In the plays of the Athenian comic poets of the third and fourth centuries B.C. we find, to wearisomeness, one recurring plot.  The heroine turns out to be, not just a common girl, but the daughter of the best family in Athens, exposed when she was a baby.  When Plato sketched his ideal constitution, in addition to the mating of suitable pairs to be decided by government, he added that, if the offspring were not good enough, it should be put away where it would not be found again.  Aristotle allowed the same practice.  The most cultured race on earth freely exposed its infants; and this letter of Hilarion to Alis—­a dated letter by the way, of September or October in the year 1 A.D.—­makes it clear that the practice of exposure of children still prevailed; and there is other evidence which need not now detain us.  It is a hard world, where kind people or good people can think of such things as ordinary and natural.

Evidence of the character of an age is given by the treatment of criminals; and that age was characterized by crucifixion.  They would take a human being, spread him out on a cross on the ground, drive nails through his hands and feet; and then the cross was raised—­the agony of the victim during the movement is not to be imagined.  It was made fast; and there the victim hung, suspended between heaven and earth, to live or die at his leisure.  By and by crows would gather round him.  “I have been good,” said the slave.  “Then you have your reward,” says the Latin poet, “you will not feed the crows on the cross."[16] There is a very striking phrase in St. Matthew:  “And sitting down they watched him there” (Matt. 27:36).  The soldiers nailed three men to crosses, and sat down beneath them to dice for their clothes.  Our tolerances, like our utterances, come out of the abundance of the heart, and stamp us for what we are.

We cannot easily realize all that slavery meant.  When we read in the Fourth Gospel that “the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), that was written before Jesus Christ had abolished slavery; for, we remember, it was done by his people against the judgement of the business experts.  Slavery meant robbing the man of every right that Nature gave him; and, as Homer said long ago, “Farseeing Zeus takes away half a man’s manhood, when he brings the day of slavery upon him."[17] He became a thief, a liar, dirty, and bad; and with the woman it was still worse.  The slave woman was a little lower than the animal; she might not have offspring.  It was “natural,” men said; “Nature had designed certain races to be slaves; slavery was written in Nature; it was Nature’s law.”  These were not the thoughts of vulgar people, but of some of the best of the Greeks—­not of all, indeed; but society was organized on the basis of slavery.  It was an accepted axiom of all social and economic life.