$77. SLAVERY. 335
beyond the satisfaction of their physical wants. They could not bear witness in courts of justice. They could be bought and sold with their children like other property. The marriage tie was disregarded, and marriages between freemen and slaves were null and void. In the course of time slavery was moder ated into serfdom, which was attached to the soil. Small farmers often preferred that condition to freedom, as it secured them the protection of a powerful nobleman against robbers and invaders. The condition of the serfs, however, during the middle ages was little better than that of slaves, and gave rise to occasional outbursts in the Peasant Wars, which occurred mostly in connection with the free preaching of the Gospel (as by Wiclif and the Lollards in England, and by Luther in Germany), but which were suppressed by force, and in their immediate effects increased the burdens of the dependent classes. The same struggle between capital and labor .is still going on in different forms.
The mediaeval church inherited the patristic views of slavery. She regarded it as a necessary evil, as a legal right based on moral wrong, as a consequence of sin and a just punishment for it. She put it in the same category with war, violence, pesti lence, famine, and other evils. St. August in, the greatest theological authority of the Latin church, treats slavery as a disturbance of the normal condition and relation. God did not, he says, establish the dominion of man over man, but only over the brute. He derives the word scrvus, as usual, from scrvarc (to save the life of captives of war doomed to death), but cannot find it in the Bible till the time of the righteous Noah, who gave it as a punishment to his guilty son Ham ; whence it follows that the word came " from sin, not from nature." He also holds that the institution will finally be abolished when all iniquity shall disappear, and God shall be all in all.1
1 De Civit. Dei, 1. XIX. c. 15. " Nomen [servus] culpa meruit, non natura. . . . Prima servitutis causa peccatum est, ut homo homini conditionis vinculo subderetw :
336 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
The church exerted her great moral power not so much towards the abolition of slavery as the amelioration and re moval of the evils connected with it. Many provincial Synods dealt with the subject, at least incidentally. The legal right of holding slaves was never called in question, and slaveholders were in good and regular standing. Even convents held slaves, though in glaring inconsistency with their professed principle of equality and brotherhood. Pope Gregory the Great, one of the most humane of the popes, presented bondservants from his own estates to convents, and exerted all his influence to recover a fugitive slave of his brother.1 A reform Synod of Pavia, over which Pope Benedict VIII., one of the forerunners of Hildebrand, presided (A. D. 1018), enacted that sons and daugh ters of clergymen, whether from free-women or slaves, whether from legal wives or concubines, are the property of the church> and should never be emancipated.2 No pope has ever declared slavery incompatible with Christianity. The church was strongly conservative, and never encouraged a revolutionary or radical movement looking towards universal emancipation.
But, on the other hand, the Christian spirit worked silently, steadily and irresistibly in the direction of emancipation.
quod nonfuit nisi Deo judicante, apud quern non est iniquitas." ... He thinks it will continue with the duties prescribed by the apostles, donee transeat iniquitas, et evacuetur omnis principatus, et potestas humana, et sit Deus omnia in omnibus." Chrysostom taught substantially the same views, and derived from the sin of Adam a threefold servitude and a threefold tyranny, that of the husband over the wife, the master over the slave, and the state over the subjects. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the schoolmen, " did not see in slavery either differ ence of race or imaginary inferiority or means of government, but only a scourge inflicted on humanity by the sine of the first man" (Balrnes, p. 112). But none of these great men seems to have had an idea that slavery would ever disappear from the earth except with sin itself. Cessante causa, cessat e/ectus. S*e vol. III. 115-121.
1 Epist. X. 66; IX. 102. See these and other passages in Overbeck, Ver-. hiiltniss der alien Kirche zur Sklaverei, in his " Studien zur Gesch. der alten Kirche" (1875) p. 211 sq. Overbeck, however, dwells too much on the proslavery sentiments of the fathers, and underrates the merits of the church for the final abolition of slavery.
* Hefele IV. 670.