Few of the clergy gave any countenance to Tuke; and the scorn of the Edinburgh Review on the one hand, and of Wesley on the other, indicate the solid religious hostility. The chief work was, however, done in France. Initiated by the sceptical Montaigne and fostered by the teaching of the philosophers, it was only established by the work of Pinel at Bicêtre, when the Revolution had shattered Catholic power. In Germany Frederick William I. was the most powerful reformer.

I

I have treated very summarily the facts relating to the long abuse and to the rise of the modern civilised practice. The reader will now be able to decide how far the Church was responsible for the ages of suffering that an encouragement of research might have arrested long ago, and how far its alleviation of much of that suffering by charitable institutions can compensate for its failure to touch the root of the evil. I need not linger over the pretended anxiety of some for the future of our hospitals if Christian beliefs are abandoned. We have now as a community the same sense of responsibility to the helpless and suffering as the Romans had. Hospitals may be municipalisedthe sooner the better-but cannot disappear. In fact, there is an enormously exaggerated idea about

The full facts, with authorities for each, will be found in White's Warfare. He speaks of the French appointing a Commission "in 1791, just before the Revolution." This was, of course, in the height of the best part of the Revolution.

of the proportion in which our Christian neighbours support or erect these institutions. Writing twenty years ago, Mr. B. B. Rawlings showed that, whereas the annual expenditure of the London hospitals was three-quarters of a million, the Church collections only made up £33,000 of this. He gave an instance where an irreproachable hospital had sent out an urgent appeal to 10,000 people living in a fashionable, and therefore religious, quarter. To this there were only nine replies, and half of them were refusals. As to the clergy, he said: "There is a general and wellfounded complaint that, as a body, the clergy are unsympathetic in regard to the institutions they make use of." Religion has done its work, for good and for evil, in connection with the sufferings of the poor and the infirm. Only when its intemperate advocates press exorbitant claims on us do we hasten to cast up the reckoning.

It

1 The Church and the Hospitals, p. 13. A very curious coincidence may be noted in connection with this foolish talk about Christianity and modern philanthropy. On the very day that I am writing this chapter Mr. Beit's will is published. bequeathes over £2,000,000 for public purposes, including £20,000 each to two hospitals and £25,000 for medical science. Religion is not mentioned, and the Daily News editorially observes: "Religion, as is the fashion in the will of the modern millionaire, does not receive a mention or a farthing." It is an instructive reply to those who fancy philanthropy is distinctively Christian.

CHAPTER V.

THE CHILD AND THE MOTHER

WE have still to examine a number of the charitable and humane accomplishments that are set out by the apologists for the Church, and we will proceed at once to consider those which are felt to contain the finest expression of the Christian spirit. Admitting, as we have done, that there was a decay of character at Rome in the Augustan age; admitting, as we must, that the imposing structure of the Empire rises very largely out of a field of conquest and violence, we must expect to find ample opportunities for reform when the new religion penetrates to the hearts of the people. The really aristocratic complexion of the Roman world the strong emphasis on the man and master-left large classes of living beings at his mercy. When that mercy deteriorated there was much inhumanity, and every effort to abolish it calls for our gratitude.

The lot of the slave, the child, and the woman suggests itself to us at once for inquiry, and, deferring the first point until the following chapter, I now approach the work of the Church on behalf of the child and its mother. It will be recognised

that I am not avoiding the more confident of the apologists' claims in order to rake up incidental errors of the clergy from the débris of history. Within the limits imposed by my purpose-the analysis of the elements of our civilisation—I am candidly following the lead of the most distinguished divines. Dr. Fairbairn, for instance, warmly insists on the service that the Church rendered to humanity in throwing "a halo" about the woman and the child. Even some nonChristian writers have accepted Raphael's famous Madonna and Child as the most impressive symbol of our debt to the Church. The point is a very natural one. As Dr. Fairbairn feelingly records, Roman law gave the father absolute power over mother, child, and slave. They had no rights. The child might be cast away alive, and would then be picked up by speculators and brought up to a career which he shudders to contemplate. The boy who was retained and bred might be put to death at any time by the father, just like the slave. "The very sense of their rights," he says, "was not yet born; the feeling of obligation towards them waited on the footsteps of Christ.”1

It is a pity that a very natural warmth of indignation prevented the distinguished apologist from going more closely into the historical details. He seems to have sadly confused various periods of

Op. cit., p. 201.

Roman life, and entirely failed to see the safeguards against abuse of the early Roman system. He refers us to Mommsen, certainly the first authority on the Republic. But when we go to Mommsen we find this remarkable assurance àpropos of the exposure of children: "The moral obligations of parents towards their children were fully and deeply felt by the Roman nation ";' and the historian elsewhere says of the worst things that befell the exposed children, "as is still commonly done in Italy." It would seem, then, that the "sense of their rights" came long before "the footsteps of Christ," and the infliction of their wrongs lingered eighteen hundred years after them. Clearly, we must proceed once more with discrimination, and consult the best available authorities on the question.

The first service that the Christian Church rendered was in the checking of the exposure of children. Mr. Lecky has said that infanticide was

• Roman History, i. 74. The second quotation is from Mommsen and Marquardt's Handbuch, under title "Aussetzung." A parallel passage is found in Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law, p. 164: "I do not know how the operation and nature of the ancient Patria Potestas can be brought so vividly before the mind as by reflecting on the prerogatives attached to the husband by the pure English Common Law"; and this, he observes, was chiefly inspired (on that point) by the theologians.

2 Its condemnation of abortion may seem to some to have first place. But the Church in this only repeated a condemnation often expressed before it-one school of Roman doctors binding its members on oath not to administer drugs for the purpose (see Smith's Dictionary)—Ovid, Seneca, Favorinus, Plutarch, Juvenal,

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