Sages and legislators of antiquity who considered slavery a _sine quâ non_ of government were not wrong. Vast numbers of human wills cannot be left in freedom without a restraint of some kind. “Christianity alone,” writes the Rationalist Lecky, “could affect the profound change of character which rendered the abolition of slavery possible” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 258). When Peter the Fisherman proclaimed the brotherhood of man, saying “Men, brethren” to all alike, the Church began her perennial mission of liberty by sanctification. Individually, men must be delivered from the yoke of evil passions by Christianity, so that the masses might be delivered from servitude. The powers of darkness, that are now waging fierce warfare on the Christian Church, understand perfectly what the legislators of antiquity understood and practised. Being resolved to uproot Christianity and its moral teaching, which alone have rendered freedom and government compatible, they are casting about for some new kind of slavery, which apparently is to take the form of State Socialism. A coterie is to concentrate in its hands all the power, all the wealth, all the natural resources of the country. This coterie will be named the State; the others, the cringing, crouching millions yclept the Sovereign People, will have nothing left but to obey the edicts of the Omnipotent Infallible State, only teacher, preacher, and general purveyor. _Humanum paucis vivit genus._ This reversion to the pagan regime from which Christianity delivered us will be the just penalty of apostasy from Christianity. If, and when, and where Christianity is crushed out, liberty both civil and personal, which are bound up with and inseparable from it, will disappear in exact proportion _tantum quantum_. We need only turn a few pages of contemporary history and read the lessons taught by the French Revolution. The most illustrious of nations, in the zenith of its civilization, allowed the government to pass into the hands of a band of neo-pagans prepared by Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured; its temples were desecrated; at Notre Dame a prostitute, posing as the Goddess of Reason, was worshipped; on the Champ de Mars the new religion of theo-philanthropy was inaugurated. What was the immediate consequence? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men could no longer call their lives their own under the Law of Suspects, a time to which Camille Pelletan, _ministre de la marine_, actually referred, yesterday, as “an hour when under the influence necessary, but somewhat enervating, of Thermidor, the Republic was in danger.”