What man of sound mind, therefore, will affirm,
while such is our character, that we are murderers? For we cannot eat
human flesh till we have killed some one. The former charge, therefore,
being false, if any one should ask them in regard to the second, whether
they have seen what they assert, not one of them would be so barefaced
as to say that he had. And yet we have slaves, some more and some fewer,
by whom we could not help being seen; but even of these, not one has been
found to invent even such things against us. For when they know that we
cannot endure even to see a man put to death, though justly; who of them
can accuse us of murder or cannibalism? Who does not reckon among the
things of greatest interest the contests of gladiators and wildbeasts,
especially those which are given by you? But we, deeming that to see
a man put to death is much the same as killing him, have abjured such
spectacles.830
830 [See Tatian, cap
xxiii., supra, p. 75. But here the language of Gibbon is worthy
to be quoted: though the icy-hearted infidelfailed to understand that
just such philosophers as he enjoyed these spectacles, till Christianity
taught even such to profess a refined abhorrence of what the Gospelabolished, with no help from them. He says, “the first Christianemperor may claim the honour of the first edict which condemned the art
and amusement of shedding human blood; but this benevolentlaw
expressed the wishes of the prince, without reforming an inveterate abuse
which degraded a civilized (?) nationbelow the condition of savage
cannibals. Several hundred, perhaps several thousand, victims
were annually slaughtered in the great cities of the empire.”
He tells the story of the heroic Telemachus, without eulogy; how his
death, while struggling to separate the combatants abolished forever
the inhuman sports and sacrifices of the amphitheatre. This happened
under Honorius. Milman’s Gibbon, iii. 210.]
How, then, when we do not even look on, lest we should contract guilt
and pollution, can we put people to death? And when we say that those
women who use drugs to bring on abortioncommitmurder, and will have
to give an account to God831
831 [Let
Americans read this, and ask whether a relapse into heathenism is not
threatening our civilization, in this respect. May I venture to refer
to Moral Reforms (ed. 1869, Lippincotts, Philadelphia), a little
book of my own, rebuking this inquity, and tracing the earliest violation
of this law of Christianmorals, and of nature itself, to an unhappy
Bishop of Rome, rebuked by Hippolytus. See vol. vi. p. 345, Edinburgh
Series of Ante-Nicene Fathers.]
for the abortion, on
what principle should we commitmurder? For it does not belong to the
same person to regard the very fœtus in the womb as a created being,
and therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into
life, to kill it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose
them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it
has been reared to destroy it. But we are in all things always alike
and the same, submitting ourselves to reason, and not ruling over it.
