The influence of Christianity in the protection of infant life, though very real, may be, and I think often has been, exaggerated. It would be difficult to overrate its influence in the sphere we have next to examine. There is scarcely any other single reform so important in the moral history of mankind as the suppression of the gladiatorial shows, and this feat must be almost exclusively ascribed to the Christian Church. When we remember how extremely few of the best and greatest men of the Roman world had absolutely condemned the games of the amphitheatre, it is impossible to regard, without the deepest admiration, the unwavering and uncompromising consistency of the patristic denunciations. And even comparing the Fathers with the most enlightened Pagan moralists in their treatment of this matter, we shall usually find one most significant difference. The Pagan, in the spirit of philosophy, denounced these games as inhuman, or demoralising, or degrading, or brutal. The Christian, in the spirit of the Church, represented them as a definite sin, the sin of murder, for which the spectators as well as the actors were directly responsible before Heaven. In the very latest days of the Pagan Empire, magnificent amphitheatres were still arising,(50) and Constantine himself had condemned numerous barbarian captives to combat with wild beasts.(51) It was in A.D. 325, immediately after the convocation of the Council of Nice, that the first Christian emperor issued the first edict in the Roman Empire condemnatory of the gladiatorial games.(52) It was issued in Berytus in Syria, and is believed by some to have been only applicable to the province of Phœnicia;(53) but even in this province it was suffered to be inoperative, for, only four years later, Libanius speaks of the shows as habitually celebrated at Antioch.(54) In the Western Empire their continuance was fully recognised, though a few infinitesimal restrictions were imposed upon them. Constantine, in A.D. 357, prohibited the lanistæ, or purveyors of gladiators, from bribing servants of the palace to enrol themselves as combatants.(55) Valentinian, in A.D. 365, forbade any Christian criminal,(56) and in A.D. 367, any one connected with the Palatine,(57) being condemned to fight. Honorius prohibited any slave who had been a gladiator passing into the service of a senator; but the real object of this last measure was, I imagine, not so much to stigmatise the gladiator, as to guard against the danger of an armed nobility.(58) A much more important fact is that the spectacles were never introduced into the new capital of Constantine. At Rome, though they became less numerous, they do not appear to have been suspended until their final suppression. The passion for gladiators was the worst, while religious liberty was probably the best, feature of the old Pagan society; and it is a melancholy fact that of these two it was the nobler part that in the Christian Empire was first destroyed.