Christian "improvements" on Rome

Children

However, apart from education, the [Christian] apologist will warmly plead that Christianity rendered to the child three mighty services by abolishing the practices of abortion, the exposure [abandoning] of children, and infanticide.
...
Lecky does not give any evidence that the theoretical right of the Roman father to kill was ever exercised to any extent. He says that "infanticide never appears to have been common in Rome till the corrupt and sensual days of the Empire." He gives no evidence that it was common in those days, and he adds: "The legislators then absolutely condemned it."
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

...one of the commonest ways of provoking a pagan mob against the Christians was to accuse them of infanticide! Strange, if infanticide was one of the "crying evils" of the pagans themselves, that the mere rumor of it infuriated them.
...
The Stoic lawyers of the first and second centuries tried to prevent exposure by making it equivalent to infanticide. It was no Christian, but the great pagan lawyer Paulus, three centuries before the Church had any influence, who said ("Digest," bk. xxv, title iii, line 4): "Death is inflicted not only by the man who smothers the new-born child, but by him also who casts it away, who denies it food, who exposes it in public places to receive a mercy which he himself does not possess." It was the pagan Emperor Trajan who decreed that an exposed child could not be made a slave; and it was the Christian Emperor Constantine who reversed this law. It was the pagan Emperors Caracalla and Diocletian who attempted to check the traffic in children.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

Compare: much later, in the 9th century, the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle stated that female convents were often brothels and that the promiscuity of the nuns commonly resulted in infanticide.

[Mommsen ("Roman History," i, 74)] "The moral obligations of parents toward their children were fully and deeply felt by the Roman nation." Any authority will tell you that. Dr. Emil Reich, the Protestant writer on Rome, says ("History of Civilization," p. 371) "It would be the easiest thing in the world to accumulate examples of the most tender charity practiced by these immoral Romans." Strange if they slew their baby-girls and then showed a most tender charity to other people's children.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

In the first century (A.D.), under the pagan emperors, more than three hundred thousand orphans were reared in public institutions in Italy alone.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

See also: the section Age of Ignorance about the fate of education under Christianity.

Medical science and Unions

The Dark Side Of Christianity by Helen Ellerbe states how Christians considered the field of medicine that the Greeks and Romans had developed, "heretical."
Christians went about the empire destroying temples of the God Aesclapius, which were ancient medical centres and other pagan hospitals, and persecuted its physicians for witchcraft.

Medical service, again, was free in the city of Rome for the poorer workers. Every temple of Aesculapius (the god of healing) gave free medical treatment, and the municipality of Rome paid a number of doctors to give free service to the poor. It is another vain and ignorant boast of the preacher that Christianity first founded hospitals and helped the sick poor. It is rubbish. Rome did what it could for them in the then state of medical science; and one has only to read what the "hospital" service was until modern times to measure what the world owes to the Church in this respect. It [the Church] shattered Roman science and education, and it fought and hampered the men who, like Vesalius, tried in the Middle Ages to resume the development of medical science.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Well into the Middle Ages, the extent of Christian "medical science" consisted of praying for the sick, exorcising the mentally ill for "possession" and murdering children with disabilities. And nothing would be done for animals, of course (animal clinics and centres were another pagan invention).
Helen Ellerbe writes that when the Black Plague swept Europe in the 6th century, claiming an estimated 100 million lives, theologians dismissed it as God's punishment for not obeying the Church.
When Christian medicine finally made a leap "forward", it introduced the useless and highly dangerous practise of bleeding:

Christian monks taught that bleeding a person would prevent toxic imbalances, prevent sexual desire, and restore the humours.
... By the sixteenth century this practice would kill tens of thousands each year. Yet, when a person died during blood-letting, it was only lamented that treatment had not been started sooner and performed more aggressively.
-- The Dark Side Of Christianity by Helen Ellerbe

Historian Rupert Hughes wrote how Christianity often takes credit for introducing medical treatment, but how in reality:

Christian ministers fought quinine, anaesthetics, education, the kindly treatment of the insane, and practically every other form of progressive mercy.
-- Rupert Hughes

See also: Christianity and The Medical Sciences

Even today, whilst Jehova's Witnesses refuse blood transfusions, other Christian denominations like Christian Science still resort only to prayer to cure all illnesses (as stipulated by the Bible), shunning medical care.

The Christian Science church even uses the religious exemption laws as evidence that legislators agree with them that Christian Science can heal all diseases as effectively as medical care.

From: Victims of religion-based medical neglect, which lists a few cases of children victimised by such Christian neglect.
There are still many Christians today who, faithful to the same age-old Christian spirit that destroyed the Greco-Roman hospitals for pagan heresy, regard all medical science as pagan. For instance:

In 1998 two-year-old Harrison Johnson ... was stung 432 times by wasps while the family was visiting church friends in Tampa, Florida. His parents asked neighborhood children and fellow church members to pray for him, but did not call for medical help until more than 7 hours after the attack.
... His parents belong to a group called The Fellowship, which reportedly shuns all medical care on grounds that doctors practice witchcraft.
A former medical nurse, Carol Balizet, of Tampa attended Harrison's home delivery and was present with him for several hours after he was stung. She advised the parents that he did not need medical care. Her book Born in Zion promotes Christian home births and argues that medical care is linked to pagan witchcraft.

Same Link

Finally, there is the boast that if the Church did not give the worker his modern Unions -- even the boldest preacher hesitates to say that -- at least it gave the world the famous medieval guilds, which inspired the Unions. And this is as empty a boast as the claim to have given the world schools! I have proved elsewhere that the medieval guilds were, at their start, fiercely resisted and drastically condemned by the Church, precisely because they were pagan.

The truth is that both Greek and Roman workers had a perfect system of "Trade Unionism." All the tanners, builders, carpenters, etc., of any district were incorporated in what they called a "School" or "College" (in the original meaning of the word). They had a clubroom, frequent suppers, and funds for burial and mutual aid. Imperial decrees also plainly hint that they used their Unions for economic, if not political, purposes. It is now actually suggested that Paul, the tent-maker, used his trade connection to travel over the Roman world and spread Christianity. At all events, we know from inscriptions that slaves were admitted on equal terms in many of these colleges, and women were sometimes enrolled as members. The women of Rome were well on the way to winning, two thousand years ago, the rights they had to fight for in our own time.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Christian morality versus that of ancient Rome

Delighted to harp on the "immorality" of ancient Rome, Christian apologists ignore how things were under Christianity. Immorality was encouraged and practised by the clergy themselves:

in the Middle Ages, when the clergy were nearly all immoral and some owned brothels.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

"In the time of St. Cyprian, before the outbreak of the Decian persecution, it had been common to find clergy professing celibacy, but keeping, under various pretexts, their mistresses in their houses; and after Constantine, the complaints on this subject became loud and general. Evagrius describes with much admiration how certain monks of Palestine, by 'a life wholly excellent and divine, had so overcome their passions that they were accustomed to bathe with women.' Virgins and monks often lived together in the same house, and, with a curious audacity of hypocrisy, which is very frequently noticed, they professed to have so overcome the passions of their nature that they shared in chastity the same bed."
-- Crimes of Christianity by G W Foote & J M Wheeler, quoting historian Lecky

Link

From the first century, "the Agapeta, were virgins who consecrated themselves to God with a vow of chastity and associated with laymen, who like themselves had taken a vow of chastity. ... It resulted in abuses and scandals. ... St. Jerome [about 400] asked indignantly, 'Why was this pest of Agapette introduced into the Church?' St. Cyprian shows that abuses of this kind developed in Africa and the East. The Council of Ancyra, in 314, forbade virgins consecrated to God to thus live with men as sisters. This did not correct the practice entirely, for St. Jerome arraigns Syrian monks for living in cities with Christian virgins. These Agapetae are sometimes confounded with the Subintroductae, or women who lived with clerics without marriage." (202.)

St. Cyprian, On the State of the Church, just before the Decian persecution (c. 250), admits: "There was no true devotion in the priests. ... That the simple were deluded, and the brethren circumverited by craft and fraud. That great numbers of the bishops ... were eager only to heap up money, to seize people's lands by treachery and fraud, and to increase their stock by exorbitant usury." (Quoted by Middleton, Free Inquiry, Int. Disc. lxvii-ix.)

"Solicitation, in canon law, is the crime of making use of the Sacrament of Penance for the purpose of drawing others into sins of lust. Numerous popes have denounced this crime vehemently, and decreed punishments for its commission ... in connection with the Confessional, during or before" (xiv, 134). "The crime of abduction was, doubtless, extremely rare among the early Christians. In the fourth century, when men grew bolder, the number of wife-captors became exceedingly numerous. To cheek this" -- a long line of Church enactments listed, down to the Council of Trent (1500's) was futile.
-- Forgery in Christianity. A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion, by Joseph Wheless, citing the Catholic Encyclopaedia unless otherwise specified

During the reign of Pope Damasus I (366-383):
The biblical scholar and ascetic St Jerome (c342-420) warned the women of Rome that the Catholic Church, under Damasus I, was monstrously corrupt. He claimed that priests, monks, professional virgins all were debauched and that they engaged in "love feasts" - orgies - in churches on saints' days. Virgins "fall every day" he wrote in a letter to an aristocratic woman called Eustochium, warning her to avoid the pontiff's flock.

In another epistle, Jerome said that men became priests and deacons "so that they may see women more freely".

Jerome warned one Roman woman to never remain alone in a room with a priest. Should she find herself in such a situation, the woman was told to "plead that either her bowels or bladder needed relieving".
Christian women were not to be trusted either, according to Jerome. "Never enter the house or be in their company alone," he said.
To Jerome, the only women of virtue to be seen on the streets of Rome were not Christians but pagans.

From the mouth of Saint Jerome himself: he had to admit that the pagans were better behaved than the Christians.
See also: the section on Popes.

The noble early Christians: "martyrs" for the faith

In his Refutation of all Heresies, (Saint) Hippolytus has a few chatty pages about the life of the Roman Christians.
[Late 2nd century] Pope Victor, the first pope who tried to be papal and got very nastily rapped on the knuckles by the other bishops, was, it seems, a friend of a lady named Marcia, who lived in the Emperor Commodus's palace.... [She] was the lewdest concubine in the spacious harem (which also included 300 handsome boys) of Commodus, who could have given lessons to Nero in sex matters. However Marcia and her friend and tutor in vice, Hyacinth, who is claimed to have been a Christian, got many favors for the Christians when Pope Victor went for tea or something in the palace.

Hippolytus broadens the picture. One of the rich Christians directs his Christian slave Callistus to open a bank in the city, and the faithful, although the Christian code declared all interest on money to be usury and a mortal sin, all rushed to put their money in it and make a bit. Callistus embezzled the lot and went to jail, and a few years later he became Pope [early 3rd century] and applied his talents to the humanization (and enrichment) of the Church. It was, he said, time they abolished this musty old idea that if a Christian sinned after baptism he or she must be expelled and considered damned forever. He and his priests could forgive sins, he said. So by this and other humane measures he opened the door of the church to rich Roman women, and they brought in a good many things besides money. In fact, anybody who represents the Roman community after this time as an oasis of virtue in a desert of sin ought to be on the staff of a Ministry of Information.

Documents of the 3rd century show that the dry rot spread quickly and very thoroughly to the whole Church. About the middle of the century, St. Cyprian, a very stern man, was leader of the African Church, and his letters to the pope describe how a large part of his clergy and bishops were unmitigated scoundrels: fornication, murder, embezzlement, and all the rest of it. For the Spanish Church, we have, about the end of the century, the canons, and, my word, the women were as gay as the cigar-girls of modern Seville. For the East, we have a letter (in Bishop Eusebius's History) of the bishop of the place describing the behavior by the Christians of Alexandria when the general persecution opened. With mordant irony, the bishop describes how, when his Christians were summoned to the tribunal, they provoked the jeers of the crowd by nervously disowning the faith. Of course the bishop himself, being a very necessary person, had had to avoid martyrdom.
...
The African very orthodox Bishop Optatus has a pleasant little story about what happened [during Diocletian's persecutions] in his History of the Donetist Schism (of the 4th century). A bunch of the African bishops met to discuss the appalling general apostasy of their Christians when the persecution was over. They fell to violent quarreling and it transpired that they had all dodged the golden crown [of martyrdom]. One had presumably with a wink at the presiding pagan official who was bribed, handed in a medical work pretending that it was the Bible.
Another of the bishops was accused by his brothers in Christ of murders. "Yes," he said--and Optatus is copying a stenographic report of the proceedings, "I did, and I'll knock off anybody who gets in my way."
-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe

Christian "morality" lost on the pagan Romans

Naturally the corruption deepened when, after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, the Church became rich. The legend is that the Christians were now able to build churches in Rome and attract the pagans by their virtuous lives. Let me state, very briefly, three notorious facts.

• In the year 366 there was an election for the Papacy, which was now very rich. The successful candidate was "St." Damasus, and his methods were such that in one day his men left the corpses of 160 of his rival's supporters on the floor of a small church. The war lasted a week and was so furious that the Roman "police" were swept aside and the prefect driven out of the city.
• The second fact is that St. Jerome, who then lived in Rome as a sort of secretary to Pope Damasus, has left us a large number of letters in which he describes the character of the Christians of Rome. In almost incredible language, he insists that clergy, monks, consecrated virgins, widows, etc., are monstrously and, with very few exceptions, comprehensively corrupt. "St." Damasus himself was denounced by his priests to the civil power for adultery, and was only saved by the emperor.
• And the third undisputed fact is that there was no "attraction" of the pagans at all. In the extant Theodosian Code we have ten decrees which the bishops got from the emperors suppressing all rival religions and sects under pain of fine, imprisonment, or death.

-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe

More testimonies from the 4th to early 5th century Saints Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom and Augustine:

The corruption of character was general in the Church. St. Augustine in his sermons and letters describes it in North Africa, which was then more flourishing and populous than it now is.
St. John Chrysostom in his sermons paints an equally dark picture of the people of Constantinople and Antioch. At Antioch, he says, there are 100,000 Christians but he doubts if 100 of them will ever see heaven. They laugh, he says, when he preaches on chastity.
St. Gregory of Nyssa in two extant letters forbids Christian women of his diocese to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem because it is, he says, a hotbed of crime and vice. And so on.

The Christian world was sinking into the dark age in which not only all attempts at restoring the shattered Greek-Roman civilization were suspended for seven centuries, but Europe fell to a level which most historians describe as barbarism. That is part of the reply to those who glibly talk about our Christian civilization. In its primitive purity Christianity was, like Paul and (possibly) Jesus, quite indifferent to what we call civilization.
-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe

About non-Christian ancient Rome:

In the case of Rome it is especially difficult and dangerous to generalize. Now and again a very vulgar or half-mad emperor came to the throne, and during his reign there certainly were orgies. It is to the reigns of these men that the preacher turns for his material. But he does not say -- I doubt if any religious writer in the world has ever taken the trouble to count -- that of the twenty-nine pagan Roman emperors twenty-one were admirable men of "good character," and eight only were "bad" (and several of those insane). Further, the twenty-one fine emperors ruled for two hundred and forty-five years, and the eight vicious monarchs for only seventy-five years, collectively. For one hundred and fifty years -- nearly half the period -- Rome had a series of Stoic emperors to which you will not find a parallel in the history of Christendom; and under them the world made a humanitarian progress that has no parallel except in our own "pagan" days. Let me add one fact to what I have said in the previous chapter. In the first century (A.D.), under the pagan emperors, more than three hundred thousand orphans were reared in public institutions in Italy alone.

Now those are facts and figures which any man may easily verify. I will go further and give an amusing illustration of the way in which the vices of Rome even under the bad emperors are exaggerated.

Years ago I was invited to write a series of biographical sketches of the Roman empresses. I wrote the work ("The Empresses of Rome"), covering five hundred years of Roman history and myself examining the whole relevant Roman and Greek literature. I inserted all the scandalous things said about the empresses and emperors, only warning the reader when (as was most commonly the case) these things were unreliable gossip. I told, from Juvenal, how the Empress Messalina was said to have gone, night after night, to a common brothel to prostitute herself and return to the palace, in the words of the fiery poet, "tired, yet not sated, with men." I told how the young Emperor Elagabalus, a maniac from Syria (not a Roman), had the empire searched for a powerful male lover. I told everything; and the publisher was disappointed at the slenderness of the scandalous bits in the long prosy chronicle! To appease him and the public -- he was not personally interested in such matters -- I had then to write a similar series of sketches of the Byzantine empresses ("The Empresses of Constantinople"), who were all Christians, and the proportion of scandal was much greater!
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Anyone who cares to consult my book, which is throughout based upon the Latin and Greek writers of the time, will see that the pagan empresses, up to the end of the fourth century, were as a rule reputable women; and that with the conversion of imperial ladies to the new religion we enter upon a story of intrigue, passion and vindictiveness which is far more picturesque. The contrast is even more marked in my "Empresses of Constantinople."
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

While Christianity was slowly propagating itself among the Gentiles, after the fall of Jerusalem, the Pagan world did not exhibit any striking need of its salutary influence. Under a succession of wise rulers the Roman Empire flourished in peace and splendor. Gibbon justly remarks that:

"If a man were called to fix a period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus." [8:3]
-- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

Now Domitian died in AD 96, and Commodus succeeded to the purple in AD 180. It was during this very period that Christianity produced its Scriptures, and made its first conquests. How utterly false and absurd, then, is the orthodox plea that Christianity, with all its faults, came to redeem mankind from intellectual darkness and moral depravity!
-- Crimes of Christianity, by G W Foote & J M Wheeler

Link

Gladiatorial Games

Well, you may say, at least Christianity abolished the brutal games of the amphitheater.
...From about the year 380 the Church ruled the consciences of the Roman emperors, and got mighty privileges and wealth for itself; but it never suggested to them to suppress the games. No Christian emperor had the courage or even the inclination to frown on the games as [pagan, Stoic] Marcus Aurelius had done. The new generation of Christian Romans had exactly the same passion for these brutal shows as the pagan Romans had had. The Emperor Constantine had given an obscure decree against the games in one province of his empire, and it was never enforced even there. The fanatically Christian Emperor Theodosius, docile to every whisper from the bishops, compelled his prisoners to fight as gladiators.
...
In the year 404, long after the complete triumph of Christianity, the gladiatorial games were proceeding as usual in the Roman amphitheater when the monk Telemachus flung himself into the arena to protest. All honor to the monk -- he was stoned to death by the Christian spectators -- but he is not "the Christian Church." Until then the Church had made no protest, nor do we find any ecclesiastical assembly or prominent ecclesiastic condemning the games, until the end of the seventh century. The combats of man against man were abandoned -- of Church pressure there is no trace -- but fights with beasts long continued; and Lecky quaintly confesses that "the difficulty of procuring wild animals" had much to do with the abandonment of these. But as the Church of the Middle Ages blessed and smiled upon the almost equally deadly combats of knights, and allowed the duel to survive to modern times, its apologists would do well to talk less about the gladiatorial games.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

It is noteworthy that the sole Christian protestor Telemachus was accompanied by two non-Christian Romans who also wanted the gladiatorial combats abolished:

The Church mightily prides itself on its suppression of the bloody sports of the arena, the gladiatorial combats, because the monk Telemachus, after 400 A.D., jumped into the arena (with two Pagan companions) and protested against them, which act incited the Pagan throng in the Ampitheatre to urge their abolition. But for four hundred years not Church nor Christian had raised a voice of protest; and during as much of this period as it had the power, the Church was merrily murdering Pagans and heretics; and the cruelties of free combat in the arena were speedily replaced by the infamous torturings and slow burnings of countless human beings for Christ's sweet sake: while bull-fights adorn every holiday and holy day of the "Most Christian" countries today. Fie for Christian "reforms"!
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Besides, it is not true that the gladiator shows were the main attraction of ancient (that is, non-Christian) Rome:

But this brutal display, against which the Stoics sternly protested, was not the great passion of the Romans. The Amphitheater, I said, seated ninety thousand spectators. But the Great Circus, the real pride and passion of the Romans, seated three hundred and eighty thousand; the entire body of the free workers of Rome. The chariot races in the Circus, the keen discussions for weeks in advance, the same intense excitement as there is in connection with a baseball match today, the universal betting on the result -- these were the great sports of the Romans. And no blood was shed, except by accident, in the Circus. The vast crowd -- three times as large as the largest sports ground in the world can accommodate today -- witnessed only chariot races, horse races, foot races, wrestling, juggling, and so on. Performers were brought from the ends of the world. The rival syndicates which ran the chariots spent enormous sums. A Roman charioteer earned as much as a good baseball player now does in America. And the Roman workers never paid one cent for admission.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Blaming the Northeners for the fall of Rome

In a last attempt to let Christianity off the hook for the destruction of Roman civilisation, Christian apologists deflect the entire blame onto the Germanic tribes from the North, but ignore other incriminating facts:

Now it is quite true that these Goths, Vandals, and other Teutonic tribes destroyed the Roman civilization. ...One must not imagine the onset of the Teutons as an event of the year, or even of a few decades. There were centuries of migration.

...Broad views are often good, and often dangerous. You must at least know the details.
The first detail is that these "barbarians" were not so barbaric as some imagine. ...The northerners had law and some fine ideals.

The second detail is that they were Christians. The chief Germanic tribes which poured over Italy, Gaul, and Spain in the fifth century had already accepted Christianity; and few Christians have such superstitious awe of the power of priests and bishops as converted barbarians.

And the third and most important detail is that these "barbarians" gave proof after proof that they were ready to accept civilization. ...Tradition has given the Vandals, who overran Spain and Africa, so terrible a reputation that we use their name still for destroyers or semi-barbarians. In most respects they were as bad as their reputation, but the leading authority on the Teutonic peoples, Dr. Hodgkin ("Italy and Her Invaders," an eight-volume work which the reader should consult for details), calls them "an army of Puritans." In fact, the fifth-century priest Salvianus represents both Goths and Vandals as stern Puritans shocked by the immorality of the Christians of the empire. He tells us that when the Vandals took Christian Carthage, they set about a purification of morals which disturbed the inhabitants far more than the loss of political freedom did. ... And within two centuries of their adoption of Christianity these Germanic peoples, whose pagan ideals had kept them chaste for ages, were more flagrantly immoral than the Romans [i.e. those Christians of the empire] had been.

Lastly, the Teutons, the new masters of Europe and pupils of the Church, in several places inaugurated a new civilization by blending their old law and ideals with the Roman; and in every single case they had no assistance from the Church, but were hampered and ultimately thwarted by the clergy.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

one of their [Christians'] biggest lies remains that of "blaming the barbarians" for the destruction of ancient civilization which they themselves caused.
...To put things in perspective, in 410, the Visigoths of Alaric (a Christian) actually pillaged Rome for three days before withdrawing. A generation later, in 455, Gaiseric (a Christian) and his Vandals spent just fourteen days in the city, taking what they could.

From: The Triumph of Christian Barbarism - blaming the Barbarians

Lying about slavery

...it is quite a mistake to suppose that all the work in Greece and Rome was done by slaves. ...To the Greeks and Romans it seemed that enslaving a man was a humane improvement upon the older practice of killing him when he was taken captive: whereas the Christian nations raided Africa for the express purpose of enslaving men. Finally, it is a sheer myth that the Christian Church abolished slavery, or made any protest whatever against it for many centuries; yet I have already quoted a Greek moralist, Alcidamas, condemning slavery in the fourth century B.C., and one Stoic moralist after another condemned it.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

In a larger degree the slave in Rome, in addition to his employment in agriculture and in the household, engaged in all trades and trading. The whole field of trade and industry was open to the slave, and Professor Dill comes close to the facts when he says that

"the slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring class."

It will not do, therefore, to identify Pagan with Christian slavery.
-- Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen (1931)

Facts of Slavery
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 [and it was replaced by serfdom].
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.

-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

The myth that Christianity "broke the fetters of the slave" is so strongly established, though it has not an atom of foundation, that even the late H. G. Wells included it as a historical fact in the first edition -- he promptly cut it out when I told him how wrong he was -- of his "Outline of History." Neither St. Paul nor any Christian Father nor any Pope or great Christian leader, and certainly no Church Council, condemned slavery until modern times when the wicked "world" was busy extinguishing it. Even the article in the "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics" makes this clear. It still existed in Europe, though economic conditions had greatly restricted it, when, under the blessing of the Spanish Church, it expanded again into the horrible chapter of African slavery.
-- The Lies And Fallacies Of The Encyclopedia Britanica, by Joseph McCabe

How ... 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.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

The Greco-Roman world

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 [referring to the skeptical age of the 19th and 20th centuries]. 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 Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Lectures against slavery in non-Christian Rome

ABOUT the year 100 A.D. two remarkable lectures on slavery were delivered in Rome.
...the eloquent Greek Stoic, Dion Chrysostom, or "Dion of the Golden Mouth" ...an intimate friend [of] the great emperor, Trajan. 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.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Rome falls before the natural end of slavery

There can be no doubt that, if the Roman Empire had continued and developed normally, slavery would have been abolished.
...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.

Rome, however, fell upon evil days ... The manhood of Italy, then of the provinces, was almost exhausted in war.
...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.
Thus we can write the history of ancient slavery without any reference to Christianity.

... All that would be noted would be that some of the Christian emperors of the fourth century issued edicts about the condition of slaves [see also below]; 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.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Now Compare:

It is an historical fact, supported by the most positive of evidence that slavery in the Roman Empire was mitigated by the noble philosophy of the Stoics and not by the teachings of the church fathers, who never thought of recommending the abolition of slavery.
-- History of Civilization, by historian Emil Reich

The first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine (c274-337) actually undid most of the humane laws to alleviate the position of slaves laid down by his pagan predecessors. He permitted parents to sell their children into slavery and allowed finders of abandoned children to bring them up as slaves. He also issued a decree which stipulates the death penalty for any Christian woman who had sexual intercourse with a slave; that the slave would also be put to death is a foregone conclusion. [The Social Record of Christianity, Joseph McCabe]

Link

Constantine decreed that slaves owned by Jews were to be freed if they embraced Christianity, but that a free woman who gave herself to a pagan slave was to be burned, and the slave executed.
-- Faiths of Man Encyclopedia of Religions, J.G.R. Forlong

And from there on the Church, after it came to power, made it worse. Some Saints, Popes, Protestant Reformers and many modern American Christian denominations, paved the way for slavery and serfdom and contributed to the plight of those enslaved.

Christianity, slavery and serfdom

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.
...[A Christian apologist] had found -- or he confessed that some industrious theologian had found for him -- one Christian condemnation of slavery in those eight hundred years! ... 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 Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Bible

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 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.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

See more: The Bible on Slavery

History of Church and slavery

Only in 867 did the Church concern itself with slaves' marriages; for the pious [5th century Christian Roman Emperor] Theodosius held that "slaves were too vile to be worthy of legal notice."
...

• Christian slaves were not permitted to partake of the Eucharist without their master's consent, as decided by the [4th century] Council of Laodicea; and
• in 541 A.C. the Council of Orleans required that the descendants of slaves should be re-enslaved.
• The Council of Toledo in 633 A.C. forbade bishops to set free church slaves, or to sell Christian slaves to any but Christians, and
• other Councils made laws about slaves down to 1179 A.C.

The Abbey of St Germain des Prés owned 80,000 slaves, and that of St. Martin de Tours 20,000.
-- Faiths of Man Encyclopedia of Religions, J.G.R. Forlong

Its conscience was only shocked when a Jewish or Heathen master owned Christian slaves. Nay, the Church not only held slaves itself, not only protected others who held slaves, but it thundered against all who should despoil its property by selling or liberating slaves belonging to the Church.

• The Council of Agatho, 506, considered it unfair to enfranchise the slaves of monasteries, seeing that the monks themselves laboured.
• The Council of Toledo, 597, stigmatised as robbers those who set free the slaves of the Church without giving an equivalent.
• The Council of Epaona, 517, prohibited abbots from emancipating the slaves of their monasteries.

Slaves were bequeathed to the Church by will, or given as an act of piety, and never was the gift refused. The Church, too, held its slaves to the end. In France, in his day, Voltaire [18th century] estimated that the Church held between 50,000 and 60,000 slaves.
-- Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen

There were many Councils held in Toledo, Spain. The one in 633 was called the Fourth Council of Toledo. Whilst the one in 597 was one of the many other national councils held there.
See more: The involvement of the Churches in African slavery

Popes and Saints

St. Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century is well-known for his pro-slavery writings which would continue to influence the Church's stance on this matter for centuries. Before him, other saints had already sanctioned it:

The slave should be resigned to his lot, in obeying his master he is obeying God ...
-- early 5th century Saint John Chrysostom

... slavery is not penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance.
-- Saint Augustine in The City of God (5th century)

When the Christian theologians took the trouble to discuss slavery, they were supportive of it. St. Augustine (354-430), in his most famous work, The City of God (426) presented the theological justification of slavery. He taught that God created man free but through sin, that freedom had been lost. Slavery is therefore the punishment for man's sin. As Augustine himself puts it:

The first cause of slavery, then, is sin - that a man should be put in bonds by another; and this happens only by the judgement of God, in whose eyes it is no crime.
-- Saint Augustine, The City of God (5th century)

Thus, in one fell swoop, Augustine not only accepted slavery but gave it divine sanction.

Link

The Roman pontiffs made many remarks about slaves and slavery, none of which helped to abolish the practice.

• Pope Leo The Great (d.461) ruled that no slaves can become priests because their "vileness" will "pollute" the sacred order.
• Pope Gregory the Great (c540-604), who was the richest slave owner in sixth century Europe, forbade the marriage of Christian women to slaves.
• In the eleventh century, Pope Benedict VIII (d1024), in an effort to stop priests from having sex, decreed that all children produced by these unlawful coupling should be made slaves.
• Pope Paul III (1468-1549) decreed that all Englishmen who supported the errant King, Henry VIII should be reduced to slavery.
• In the fifteenth century, the papacy gave the king of Portugal permission to conquer "heathen" countries and reduced their population in "everlasting slavery."

The churches and the monasteries, far from being a haven for escaping slaves, actually owned slaves. When ancient slavery ended, the monasteries were among the last to give up their slaves. [8] Ancient slavery ended in the twelfth century, or more correctly evolved into serfdom, not because of any concerted Christian action but for purely economic reasons. It became cheaper for the wealthy to have serfs working their land and feeding themselves than to own dependent slaves.

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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 Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

With respect to slavery, which the Church boasts to have suppressed, this pious lie is nailed by the fact of the gradual shifting of technical slavery into universal serfdom throughout Europe for centuries, and its persistence in "Christian" England, America and Brazil until almost the present generation, and the existence today of millions of slaves in very Christian Abyssinia; and the world knows the part which the Christian soul-savers took in the United States in upholding slavery as a God-ordained institution of the Blessed Bible. But the Church not only aided and abetted slavery; it owned slaves, and it actively engaged in the most revolting forms of slave-trade:

"Clement V (1309) decreed that resisting Venetians should be sold into slavery, and Gregory XI and Sixtus IV [of blessed memory] decreed the same for the Florentines, and Julius II for both Florence and Bologna. The Bull by which Nicholas V (1442) encouraged Portugal to what became the organized trade in negro slaves. ... In 1538 Paul III decreed slavery against all Englishmen who should dare to support Henry VIII against the pope"!
-- (Encyc. Brit., 14th ed. xix, 35.)

-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

In Rumania for instance, monasteries kept many Roma (Gypsies) as slaves.

Reformers

... the Reformation did nothing for them [the workers].

At first Luther showed a human concern about the exploitation of the mass of the people. ...They rose [against the oppression under the German princes] ... and they 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."

...[Luther] defended serfdom, saying that to abolish it would be "against the gospels and robbery." In later years [after 100,000 German peasants lay dead] 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 Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Luther was in support of slavery.
See also: The involvement of the Churches in African slavery

The Churches and the workers

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.
...
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 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.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe