Originally published in The Leisure Hour (Religious Tract Society) vol.1 #8 (19 Feb 1852).
Surprise is often felt by persons who are unversed in the habits of the Greeks and Romans, at finding the exposure of infants to perish so constantly introduced into the legends of their mythology and the fictions of their poets. As an instance of each of these classes, Priam, the venerable king of Troy, and Chremes, a character in one of the plays of Terence, are described as abandoning their offspring to perish, without hesitation, without remorse, and without the imputation of guilt. Among ourselves, parental affection seems not so much a moral duty as an ineradicable instinct. It survives every other virtue, and can cease to exist only in the hearts of the most desperately abandoned and depraved. The horror and indignation manifested when any case of infanticide does come to light, merely sets in a stronger view the sense we have of the atrocity of the deed. We ask with wonder, "Can a woman forget her
sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?" But this feeling is comparatively new in Europe. It is the product of Christianity, which first "imputed the crime of murder to the parent who strangles, starves, or abandons his new-born infant to perish. The exposure of children was the stubborn and prevailing vice of antiquity; it was sometimes prescribed, often permitted, almost always practised with impunity, even by nations who never entertained the Roman ideas of paternal power; and the dramatic poets, who appeal to the human heart, represent with indifference a popular custom which was palliated by the motives of economy and compassion." (Gibbon's Decline and Fall, cap. 44.) This testimony is the more valuable as coming from one who systematically set himself to blacken Christianity and brighten heathenism.
Among the Spartans, infanticide was not only sanctioned by law, but organized into a system. In certain cases they did not allow the children to be reared, even should the parents wish it. The father, on the birth of an infant, was ordered to carry it to certain officers appointed for the purpose, who examined the child, and if they found it strong and well formed, they gave orders for its preservation; but if it proved deformed or puny, it was carried away and flung into a deep cavern at the foot of Mount Taygetus, where it was left to perish. This custom seems to have prevailed throughout Greece, and to have been practised in all the states, with the exception of Thebes, which is spoken of as singular in making provision for the bringing up of sickly and deformed children. The sages and moralists, so far from opposing a practice which seems to us so atrocious, gave it their countenance and support. Plato, in his model republic, provides that in case of any marriage where the children are likely to prove weakly, care must be taken that they do not see the light; or if such should be born, they are to be destroyed as speedily as possible. Aristotle speaks to the same effect, in language yet more decided and peremptory. The Roman law, though it did not prescribe, yet permitted infanticide. The male children, if m any way deformed, were to be shown to five persons living in the neighbourhood, and then thrown into the Tiber. Any of the female children, except the eldest, might be destroyed in the same way, without, as it seems, any formality whatever. A striking illustration of the commonness of the practice, and the indifference with which it was regarded, is afforded by the fact, that Cicero and Seneca speak of it incidentally, without making any comment upon it, but treating it as a matter of course.
A still more impressive proof of this has been pointed out by Bishop Warburton in the later editions of his Divine Legation of Moses. Chremes, whom Terence describes as a man of universal benevolence, and into whose mouth he puts the famous line—"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" (I am a man, and deem no human interest a matter of indifference to myself), is the same person who commands his wife to expose his new-born infant, and flies into a passion with her for having committed the doing of it to another, in consequence of which it had escaped death; and who goes on to characterize all persons who retain any remnant of this natural affection as persons who are "ignorant alike of law, goodness, and justice." Well might the apostle speak of the heathen of his time, as "without natural affection!"
"The dark places of the earth are" yet "full of the habitations of cruelty." Heathenism still retains this characteristic unchanged. The extent to which infanticide prevails in China, India, Africa, and the islands of the Pacific, is matter of notoriety. Its prevalence over large portions of the American continent seems proved beyond a doubt. In Mohammedan countries it is not discountenanced, whilst kindred practices, scarcely less revolting and horrible, are affirmed to be perpetrated without scruple. Christianity alone has made it shameful and criminal for the parents to destroy the offspring to which they have given birth; it alone has repressed a custom which, however abhorrent to our natural instincts and affections it may seem, has yet existed unchecked (sometimes even enjoined) in every heathen land.
These facts are surely worth pondering by those who have hitherto not looked on Christianity as it really is entitled to be regarded, as the best friend of humanity. Could we suppose, indeed, Christianity, with all its direct and indirect benefits, to be withdrawn from our social system, a change would ensue in the moral world only to be paralleled by what would result from the withdrawal of light and solar heat from our globe. We cannot disguise the fact, that the human heart by nature is selfish and cruel. Illustrations, like those just quoted, prove this to be the case. When the Bible, then, talks of the necessity of its being renewed before man can be truly happy, it asserts a truth in harmony with experience and all sound mental philosophy. It must be born again. Education may refine the exterior of it, but it cannot cleanse the interior. Let a man, however, by the teaching of the Holy Spirit, be led to perceive the ingratitude of sin, and to understand the love of Christ in dying for him; let him by vital purifying faith in the Saviour's atoning sacrifice, obtain peace to his troubled conscience; let him have the great law of love to God and man written upon his heart; then all things become new. The selfish affections lose their control; kindness fills the bosom; and dark clouds of heathenism, such as those which this paper has indicated, disperse and flee away.