In the testimony of the Christian Church there is one character of precious example: I refer to Pope Gregory, justly meriting by his life the title of Great, which has been preserved by history. Through him England first tasted the blessings of Christianity. Fair-haired Saxons from the distant island, standing for sale in the market of Rome, enlisted his sympathy. When told that they were Angles, he exclaimed, “Not Angles, but Angels,”--“_Non Angli, sed Angeli_”--and he insisted on their ransom and instruction to become the apostles of their countrymen. Under his auspices St. Augustin commenced the work, so that the conversion of England may be traced to the sympathies aroused by English slaves on the banks of the Tiber. A letter from St. Gregory shows the spirit in which he acted. Giving freedom to two bondmen, he wrote these commanding words: “Since our Redeemer, Maker of the whole creation, being hereto propitiated, has been pleased to assume human flesh, that, by the grace of his divinity, the chain of slavery wherewith we were held captive being broken, he might restore us to pristine liberty, it is well that men whom Nature from the beginning has brought forth free and the law of nations has subjected to the yoke of servitude, should by benefit of manumission be restored to the liberty wherein they were born.”[285] And do not these words speak to us now? Foremost of all in history who have vindicated human liberty, and associated their names with it forevermore, stands John Milton, Secretary of Oliver Cromwell, and author of “Paradise Lost.” Cradled under a lawless royalty, he helped to found and support the English Commonwealth, while in all that he wrote he pleaded for human rights,--now in defence of the English people, who had beheaded their king, and now in immortal poems which show how wisely and well he loved the cause he had made his own. Nowhere has the assumption of property in man been encountered more completely than in the conversation between the Archangel and Adam, after the former had pictured a hunter whose game was “men, not beasts”:-- “O execrable son, so to aspire Above his brethren, to himself assuming Authority usurped, from God not given! He gave us only over beast, fish, fowl Dominion absolute; that right we hold By His donation; but man over men He made not lord, such title to Himself Reserving, human left from human free.”[286]