The influence of Christianity in this respect began with the very earliest stage of human life. The practice of abortion was one to which few persons in antiquity attached any deep feeling of condemnation. I have noticed in a former chapter that the physiological theory that the fœtus did not become a living creature till the hour of birth, had some influence on the judgments passed upon this practice; and even where this theory was not generally held, it is easy to account for the prevalence of the act. The death of an unborn child does not appeal very powerfully to the feeling of compassion, and men who had not yet attained any strong sense of the sanctity of human life, who believed that they might regulate their conduct on these matters by utilitarian views, according to the general interest of the community, might very readily conclude that the prevention of birth was in many cases an act of mercy. In Greece, Aristotle not only countenanced the practice, but even desired that it should be enforced by law, when population had exceeded certain assigned limits.(15) No law in Greece, or in the Roman Republic, or during the greater part of the Empire, condemned it;(16) and if, as has been thought, some measure was adopted condemnatory of it before the close of the Pagan Empire, that measure was altogether inoperative. A long chain of writers, both Pagan and Christian, represent the practice as avowed and almost universal. They describe it as resulting, not simply from licentiousness or from poverty, but even from so slight a motive as vanity, which made mothers shrink from the disfigurement of childbirth. They speak of a mother who had never destroyed her unborn offspring as deserving of signal praise, and they assure us that the frequency of the crime was such that it gave rise to a regular profession. At the same time, while Ovid, Seneca, Favorinus the Stoic of Arles, Plutarch, and Juvenal, all speak of abortion as general and notorious, they all speak of it as unquestionably criminal.(17) It was probably regarded by the average Romans of the later days of Paganism much as Englishmen in the last century regarded convivial excesses, as certainly wrong, but so venial as scarcely to deserve censure.