BOOK SEVENTH.

CHRISTIANITY AND SLAVERY.

CHRISTIANITY has destroyed slavery.

Yes, He who is pre-eminently the Redeemer, he who has ransomed woman from degradation, children from abandonment, subjects from tyranny, the poor from contempt, reason from error, the will from evil, the human race from punishment, Jesus Christ has restored fraternity to mankind and liberty to man, Jesus Christ has destroyed slavery.

I find this fact established or affirmed by the most impartial, the most severe, the most renowned writers; it is written in a long series of laws, decisions, and canons, in an uninterrupted train of historical monuments. This imposing unanimity of testimony confirms the presentiments of universal instinct. Before all demonstration, we comprehend, we divine that Christianity must abolish slavery, as daylight abolishes darkness, because they are incompatible.

It is hackneyed, therefore, to attribute this magnificent boon to Christianity, and those even who contest it everything do not usually dispute this.

This is true, at least, on this side of the ocean; but in America and Spain, the need of justifying what is practised leaves still some credit to the contrary assertion. In France and England, emancipation has thrown analogous dissertations into the shade. The time is not far off, however, when a well-known publicist* dared write: "Chris

*M. Granier de Cassagnac, Voyage aux Antilles, Tom. II. p. 409.

tianity has always justified and

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more recently, not to justify slave tianity, it has maintained, with a gre that reason and philosophy can alone of emancipating the slaves.*

ore, to t The question of the influence of Christianity on emancipation is not so simple as is supposed, and the objections are worth the trouble of refuting anew, since they are of a nature to mislead many minds.

Consult the Old Testament, it is said: it sanctions slavery.

Open the New Testament: it is silent.

Read the writings of the Apostles: they counsel the slaves patience, far from promising them liberty.

The councils, the fathers, the popes, the modern theologians, hold the same language.

Consult history: slavery is maintained after Christianity; destroyed, it springs up anew; and, in fine, has been so far from abolished, that it still endures.

Against slavery, therefore, Christianity has said nothing, Christianity has done nothing.

We will take up this theory, word by word, preceding it by a brief summary of the history of slavery before Christianity.

*Revue de Paris, Article of M. Larroque, January, 1856.

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CHAPTER I.

SLAVERY BEFORE CHRISTIANITY.

AFTER admirable labors, devoted to this painful history by scholars of the first rank, after the patient researches of M. Édouard Biot and M. Yanoski,* after the writings, unhappily unfinished, of Moehler † and Mgr. England,‡ and the works of Guizot, Ozanam, Albert de Broglie, Troplong, Champagny, Wilberforce, Buxton, Balmès, and so many other eminent writers, and above all, after the great, scholarly, conscientious, and complete work of M. Wallon.§ it seems as if nothing remains to be added to the united erudition of France, Germany, England, America, and Spain.

I shall be proud and satisfied if I succeed but in summing up these excellent works, and communicating all their substance, and, as far as in me, all their enlightenment.

A cursory view of the history of slavery in the days of antiquity, and a special glance at slavery among the Jews, will conduct us, by an indispensable but brief road to the study of the means employed by Christianity to inaugurate liberty and equality into the world.

* Abolition de l'esclavage ancien en Occident, by M. Édouard Biot; Abolition de l'esclavage ancien au moyen âge, by M. J. Yanoski.

† L'Abolition de l'esclavage par le christianisme dans les quinze premiers siècles, by Moehler, translated by Abbé S de Latreiche, and preceded by the Dissertation sur les christianisme et l'esclavage, by Abbé Thérou.

Letters to John Forsyth on Domestic Slavery, by Dr. England, First Bishop of Charleston. Baltimore, 1849.

§ Histoire de l'esclavage dans l'antiquité.

I.

SLAVERY IN ANTIQUITY.

We must have the pain of repeating once more, to the shame of the human family, that, if all the greatest minds agree to-day in condemning slavery, all the greatest minds formerly agreed in justifying and practising it.* In Greece, Plato has sanctioned it in the name of politics; Aristotle, in the name of natural history; Epicurus, in the name of pleasure; Zeno, in the name of stoical indifference; Thucydides, in the name of history; Xenophon, in the name of social economy. Once himself a slave, Epictetus remains almost insensible to the ills of his fellows. Euripides does not experience the most transient emotion at the sight of these unfortunates; Aristophanes thinks it a good jest to show us Charon refusing them his bark; and old Hesiod coldly writes that the slave is to the rich what the ox is to the poor. At Rome, Cato likens the slaves to the wornout cattle in his stable; Varro enumerates them among the implements of labor; † Cicero apologizes for too deeply regretting a slave; Pliny compares them to hornets; Lucretius troubles himself little about them; Horace derides them; Plautus calls them a race good for chains, ferratile genus; Seneca and Marcus Aurelius offer them barren consolations.

* See the original in the learned works of Wallon and Moehler. The little that I give belongs to them, above all, to M. Wallon, whose book is, in my eyes, a veritable masterpiece.

†The text of Varro (Wallon, II. 189, note) is cynical indeed: "Instrumenti genus vocale, et semivocale, et mutum; vocale in quo sunt servi; semivocale, in quo sunt-boves; mutum, in quo sunt plaustra." (De re rustica. I. xvii. 1.)

The extent of the estates, and the difficulty of watching over numbers of slaves at a distance, resulted in causing the slaves to be put in irons. Cato, Varro, and Columella relate this without surprise, and Seneca contents himself with the phrase, Necessitas fortiter ferre docet, consuetudo facile. (Wallon, II.

I know that we lessen what we exaggerate. I have no intention of vilifying beyond measure the baseness of man in order to exalt the greatness of God: it is a mistaken philosophy to glorify the workman by depreciating his works. Christians have no need to be taught that man is capable by his own strength of a certain amount of goodness, since Christians profess that humanity, at the lowest degree of degradation, is still too noble to be unworthy the intervention of God.

I delight, therefore, in seeking and finding some traces of better sentiments in the Pagan authors. Aristotle quotes unknown philosophers who combated his doctrine; Plato hesitates; Plutarch censures the rigor of Cato; Seneca writes passages on equality so noble that they have been supposed secretly inspired by Christianity.* Some emperors, the Antonines, Claudius, and Diocletian, who was himself a freed slave, enacted the most human measures. Religion inspired some salutary customs, and established a few places of refuge, at the foot of the statues of Hercules and Theseus, liberating spirits, or of the emperors in the temples; so true is it that, as soon as the thought of God intervenes, the instinct of the equality of men in his sight becomes manifest. We should be glad also to find some examples of the gentleness of woman; all were not Messallinas; I believe without proof that the heart of woman was more than once, like the altar of the gods, a place of refuge for the unhappy slaves.

But what are these feeble vestiges, these conjectures, these shreds of phrases, by the side of the unanimity of doctrines, the universality of customs? These philosophers with sympathizing words, were they practising philosophers, as is forcibly said of Christians who conform their

* 1 Ep. xlvii. Vol. II. p. 196, etc. "Servi sunt? Immo homines. Hæc præcepti mei summa est: sic cum inferiore vivas, quemadmodum tecum superiorem belles vivere."