Now for something of very great importance to us here, which occurred soon afterwards, and before the introduction of African slavery into America. It is that by the Renascence the literature of slaveholding Greece and Rome suddenly acquired and long held commanding influence upon almost every educator of the public in the enlightened world. It was in the last quarter of the fourteenth century--some fifty years after Dante had died--that the classics revived in Italy. Spreading thence over Europe, they are found dominating the great Elizabethan divines, philosophers, poets, and other opinion-forming writers at the end of the fifteenth century. And during all of the time from the landing of the twenty Africans at Jamestown by the Dutch man-of-war in 1619 until slavery had become the solitary prop of southern industry and property, the Greek and Latin ancient writers were in our mother country almost the sole subjects of school or university education, and the main reading of all those that read at all. And every page of this literature, studied with enthusiastic worship and resorted to day in and day out for instruction and inspiration, disclosed that in Greece and Rome the average family was dependent for its maintenance upon slaves; and that so far from slavery being a relic of barbarism, as the American root-and-branch abolitionists afterwards fulminated in a platform, it was the very foundation of the state in those two great nations whose philosophy, learning, science, jurisprudence, poetry, art, and eloquence are still the models in every enlightened land. Naturally the educated classes, now that it had been several hundred years since slavery was a burning question, had forgotten or had never heard of the old disinclination of the church, and could not see any evil in that which their most admired and dearest ones had all practised. The classics did not stop with giving slavery the negative support just mentioned. Although such authors as Quintilian and Seneca, and the later jurists--all of the discredited silver, and not of the glorified Ciceronian and Augustan ages--do express, theatrically and academically, anti-slavery opinions, yet what they say was merely dust in the balance when weighed against the commendations of the institution to be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, who had now become the great idols of intellectual society.[12] The church would not stay out in the cold and dark, whither it had been suddenly and rudely cast by the Renascence. It woke up to discover that as the African was a heathen barbarian it was God's mercy to kidnap him for a christian master, and thus give him his only opportunity of saving his soul. And although it is not right to enslave other races, the descendants of Ham are an exception, who by reason of Noah's curse are to be the servants of servants to the end of time--that is what Holy Church taught by precept and example.