Equally emphatic was the condemnation which the new conscience pronounced on infanticide and self-destruction. We have seen in our review of the morality of the classical peoples how almost universal was the practice of the exposition of infants, and how slight was the moral condemnation which the custom evoked even from philosophers and moralists. When the practice was prohibited, usually the prohibition sprang from considerations of a prudential or economic character rather than from scruples of conscience. But the Christian teachers, proclaiming the sacredness of human life and the immortal destiny of every human soul, declared the destruction of the infant as sinful as the taking of the life of the adult. It is to this teaching doubtless that is, in large measure, due the existence in Christian lands of a conscience which condemns the destruction of the newborn babe as an act of deep moral turpitude. It was the same Christian doctrine of the sacredness of human life, along with the teaching of the duty of resignation, that created also a new moral feeling in regard to suicide. We have seen how the conscience of the classical peoples in general passed no condemnation upon the act of self-destruction if life had in any way become a burden; but the Church taught that suicide is the same as murder, indeed a greater sin because it destroys not only the body but also the soul. Some Christian moralists maintained that “Judas committed a greater sin in killing himself than in betraying his master Christ.”[646] Throughout the Middle Ages, under the influence of the Church, the act of self-destruction was regarded with the greatest abhorrence,[647] and without that commingling of tenderness and pity which with us has come to temper the feeling of condemnation. [Sidenote: The great missionary propaganda as an expression of Christian altruism]