not directly condemn slavery, and the
reason of this is to be found in the study of the nature of His mission.
He came to regenerate the individual, and not, primarily, society. "His
language in innumerable similes showed that He believed that those
principles He taught would only be successful after long periods of time
and gradual development. Most of His figures and analogies in regard to
'the Kingdom of God' rest upon the idea of slow and progressive growth
or change. He undoubtedly saw that the only true renovation of the world
would come, not through reforms of institutions or governments, but
through individual change of character, effected by the same power to
which Plato appealed--the love-power--but a love exercised towards
Himself as a perfect and Divine model. It was the 'Kingdom of God' in
the soul which should bring on the kingdom of God in human society....
And yet ultimately this Christian system will be found at the basis of
all these great movements of progress in human history. But it began by
aiming at the individual, and not at society; and aiming alone at an
entire change of the affectional and moral tendencies."[33]

The moral teaching of the _Stoics_, second only to that of the Christian
religion, had an effect in preparing the way for the introduction of
humane principles of treatment for the bond and the oppressed. But the
Stoics, like many of the Christians, did not always make their actions
accord with their principles. Seneca tells of a Stoic who amused himself
by feeding his fish with pieces of his mutilated slaves. Juvenal, who
wrote when Stoicism was at the height of its influence, asks "how a
slave could be a man," and Gaius, the Stoical jurist, in the reign of
Marcus Aurelius, classes slaves with animals.

Constantine, in his own character, did not display the beauties of the
Christian religion, though his advisers who framed his laws acted under
the influence of Christian teaching. This emperor passed laws in
reference to slavery. He wrote to an archbishop: "It has pleased me for
a long time to establish that, in the Christian Church, masters can give
liberty to their slaves, provided they do it in presence of all the
assembled people with the assistance of Christian priests, and provided
that, in order to preserve the memory of the fact, some written document
informs where they sign as parties or as witnesses." In pagan times
there was a somewhat similar system of a master being able