Mr. Oman (_Byzantine Empire_, p. 145) takes the popular view as to the reformative effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe Constantine as providing for the children of the destitute to prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing had been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted the finder of an exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all exposure as infanticide, under Valentinian, was only an adoption of the pagan practice at Thebes (Ælian, _Var. Hist._ ii, 7). But in spite of all enactments, under Christian as under pagan rule, exposure and positive infanticide continued, though Christian sentiment never gave it the toleration exhibited in the drama of Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky, _Hist. of European Morals_, 6th ed. ii, 24-33. Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is pictured for us by Chrysostom--a multitude profoundly ignorant, superstitious, excitable, sensuous--all the vices of the Græco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread. On the general moral environment, cp. the author's _Short History of Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 249-50. It is necessary, in the same way, to substitute an accurate for a conventional view as to the treatment of slaves under the Christian Empire. We are still told[300] that the Christian doctrine or implication of religious equality had the effect first of greatly modifying the evils of slavery and finally of abolishing it. Research proves that the facts were otherwise. We have already seen how economic causes partially limited slavery before Christianity was heard of; and in so far as the limitation was maintained,[301] the efficient causes remain demonstrably economic.[302] Indeed, no other causes can be shown to have existed. Not only is slavery endorsed in the Gospels,[303] and treated by Paul as not merely compatible with but favourable to Christian freedom on the part of the slave,[304] but the early Christians, commonly supposed to have been the most incorrupt, held slaves as a matter of course.[305] In the laws of Justinian not a word is said as to slavery being opposed to either the spirit or the letter of Christianity; and the only expressions that in any degree deprecate it are in terms of the Stoic doctrine of the "law of nature,"[306] which we know to have been already current in the time of Aristotle,[307] and to have become widespread in the age of the Antonines, under Stoic auspices. That "law of nature," however, was never allowed to override a definite law of society; and the Christian influence on the other hand set up a new set of arguments for slavery.[308] Among the Christian Visigoths, slaves who married without authority from their masters were forcibly separated; and the slave who dared to marry a free-woman was