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                           CHAPTER XIX

                    Christianity and Slavery

       Paganism and slavery -- The Gospel and the Slave --
                  The Churches and the Workers

                      PAGANISM AND SLAVERY

     ABOUT the year 100 A.D. two remarkable lectures on slavery
were delivered in Rome. The central part of Rome was a very broad
open space, the Forum, crowded with statues and works of art, lined
with beautiful marble temples and public halls. In these halls
lectures were delivered, just as they are in New York and Chicago
today; and, as the Romans knew and practiced shorthand as well as
we do, many of the lectures have been preserved for us.

     The orator to whom I now refer was the eloquent Greek Stoic,
Dion Chrysostom, or "Dion of the Golden Mouth." He was no
demagogue. At times you would see him driving about Rome with the
great emperor, Trajan, of whom he was an intimate friend. He was
the idol of the thoughtful section of the Roman nobility. And for
the two days -- the subject was too large for one day -- Dion had
announced as his subject "Slavery": a delicate topic, one would
imagine, if pagan Rome were quite the slave-driving city it is
commonly supposed to have been, unless the aristocratic orator
intended to justify the institution for his aristocratic audience,
every member of which owned many slaves.

     But Dion, as we read in the extant lectures, denounced slavery
as unjust. About the same time there was in Rome a very democratic
poet named Juvenal who was putting in fiery verse, or satire,
certain statements about the brutality of the Roman aristocrats to
their slaves. Every religious writer in the world knows those
"Satires" of Juvenal; although every classical authority in the
world will warn you not to take their statements seriously. But no
religious writer in the world seems ever to have heard of Dion
Chyrsostom and his denunciation of slavery.

     It is quite formal, explicit and lengthy. It fills two
lectures. Here is an express and honorable condemnation of slavery,
by a well-known friend of the emperor, in the most public and
effective circumstances, at a time when the Christians were a mere
handful of obscure folk, mumbling a Greek liturgy and debating
whether the end of the world was not at hand.

     It is the reverse of the truth to say that Christianity
abolished slavery and gave the world education; and I say this
knowing well that H.G. Wells has endorsed the Christian claim. No
one admires Wells' ability and service to this generation more than
I do, but here he made, or borrowed, a statement which he had never
examined. The undisputed historical facts are that:

          (1) The Greek and Roman moralists perceived the injustice
     of slavery, often denounced it, and rendered great services to
     the slave.

          (2) No Christian leader denounced slavery until the ninth
     century, when the age of slavery was over.


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          (3) In the Christian Middle Ages the workers were far
     worse off, because nearly everyone was a serf, and serfdom was
     slavery under another name.

          (4) The betterment of the condition of the workers has
     been won quite independently of religion and to an enormous
     extent in spite of the churches.

     Let me underline a truth which is a simple historical fact.
There have in history been two great periods of benevolence and
social services: one was under the pagan Stoics and the other is
under modern paganism. The Christian Era lies between these two
paganisms, and it has as poor a record of social service as one can
imagine. By the first century the Stoics openly condemned slavery.
Other Greek moralists besides the Stoics condemned it. Plutarch
condemned it. Epicurus had come near to condemning it three
centuries earlier when he had defined the slave as "a friend in an
inferior condition"; and the Epicurean Hegesias had maintained that
slaves were the equals of free men. Florentinus and Ulpian, the two
famous Stoic jurists, declared that the enslavement of a man was
against the law of nature, the supreme standard of the Stoic.
Seneca insisted that the slaves were our "lowly friends," and he
pleaded repeatedly and nobly for them. Pliny shows us in his
letters that by the second century the slaves were very humanely
treated even on provincial estates. Juvenal fiercely attacked
inhumanity to slaves.

     Yet I presume that all that any religious reader is likely to
know about Roman slavery is that the rich patricians had large
armies of slaves on their estates and treated them like cattle. He
is never told that this refers to the early period of Roman
expansion, and that before the end of the first century the slaves
were protected by law.

     He has probably heard how Cato made some callous remark about
his slaves; and he is not told that the pagan writer who has
preserved it for us gives it expressly as an instance of "a mean
and ungenerous spirit."

                    THE GOSPEL AND THE SLAVE

     There can be no doubt that, if the Roman Empire had continued
and developed normally, slavery would have been abolished.
Abolition would, as every American knows, have been a colossal
task. It would have been far more terrible in Rome than in the
southern States, because the entire empire rested to a great extent
upon slave-labor. The immense privileges even of the Roman working
men were based upon the labor of slaves in the provinces.

     Yet public feeling was profoundly affected by the Stoic
principle, and the "manumission" of slaves -- the grant or sale of
freedom to them -- was a daily occurrence. Even before Christ this
liberation proceeded on so large a scale that the Emperor Augustus
checked it for a time, on political grounds. The Stoics urged it
and facilitated it, and the final term of the movement was certain.




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     Rome, however, fell upon evil days just at the time when the
humanitarian gospel was accepted. The manhood of Italy, then of the
provinces, was almost exhausted in war. The empire was so vast, its
frontiers so far-flung, that the military burden was terrible; and
frontier-wars naturally increased as the military forces weakened.
The third century was one of great poverty and confusion. In the
fourth century there was a recovery, but the empire was bleeding to
death, and new formidable forces were advancing upon it.

     Early in the fifth century it fell. The great slave-owners,
the imperial estates and the wealthy Romans, were ruined. The whole
economic system was shattered. The old slaves were not "freed":
they found themselves free. No one "broke their fetters." They had
no fetters. But the barbarians slew or sent into exile the owners,
destroyed the connection of the provinces with Rome, and wrecked
the administration of the estates. The slaves dispersed and there
were now no Roman troops to prevent them.

     Thus we can write the history of ancient slavery without any
reference to Christianity. If it were not for this religious
controversy which perverts the facts of history, the Christian
religion would hardly be noticed in any complete and impartial
study of Roman slavery. All that would be noted would be that some
of the Christian emperors of the fourth century issued edicts about
the condition of slaves; though they are much less important than
the great measures of the pagan emperors. It would then be recorded
that the new Christian masters of Europe, petty princes, bishops,
abbots, and land-owners, continued to use slave-labor. But it was
comparatively easy to deal with this new kind of slavery, and
Christendom, tardily recognizing a little of the Stoic ethic,
turned it into serfdom: which would have horrified the Stoics.

     How, then, has this persistent belief that Christianity broke
the fetters of the slave originated and been maintained? Naturally,
in the same way as the belief that the Church emancipated woman. It
is a quite modern belief. Until recent times nobody cared two pins
about the social services of religion. Its business was to save
souls. When men could no longer be prevented from attaching
importance to social interests, however, the cry arose that
religion was just the thing to serve us. The history of the past
was caricatured. Already everybody believed that the era before
Christ was dark and impotent, and the Christian Era brought a
wonderful transformation. Part of this transformation, it was now
said, was the uplifting of woman, the emancipation of the slave,
the opening of schools, the purification of morals, the beginning
of charity, and so on. Neither preachers nor their hearers read the
facts of ancient history.

     What is there in the Bible that even tends to discourage or
condemn slavery? Not a word from cover to cover. Apologists manage
to find a word or two which they can twist into a desperate defense
of woman, but there is not a single phrase, of Jehovah or Jesus or
Paul, that they can, with all their ingenuity, represent as a
condemnation of slavery or war, the two most colossal evils of the
ancient world.




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     As I have said, one of the ablest of the apologists actually
turns this silence of the Bible into a piece of high diplomacy.
Jesus did not want to cause the economic ruin of the empire, so he
did not condemn slavery! How religious readers permit such stuff to
be presented to them one cannot imagine.

     Throughout the Bible slavery is as cheerfully and leniently
assumed as are war, poverty, and royalty. In the English Bible
there is frequent mention, especially in the parables, of
"servants." The Greek word is generally "slaves." Jesus talks about
them as coolly as we talk about our housemaids or nurses.
Naturally, he would say that we must love them: we must love all
men (unless they reject our ideas). But there is not a syllable of
condemnation of the institution of slavery. Fornication is a
shuddering thing; but the slavery of fifty or sixty million human
beings is not a matter for strong language. Paul approves the
institution of slavery in just the same way. -- He is, in fact,
worse than Jesus. He saw slaves all over the Greco-Roman world and
he never said a word of protest.

     As to the customary quibble, that these reforms were "implied"
in the teaching of Jesus, it reminds me of Disraeli's famous joke.
Asked his religion, he (being a Rationalist, yet a politician) said
that he held "the religion of every sensible man." And to the
question what that was, he replied that no sensible man ever tells.
It reminds me also of the great achievement of Pope Leo XIII, who
at last (in the eighteenth century of Papal power) found the
courage to declare that the worker was entitled to "a living wage."
But when the clergy found that working men of the nineteenth
century were not so easily duped by phrases, and wanted to know
what was a living wage, the Pope refused to answer the questions
privately submitted to him.

     Here is another historical truth to underline: For eight
hundred years no Christian leader condemned slavery. And here is
one for the Roman Catholic: No Pope ever condemned slavery. In Rome
the Pope saw more slavery than in any other city in the world. The
life of Rome was based upon the labor of millions of slaves in the
provinces. All the dreadful things quoted about pagan slavery are
from Roman writers. And no Pope ever uttered a syllable of
condemnation of slavery.

     Negative statements are a little dangerous. I borrowed this
statement, that no Christian writer condemned slavery until the
ninth century, from Ingram's "Slavery and Serfdom," which is the
best authority on the subject. Then I waited for the reply. It came
in a shabby booklet or pamphlet from the Christian Evidence
Society; and it reminded me of the Irishman's complaint about his
sandwich, that there was "so much mustard for so little mate." In
quite a fury of righteous indignation the clerical writer exposed
my "lies" to the contempt of the Christian world. He had found --
or he confessed that some industrious theologian had found for him
-- one Christian condemnation of slavery in those eight hundred
years!





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     Now, I did not profess to have read every page of every
Christian work for eight centuries. I know the Migne collection of
this literature as well as anybody, and have spent, in all, many
weary months over it. But it was fair to assume that theologians
would long ago have quoted Christian condemnations of slavery, if
there were any; and none had appeared. The great search now yielded
a sort of condemnation of slavery in a work ascribed to Gregory of
Nyssa, one of the least influential of the Fathers. How I would
have treasured that solitary gem; but, alas, it was spurious. The
authorship of the work is disputed, and the author, whoever he is,
does not so much condemn slavery as an unjust institution, but
attacks all holding of property, including slaves.

     The true and typical attitude of the churchman is seen in Pope
"St. Gregory the Great." Possibly some Catholic may be surprised at
my effrontery in quoting Gregory. Did he not say in one of his
letters that all men are "born free," that slaves are only such by
"the law of nations," and that it is proper to free slaves? Oh,
yes. I know the letter well: much better than the Catholic writers
(and even Ingram, who, being a Positivist, favors the Church when
he can) who quote it. The Pope is writing to two of his slaves. He
is giving them their freedom. But this is the little suppressed
fact -- they have inherited money, and Gregory secures the money
for the Church!

     Pope Gregory, my Catholic friend, was the greatest slave-owner
in the world in the sixth century. Announcing that the end of the
world was to come in 600 A.D., he kindly allowed land-owners and
slave-owners to hand over their property to the Church -- God would
not damn the Church for its wealth -- and enter monasteries. The
Papacy soon had an income from land, of about two million dollars
a year; a stupendous sum in those impoverished days. Enormous
numbers of slaves tilled the eighteen hundred square miles of the
Church's property. Gregory freed them occasionally: when they got
money. He never condemned slavery. He would not allow any slave to
become a cleric, and he expressly reaffirmed (Epp. vii, 1) that no
slave could marry a free Christian.

                  THE CHURCHES AND THE WORKERS

     Back of all these quibbles and squabbles about Jesus and Paul,
Gregory of Nyssa and Wulstan, William Wilberforce and Lloyd
Garrison, is a poignant and immense human tragedy. It is the larger
part of the tragedy of human history which Winwood Reade called the
"Martyrdom of Man." It was bad enough in pagan days but humanity,
in Europe, was then young and had to learn wisdom. It was worse a
thousand years later, when nine-tenths of Europe were serfs. It was
still terrible at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

     In one of my most recent books, "A Century of Stupendous
Progress," I have shown that the workers of England, a hundred
years ago worked on the average at least fourteen hours a day, six
days a week, for an average wage of certainly less than three
dollars a week; that most of the children of England over the age
of six (and many under it), of both sexes, worked twelve or
thirteen hours a day, six days a week, for about two cents a day;
that the conditions of workshop and home were vile beyond


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description, that holidays were only two days a year besides
Sundays, that food was dear and of the poorest description, and
that manners were correspondingly brutal and morals rare. I proved
this from contemporary documents, and no one doubts it. The British
worker was then, it is true, in a slightly worse position than the
American worker, but he was better off than any other worker in the
world.

     I invite the reader to get that point clearly. In the year
1826 nine-tenths of the men of Europe, and a very high proportion
of the women, worked ninety hours a week, in filthy conditions,
under brutal masters, for a little over two and a half dollars a
week. They lived mainly on bread, potatoes and water. Meat, milk,
sugar, tea and fruit they rarely tasted. Not five in a hundred of
them could read or write. Their amusements were of the coarsest
description. Their sex morals were atrocious. Yet they were no
worse off than in previous centuries of the Christian Era.
Professor Rogers' "Six Centuries of Work and Wages" shows that for
England, and Brissot's "Histoire du Travail" shows it for Europe
generally. And at that time Christianity had dominated Europe for
more than a thousand years.

     There is the full irony of the Christian claim. It emancipated
the slaves, you say. It did not; but in any case it created the new
slavery of serfdom and later the martyrdom of the black race. It
emancipated the serfs, you protest. It did not; but it witnessed
the evolution of the serfs into these "free" workers of a century
ago, brutalized by excessive labor, shut out from all knowledge,
deprived of the least voice in the control of their own affairs. It
is a mockery to talk about the social service of Christianity, to
remind us how it taught the brotherhood of man.

     But we have to complete our study by finding who did help the
workers of the world to reach a higher level.

     In the first place, the Reformation did nothing for them.
There had already begun a movement in the life of Europe a movement
quite distinct from Christianity and hostile to it -- which was the
first flush of a new dawn, upon the Dark Ages. The Moors of Spain
had given Christendom an object lesson in civilization: the
Humanists of the Renaissance conjured up before it the long-buried
civilizations of Greece and Rome.

     But the Reformation, necessary and important as it was, was a
reaction both in culture and social idealism.

     Luther and his colleagues primarily sought to concentrate the
attention of men on the Bible and on their immortal souls. You are
proud of it? Very good; but you cannot have your bread buttered on
both sides. The more a man cares for our immortal souls, the less
he cares about our mortal bodies.

     At first Luther showed a human concern about the exploitation
of the mass of the people. A German noble had said contemptuously
of the German peasants -- then the great majority of the nation:
"They will never rise unless you cut a slice off their buttocks" --
to put it as politely as possible. They rose, however, and they


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claimed Luther's sympathy. After some hesitation he harshly
condemned the insurrection. He discovered that the Bible ordered
them to be "subject to all higher authorities." In July, 1624, he
wrote to the nobles of Saxony: "They must be crushed, strangled,
and spitted, wherever it is possible, because a mad dog has to be
killed." He defended serfdom, saying that to abolish it would be
"against the gospels and robbery." In later years he wrote: "All
their blood is on my head, but I leave it to the Lord God, who bade
me speak thus." Melanchthon was no better. He said: "The Germans
are always such ill-bred, perverse, blood-thirsty folk that they
must be kept down more stringently than ever." Eccardus, in his
"Geschichte des niederen Volkes," is quite candid about the kind of
"brotherhood" which the great Reformers learned from their profound
study of the Gospels.

     If any change is claimed by any historian of labor, it is that
during the three centuries after the Reformation the condition of
the workers grew steadily worse. Let not the Catholic rejoice,
however. It was just the same in Catholic and Protestant lands, as
Brissot shows in his "Histoire du Travail." There were economic
causes of this which we cannot discuss here. As to religion, we
have only to say that bishops and priests continued their absolute
and universal indifference to the martyrdom of the mass of the
race. Strong language? Name, if you can, who acted otherwise.

     The first attempt at reforms was made by the French
Revolution. This at once conjures up visions of bloodshed and
orgies in the minds of religious readers, who read about it only in
religious works, hear about it in sermons, and see it on the
screen. The horrors were mainly due to the later revolutionaries,
and the first half of the French Revolution was a sober and
beneficent movement led almost entirely by Rationalists. The way
had been prepared for its best work by the great Rationalists, or
Encyclopedists, of the eighteenth century. Voltaire had been
concerned mainly with superstition, though he has a fine record of
humanitarian service, but the later and more radical unbelievers,
just before the Revolution, were strong humanitarians; and they
were all what we now call Agnostics or Materialists. The early
leaders of the Revolution -- Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Sieyis,
Lafayette, Desmoulins, Mounier, Danton, Petion and Barnave --
merely developed their ideas; and all these men in turn were either
Deists or Agnostics. A Christian like the Abbi Gregoire was a very
rare bird amongst the revolutionaries; and he was angrily disowned
by the Church.

     Again let me ask the religious reader to look at this broad
and uncontroverted situation frankly. The millions of workers of
France were in a lamentable plight. Twenty million people lived on
the land, owned only two-fifths of it, and bore an intolerable
burden of taxes for Church and State. Two hundred thousand priests,
monks, and nuns owned a fifth of the land, and paid no taxes. Yet
all these exponents of the Gospel had for ages ignored the
condition of the people and the gross injustice of their rulers,
and only a few of the common clergy, sons of the people themselves,
joined in the sound part of the Revolution. It was a handful of
skeptics, of Atheists and Materialists and Voltaireans, who gave



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the world the creed of the Rights of Man. Remember this the next
time you hear an eloquent sermon on the horrible possibilities of
Materialism. Remember, too, that the Stoics, the only previous body
of idealists who had moved the world, were Materialists.

     The work of the Revolution was murdered. Church and Royalty
combined to put their white hands round the neck of humanity.
America, fortunately, had won independence of Europe, and the
reaction did not spread to the United States. But the White Terror,
ironically calling itself "the Holy Alliance," spread over the
whole of Europe. The workers sank back into the dark and sullen
attitude from which the clarion call of the Revolution had
momentarily raised them. Not a priest or minister of the Gospel in
the world pleaded for them. Remember that also when next you are
invited to compare the fruits of Christianity and Materialism.

     In the recent work of mine to which I have referred, "A
Century of Stupendous Progress," I have proved that the world has
made more progress in the last hundred years economically,
socially, morally and intellectually -- than in the previous
fourteen hundred years of Christian power. One of the most
distinguished living British economists, Sir Josiah Stamp, says
that the British worker of today is four times as well off as the
worker of a century ago. I have proved that this is true, in every
respect; and it is true of civilization generally. Who did it?

     If we were to argue in the manner of religious writers, the
answer would be prompt and simple. Skepticism, of course. The new
force in the world was Rationalism. Christianity had been tried for
fourteen centuries and had failed dismally. The only thing that I
can imagine any sincere and informed person saying for it is that
it saved the souls of a large number of men. He could not even say
that it improved the morals of Europe. Well, we have much doubt
today even about the saving of souls, but assuredly it did not save
bodies. Then Rationalism appeared, and -- the world leaped onward
and made far more progress in a century than it had done in
fourteen centuries.

     But we do not follow the clerical standard of argumentation.
We must analyze patiently. And it becomes at once apparent that
science did most of the work. I should scarcely have the patience
to discuss here the opinion of any man who claimed that the Church
gave the world science, so we will leave it that the extraordinary
increase of wealth and comfort was due to secular science. We have,
however, to inquire how it was that the workers and the small
middle class secured so much from this new wealth, as I have shown
in my book. Science has nothing to say to the distribution of
wealth.

     Next, education was the great redeeming force. Education was
won for the mass of the people mainly by Rationalism, in spite of
the Churches.

     In short, the real question from our present point of view is:
In what proportion were the social idealists who got these new
forces applied to the uplifting of the workers Christians, and in
what proportion were they non-Christian or anti-Christian? And


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please remember the perspective of the question. At the end of the
eighteenth century perhaps five percent of the world was
Rationalist and ninety-five percent religious. In the hard period
from 1820 to 1840, when the work entailed heavy sacrifices, perhaps
ten percent of Europe was Rationalist and ninety percent Christian.
From 1840 to 1880, still a desperate period for idealists, the
Christians were at least in a majority of seventy or eighty
percent. In our time they are, taking one advanced country with
another, in a minority of thirty to forty percent.

     And the historical facts show that of those social idealists
with whom I am here concerned -- not mere philanthropists like
Howard or Elizabeth Fry, or workers in very narrow field like
Shaftesbury, but men and women who fought for the betterment of the
workers as a mass -- the overwhelming majority were Rationalists at
a time when Rationalists were only five or ten percent of the whole
community; that the great majority were still Rationalists in the
second half of the nineteenth century; and that it is only in
recent times, when reform movements were successful and the
Churches were losing members very heavily, that we have discovered
such a thing as social idealism and "social experts" in the
Christian bodies,

     For England, in the first period, the men and women of most
influence were Paine, Byron, Shelley, Priestley, Horne, Tooke,
Erasmus, Darwin, Godwin, Hardy, Holcroft, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Hardy's opinion about religion is not recorded. Priestley was a
Unitarian: which was not then regarded as Christian. Not one of the
others was a Christian.

     The reaction against the French Revolution hardened the
Churches in their attitude toward reform. The bishops of the
English Church opposed all reform. Lord Brougham, noticing that
they avoided supporting even a temperance bill, said fierily that
"only two out of six-and-twenty Right Reverend Prelates will
sacrifice their dinner and their regard for their belly -- to
attend and vote." Lord Shaftesbury angrily described the clergy --
and he was a bigoted Christian -- as "timid, time-serving, and
great worshipers of wealth and power." "I can," he said, "scarcely
remember an instance in which a clergyman has been found to
maintain the cause of laborers in the face of pew-holders." I take
the quotation from "The Bishops as Legislators," by Joseph Clayton,
a devout member of the Church of England; and his book is a
scorching indictment of his Church. He praises Shaftesbury at
least; but Shaftesbury opposed every reform movement except his
own, in favor of children, and he was so hated by the workers of
London that he had to barricade his house against them. In short,
one Wesleyan clergyman, Stephens, and late in the nineteenth
century one Anglican clergyman, Kingsley, worked for reform; and
their Churches persecuted them. That is the record for more than
half a century.

     I have in my "Church and the People" given the full evidence
for my statements. When reform was arduous, very few Christian
laymen figured in it. They and their clergy swarmed into it when it
became successful, and the workers were deserting the churches in
millions. All over Europe -- there was not the same battle to fight


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in the United States -- the great fighters were anti-Christian in
the overwhelming majority. As to the Papacy, which now says
flattering things to the workers of America, the kind of thing a
young man says to a young lady who has inherited a fortune, it has
the blackest record of any section of Christendom. It murdered, as
long as the world would allow it, those who fought for the rights
of man. So had Christianity done from the first. The present-day
claims of its apologists are like a row of haggard women whom you
place, unpainted and unpowdered, under the blaze of our modern arc
lamps.




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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                              1928














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