Labor will some day be too liberal to give up its Bible.  In that age, when “God was dead”; in that age, when “the gods had abdicated”; they said, “the mechanic’s occupation is degrading.  A workshop is incompatible with anything noble.”  The curse of slavery had blotted the name of labor, and they agreed that “a purchased laborer is better than a hired one,” and thousands of prison-like dwellings rose to conceal the myriads of slaves.  In that age Nero, who had the same opinion about God which the vaunting spirit which calls itself liberal has today, had a “golden house” as large as a city, with colonnades a mile long, and within it a statue of Nero 120 feet high.  That is what the theory of infidelity did for labor and the working man when it was on the throne.  Do you wonder that from that day to this the “carpenter’s son” of the Bible has been scoffed at by this infidelity?

In that age, when the theories of infidelity ruled, the gladiators made wet with their blood the great enclosure of the arena.  The women and timid girls of Rome gave lightly the sign of death.  The crowd shook the building with applause as the palpitating body was dragged by a hook into the death-chamber, and slaves turned up the bloody soil and covered the blood-dabbled earth with sand that the awful amusement might go on.  All this was allowed by infidelity in its purity, before it had been influenced by the Christian’s Bible into believing that such things are atrocious.

Oh, when I hear infidelity prate of the horrors of slavery and defend a Godless theory of the State, I remember that those who had it in its purity did not regard the slave as a man.  When I read the story of slavery and hear an exponent of free thought say, “The doctrine that woman is a slave or serf of man—­whether it comes from hell or heaven, from God or demon, from the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, or the very Sodom of perdition—­is savagery pure and simple,” I say, “That is so, but just that was the ruling idea when infidelity was on the throne of Rome.”  And only where the Bible has gone and triumphed has woman the privileges which are thus praised.

When I hear it said:  “Slavery includes all other crimes.  It is the joint product of the kidnaper, pirate, thief, murderer, and hypocrite.  It degrades labor and corrupts leisure.  To lacerate the naked back, to sell wives, to steal babes, to debauch your soul—­this is slavery,” I answer:  “That is so,” and I add that all these and a thousand other damnable features of slavery were seen in Rome when the whole Roman people felt and spoke about the message of the Bible just as your type of liberalism does today.

To all this wretched state of man what offers came from Seneca, whom skepticism quotes as a moralist?  Why, he said:  “Admire only thyself”; and when he saw that a man must get out of himself, he said:  “Give thyself to philosophy.”  Not philosophy, but the power of the Bible’s Christ has lifted man upward to his highest life.