aze to the brighter qualities which it developed in the healthier
atmosphere of the West?

Further, Turgot might have asked with much profit to the cause of
historic truth, and perhaps in more emancipated years he did ask,
whether economic circumstances have not had more to do with the
dissolution of slavery than Christian doctrines:--whether the rise of
rent from free tenants over the profits to be drawn from slave-labour by
the landowner, has not been a more powerful stimulant to emancipation,
than the moral maxim that we ought to love one another, or the Christian
proposition that we are all equals before the divine throne and co-heirs
of salvation:--whether a steady and permanent fall in the price of
slave-raised productions had not as much to do with the decay of slavery
in Europe, as the love of God or the doctrine of human brotherhood.[36]
That the influence of Christianity, so far as it went, and, so far as it
was a real power, tended both to abolish slavery, and, where it was too
feeble to press in this direction, at any rate tended to mitigate the
harshness of its usages, is hardly to be denied by any fair-minded
person. The true issue is what this influence amounted to. The orthodox
historian treats it as single and omnipotent. His heterodox brother--in
the eighteenth century they both usually belonged to one family--leaves
it out.

[Footnote 36: See on this subject Finlay's _Mediaeval Greece and
Trebizond_, p. 197; and also, on the other hand, p. 56.]

The crowded annals of human misology, as well as the more terrible
chronicle of the consequences when misology has impatiently betaken
itself to the cruel arm of flesh, show the decisive importance of the
precise way in which a great subject of debate is put. Now the whole
question of religion was in those days put with radical incompleteness,
and Turgot's dissertation was only in a harmony that might have been
expected with the prevailing error. The champions of authority, like the
leaders of the revolt, insisted on inquiring absolutely, not relatively;
on judging religion with reference to human nature in the abstract,
instead of with reference to the changing varieties of social
institution and circumstance. We ought to place ourselves where we can
see both lines of inquiry to be possible. We ought to place ourselves
where we can ask what the tendencies of Christian influence have been,
without mixing up with that question the further and distinct inquiry