2

value to the slave class, and a very merciful law of Constantine forbade the separation of the families of the slaves.1 Another law, which in its effects was perhaps still more important, imparted a sacred character to manumission, ordaining that the ceremony should be celebrated in the Church, and permitting it on Sundays. Some measures were also taken, providing for the freedom of the Christian slaves of Jewish masters, and, in two or three cases, freedom was offered as a bribe to slaves, to induce them to inform against criminals. Intermarriage between the free and slave classes was still strictly forbidden, and if a free woman had improper intercourse with her slave, Constantine ordered that the woman should be executed and the slave burnt alive.3 By the Pagan law, the woman had been simp. reduced to slavery. The laws against fugitive slaves were also rendered more severe.4

This legislation may on the whole be looked upon as a progress, but it certainly does not deserve the enthusiasm which ecclesiastical writers have sometimes bestowed upon it. For about two hundred years, there was an almost absolute pause in the legislation on this subject. Some slight restrictions were, however, imposed upon the use of torture in trials; some slight additional facilities of manumission were given, and some very atrocious enactments made to prevent slaves accusing their masters. According to that of Gratian, any slave who accused his master of any offence,

Empire this distinction between the marriage of the freeman and the concubinage of the slave was long recognised by Christianity itself. These unions were not blessed, as the marriages of their superiors had soon begun to be, by the Church. Basil the Macedonian (A.D. 867886) first enacted that the priestly benediction should hallow the mar

riage of the slave; but the authorty of the emperor was counteracted by the deep-rooted prejudices of centuries.'-Hist. of Latin Christianity, vol. ii. p. 15.

Cod. Theod. lib. ii. tit. 25. 2 Ibid. lib. iv. tit. 7. 3 Ibid. lib. ix. tit. 9.

4

Corpus Juris, vi. 1

except high treason, should immediately be burnt alive, without any investigation of the justice of the charge.1

Under Justinian, however, new and very important measures were taken. In no other sphere were the laws of this emperor so indisputably an advance upon those of his predecessors. His measures may be comprised under three heads. In the first place, all the restrictions upon enfranchisement which had accumulated under the Pagan legislation were abolished; the legislator proclaimed in emphatic language, and by the provisions of many laws, his desire to encourage manumission, and free scope was thus given to the action of the Church. In the second place, the freedmen, considered as an intermediate class between the slave and the citizen, were virtually abolished, all or nearly all the privileges accorded to the citizen being granted to the emancipated slave. This was the most important contribution of the Christian emperors to that great amalgamation of nations and classes which had been advancing since the days of Augustus; and one of its effects was, that any person, even of senatorial rank, might marry a slave when he had first emancipated her. In the third place, a slave was permitted to marry a free woman with the authorisation of his master, and children born in slavery became the legal heirs of their emancipated father. The rape of a slave woman was also in this reign punished, like that of a free woman, by death.2

But, important as were these measures, it is not in the field of legislation that we must chiefly look for the influence of Christianity upon slavery. This influence was indeed very great, but it is necessary carefully to define its nature. The prohibition of all slavery, which was one of the peculiarities of the Jewish Essenes, and the illegitimacy of hereditary

1 Cod. Theod. lib. vi. tit. 2. 2 See on all this legislation, VOL. II.

F

Wallon, tome iii.; Champagny
Charité chrétienne, pp. 214-224.

1

slavery, which was one of the speculations of the Stoic Dion Chrysostom, had no place in the ecclesiastical teaching. Slavery was distinctly and formally recognised by Christianity, and no religion ever laboured more to encourage a habit of docility and passive obedience. Much was indeed said by the Fathers about the natural equality of mankind, about the duty of regarding slaves as brothers or companions, and about the heinousness of cruelty to them; but all this had been said with at least equal force, though it had not been disseminated over an equally wide area, by Seneca and Epictetus, and the principle of the original freedom of all men was repeatedly averred by the Pagan lawyers. The services of Christianity in this sphere were of three kinds. It supplied a new order of relations, in which the distinction of classes was unknown. It imparted a moral dignity to the servile classes, and it gave an unexampled impetus to the movement of enfranchisement.

The first of these services was effected by the Church ceremonies and the penitential discipline. In these spheres, from which the Christian mind derived its earliest, its deepest, and its most enduring impressions, the difference between the master and his slave was unknown. They received the sacred elements together, they sat side by side at the agape, they mingled in the public prayers. In the penal system of the Church, the distinction between wrongs done to a freeman, and wrongs done to a slave, which lay at the very root of the whole civil legislation, was repudiated. At a time when, by the civil law, a master, whose slave died as a consequence of excessive scourging, was absolutely unpunished, the Council of Illiberis excluded that master for

It is worthy of notice, too, that the justice of slavery was frequently based by the Fathers, as by modern defenders of slavery, on the curse

of Ham. See a number of passages noticed by Moehler, Le Christianisme et l'Esclavage (trad. franç.), pp. 151-152.

ever from the communion.1 The chastity of female slaves, for the protection of which the civil law made but little provision, was sedulously guarded by the legislation of the Church. Slave birth, moreover, was no disqualification for entering into the priesthood; and an emancipated slave, regarded as the dispenser of spiritual life and death, often saw the greatest and the most wealthy kneeling humbly at his feet imploring his absolution or his benediction.2

In the next place, Christianity imparted a moral dignity to the servile class. It did this not only by associating poverty and labour with that monastic life which was so profoundly revered, but also by introducing new modifications into the ideal type of morals. There is no fact more prominent in the Roman writers than the profound contempt with which they regarded slaves, not so much on account of their position, as on account of the character which that position had formed. A servile character was a synonym for a vicious Cicero had declared that nothing great or noble could exist in a slave, and the plays of Plautus exhibit the same estimate in every scene. There were, it is true, some exceptions. Epictetus had not only been, but had been recognised as one of the noblest characters of Rome. The fidelity of slaves to their masters had been frequently extolled, and Seneca in this, as in other respects, had been the defender of the op

one.

The penalty, however, appears to have been reduced to two years' exclusion from communion. Muratori says: In più consili si truova decretato, " excommunicatione vel pœnitentiæ biennii esse subjiciendum qui servum proprium sine conscientia judicis occiderit."- An

tich. Ital. Diss. xiv.

Besides the works which treat generally of the penitential discipline, the reader may consult with

fruit Wright's letter On the Political Condition of the English Peasantry, and Moehler, p. 186.

On the great multitude of emancipated slaves who entered, and at one time almost monopolised, the ecclesiastical offices, compare Moehler, Le Christianisme et l'Esclavage, pp. 177-178. Leo the Great tried to prevent slaves being raised to the priestly office, because it would degrade the latter.

pressed. Still there can be no doubt that this contempt was general, and also that in the Pagan world it was to a great extent just. Every age has its own moral ideal, to which all virtuous men aspire. Every sphere of life has also a tendency to produce a distinctive type being specially favourable to some particular class of virtues, and specially unfavourable to others. The popular estimate, and even the real moral condition, of each class depends chiefly upon the degree in which the type of character its position naturally develops, coincides with the ideal type of the age. Now, if we remember that magnanimity, self-reliance, dignity, independence, and, in a word, elevation of character, constituted the Roman ideal of perfection, it will appear evident that this was preeminently the type of freemen, and that the condition of slavery was in the very highest degree unfavourable to its development. Christianity for the first time gave the servile virtues the foremost place in the moral type. Humility, obedience, gentleness, patience, resignation, are all cardinal or rudimentary virtues in the Christian character; they were all neglected or underrated by the Pagans; they can all expand and flourish in a servile position.

The influence of Christianity upon slavery, by inclining the moral type to the servile classes, though less obvious and less discussed than some others, is, I believe, in the very highest degree important. There is, probably, scarcely any other single circumstance that exercises so profound an influence upon the social and political relations of a religion, as the class type with which it can most readily assimilate; or, in other words, the group or variety of virtues to which it gives the foremost place. The virtues that are most suited to the servile position were in general so little honoured by antiquity that they were not even cultivated in their appropriate sphere. The aspirations of good men were in a different direction. The virtue of the Stoic, which rose triumphantly under adversity, nearly always withered under degradation.