successful was Christianity"; also
"That when the barbarian conquests re-established slavery in a new form,
the Church exerted all her energies on the side of freedom."

That Christianity "threatened" the permanence of Slavery is, of course,
purely a matter of opinion. Mr. Henson takes one view, I have given
reasons for another, and the reader must judge between us. That it
softened the rigors of Slavery is a very questionable statement. When
Mr. Henson says that "Roman Slavery was, perhaps, the most cruel and
revolting kind of Slavery," he is guilty of historical confusion. Roman
Slavery lasted for very many centuries. In the early ages it was brutal
enough, but under the great emperors, and especially the Antonines,
it was far more merciful than negro Slavery was in Christian America.
Slaves were protected by law; the power of putting them to death was
taken from the masters and entrusted to the magistrates; and, as Gibbon
says, "Upon a just complaint of intolerable treatment, the injured slave
either obtained his deliverance or a less cruel master." Compare this
with the condition of serfs under the Christian feudal system, when, in
Mr. Henson's own language, "the serf was tied to the soil, bought and
sold with it, the chattel of his master, who could overwork, beat, and
even kill him at will."

The phrase "re-established Slavery in a new form," seems to imply that
Christianity had abolished Slavery before the barbaric conquests. But it
had done nothing of the kind. Nay, as a matter of fact, Constantine and
his successors drew a sharper line than ever between slaves and freemen.
Constantine (the first Christian emperor) actually decreed death against
any freewoman who should marry a slave, while the slave himself was to
be burnt alive!

Much of what Mr. Henson says about the manumission of slaves by some of
the mediaeval clergy is unquestionably true. But who doubts that, during
a thousand years, a humane and even a noble heart often beat under a
priest's cassock? These manumissions, however, were of Christian slaves.
The Pagan slaves--such as the Sclavonians, from whom the word _slave_ is
derived--were considered to have no claims at all. Surely the liberation
of fellow Christians might spring from proselyte zeal. "Mohammedans
also," as Professor Newman says, "have a conscience against enslaving
Mohammedans, and generally bestow freedom on a slave as soon as he
adopts their religion." Manumission of slaves was com