Early Christianity

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Christians because their enemies had charged them with murdering infants at secret rites. The letter attributed to Barnabas by Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and which in any case goes back to the earliest days of the religion, severely condemned infanticide. "Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion, nor again shalt thou destroy it after it is born." By such protests as these, made with one cannot tell what frequency, the Christians took their stand on the basic principles.

Justin, whose vigorous manner of addressing the Emperor is so attractive, succumbed, at the age of seventy-four, to the calumnies of the cynic Crescentius, and became a martyr; but his example and fervour left an indelible mark upon his time.

"As for us," he says, "we have been taught that to expose newly born children is the part of wicked men; and this we have been taught lest we should do any one an injury, and lest we should sin against God; first, because we see that almost all so exposed (not only the girls, but also the males) are brought up to prostitution. . . . Now we see you rear children only for this shameful use; and for this pollution a multitude of females and hermaphrodites, and those who commit unmentionable iniquities are found in every nation. And you receive the hire of these, and duty and taxes from them, whom you ought to exterminate from your realm."

'Barnabas, Epistle, chapter xix.

Justin, Apol., i., chapter xxvii., p. 30.

And again he says: "We fear to expose children, lest some of them be not picked up, but die, and we become murderers. But whether we marry, it is only that we may bring up children; or whether we decline marriage, we live continently."

2

Athanagoras, the Athenian philosopher, who presented to Marcus Aurelius and to Commodus an apology for the Christians, in 166 A.D., asked the logical Romans to use their famous common sense in weighing false charges made against Christians.

"What man of sound mind," he said, "will affirm that we, who abhor murder, are murderers; we who condemn as murder the use of drugs for abortion, and declare that those who even expose a child are chargeable with murder."3

Tertullian, whose apology was written in the year 200, or 205, of our era, was equally bold.

"Rulers of the Roman Empire," he began, "seated for the administration of justice on your lofty tribunal"—and then made the charge direct: "You first of all expose your children, that they may be taken up by any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite unknown; or you give them away to be adopted by those who will act better to them the part of parents." 4

Justin, A pol., i., chapter xxix., p. 31.

Athanagoras, Plea, chapter xxxv., p. 419.

A. J. Dogour, Recherches sur les Enfants Trouvés, p. 61. ♦ Tertullian, Apologeticus, par. 90.

Later, in another address, this time to the pagan people, he returns to the charges.

"Although you are forbidden by the laws to slay new-born infants, it so happens that no laws are evaded with more impunity or greater safety, with the deliberate knowledge of the public and the suffrages of this entire age, . . . . . . You make away with them in a more cruel manner, because you expose them to cold and hunger, and to wild beasts, or else you get rid of them by the slower death of drowning [sic]."

"Man is more cruel to his offspring than animals," said the learned Clement of Alexandria. "Orpheus tamed the tiger by his songs, but the God of the Christians, in calling men to their true religion, did more, since he tamed and softened the most ferocious of all animals-men themselves."2

No abler pleader for the new order of things was there than Minucius Felix, a Roman lawyer of education, who, on his conversion to the new faith, became one of the eloquent founders of Latin Christianity. A disciple of Cicero, he has been called the "precursor of Lactantius in the graces of style.'

“How I should like to meet him," he exclaims, indignantly, "who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant . . . no one can believe this except one who can

1 Tertullian, Ad Nationes, chapter xv.

⚫ Clement of Alexandria, Pædagogus, chapter iii., p. 3.