A misconception on the subject has arisen by way of a hasty inference from the fact that in the Christian period all manumissions were religious acts, performed through the Church. This was no result of any Christian doctrine, being in fact a deliberate imitation of pagan practice. Before Constantine, as we have seen, the act of manumission was a religious one, performed as such in the pagan temples; and when Constantine adroitly transferred the function from those temples to the churches, he probably put a check on the process of liberation, since pagans would long be reluctant to go to the churches for any purpose. For centuries manumission had been a common act, the number of freedmen in Rome being notoriously great at all times, from the day of Cicero onwards. It was almost a matter of course for a Roman master to free a multitude of his slaves on his deathbed or by his will, till Augustus enacted that no one should emancipate more than a hundred at once. A diligent slave, in fact, could usually count on getting his freedom by five or six years of service; and many were allowed to buy it out of their savings, or out of earnings they were permitted to make. So far were the earlier Christian emperors, with one exception, from seeking to raise the status of slaves, that they re-enacted the rule excluding them from the purview of the law against adultery, "because of the vileness of their condition." The exception was the law of Constantine forbidding the separation of slaves from their families--a humane veto disregarded by Christian slave-owners in modern times. But Constantine, on the other hand, enacted that if a freewoman should cohabit with a slave, she should be executed, and he burned alive; and the laws against fugitive slaves were made more cruel. Gratian even enacted that any slave who dared to accuse his master of any crime, unless it were high treason, should be burned alive, without any inquiry into the charge. For the rest, the Fathers justified slavery on the score of the curse passed on Ham; and the theses of the Stoics as to the natural equality of men had from them no countenance.