indicated in our first and second chapters. They must either find work as hired labourers, or they must beg, or they must steal, or they (if females) must turn to prostitution. They must, to repeat the Guizot classification of proletarianism, become

LABOURERS, BEGGARS, THIEVES, OR PROSTITUTES