But at no period in the
history of morals has it sufficed to lay down general principles.
Everybody perceives to-day, not only that slavery was in itself a crime,
but that it was essentially opposed to the Christian morality. Yet, as
no Christian teacher for many centuries ventured to apply the principle
by expressly denouncing slavery, the institution was taken over from
Paganism by Christian Europe and lasted centuries after the fall of the
Roman Empire. The Church itself had vast numbers of slaves, and later of
serfs, on its immense estates. Leo the Great disdainfully enacted that
the priesthood must not be stained by admitting so "vile" a class to its
ranks, and Gregory the Great had myriads of slaves on the Papal
"patrimonies." So it was with the demand for social reform which
characterised the nineteenth century. To-day Christians claim that their
principles sanctioned and gave weight to those early demands of reform,
yet their principles had been vainly repeated in Europe for fifteen
hundred years, and, when the people themselves at last formulated their
demands in the early part of the nineteenth century, it is notorious
that the clergy opposed them.
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