On the whole, what was demanded on this subject was not any clearer moral teaching, but rather a stronger enforcement of the condemnation long since passed upon infanticide, and an increased protection for exposed infants. By the penitential sentences, by the dogmatic considerations I have enumerated, and by the earnest exhortations both of her preachers and writers, the Church laboured to deepen the sense of the enormity of the act, and especially to convince men that the guilt of abandoning their children to the precarious and doubtful mercy of the stranger was scarcely less than that of simple infanticide.(30) In the civil law her influence was also displayed, though not, I think, very advantageously. By the counsel, it is said, of Lactantius, Constantine, in the very year of his conversion, in order to diminish infanticide by destitute parents, issued a decree, applicable in the first instance to Italy, but extended in A.D. 322 to Africa, in which he commanded that those children whom their parents were unable to support should be clothed and fed at the expense of the State,(31) a policy which had already been pursued on a large scale under the Antonines. In A.D. 331, a law intended to multiply the chances of the exposed child being taken charge of by some charitable or interested person, provided that the foundling should remain the absolute property of its saviour, whether he adopted it as a son or employed it as a slave, and that the parent should not have power at any future time to reclaim it.(32) By another law, which had been issued in A.D. 329, it had been provided that children who had been, not exposed, but sold, might be reclaimed upon payment by the father.(33)