On the one hand, the Jewish tradition, which Christianity inherited, abounded not only in noble utterances of the sentiment of compassion, but also in elaborate arrangements for the practical relief of the poor. "Blessed is he that considereth the poor; "1 "He that hath pity on the poor, happy is he;" 2 "Thou shalt surely open thine hand unto thy brother, to thy needy, and to thy poor, in thy land;" 3 "Is not this the fast that I have chosen? . . . to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?"4-these exhortations represent not only the principles of Old Testament religion, but the actual conduct of the devout. The Hebrew race, throughout its entire history, has been endowed with a peculiar sense of responsibility for its weaker brethren, and in modern life is excelled by no element in any community in thoroughness and munificence of organized charity.5

When, on the other hand, we turn to the Roman civilization in which the Christian religion found its expansion and stability, we are confronted, it must be admitted, by conditions of the gravest social corruption and moral decline. These excesses of a debauched and decadent aristocracy, however, do not constitute a complete record of

1 Ps. xli. I.

2 Prov. xiv. 21.

3 Deut. xv. II.

4 Is. lviii. 6, 7.

5 Charities Review, Vol. II, p. 21 ff., F. G. Peabody, "The Modern Charity-worker" (addressed to the United Hebrew Charities of New York City).

the social life of the Roman world. By fixing attention on the immorality of the ruling class, and by utilizing such evidence concerning it as is contributed by the Satirists on the one hand, and by the Stoics on the other, it is possible to describe the social life of Rome as one of the most flagrant domestic looseness and most hopeless social decadence. The historical romances which reproduce these conditions of the Augustan age join with the apologists of Christianity in portraying this moral bankruptcy, and the collapse of Roman power through loss of moral virility is the most solemn proof which history provides that righteousness alone exalteth a people. Yet such a judgment, if passed upon the mass of Roman life, would be as extravagant as a judgment of American civilization derived from the literature and the newspapers which find their material in the follies and sins of the luxurious, pleasure-hunting, and unbridled rich. Beneath the depravity of Roman aristocracy and the corruption of Roman government there still survived, especially in the provincial towns, an atmosphere of unspoiled social life in which the ideals of Christianity might naturally unfold.1

1 A just picture of the characteristics of Roman social life may be derived from Friedländer, "Sittengeschichte Rom's," 6. Aufl., 1888-1890, esp. III, 514 ff.; Keim, "Rom und das Christentum "; Mommsen, "History of Rome," V, Chs. XI and XII; Pearson and Strong, "Juvenal" (Introduction, chapter on Roman life); Reville, "La Réligion à Rome sous les Sevères"; Coulanges, "The Ancient City," 1884; Church, The Gifts of Civilization,” 1880, 147 ff.

Conclusive evidence of this survival may be de rived, for example, from the monuments which recalled the virtues of the dead. At the very period when licentiousness and brutality were corroding the life of the luxurious, these silent witnesses testify that in the great body of the population a way of life still prevailed which was tranquil, domestic, compassionate, unostentatious and calm.1 It was in this soil of the surviving traditions of Rome and the still flourishing traditions of Israel that the philanthropy of the Christian religion took root. Without such a soil Christian charity would have been a seed sown by the wayside. The expansion of the range and depth of philanthropy accomplished by Christianity was beyond doubt a mighty transition in the evolution of human character, but it was not a miraculous transformation of human character. God had not left himself without witnesses in the pre-Christian world. Legal and ostentatious as was the philanthropy of the scribes and Pharisees, the Hebrew race still maintained in many devout homes its national virtue of compassion, and in such a home Jesus was born. Prodigal as were the vices of

(Civilization before and after Christianity); and the striking essay by Bosanquet on "Paganism and Christianity" in his "Civilization of Christendom," 1893.

1E.g. Wilmanns, "Exempla inscriptionorum Latinarum," 1873, pp. 71, 147, 150, 168, and the touching eulogy of the girl Minicia Marcella, by the younger Pliny (Ep. V, 16), translated, with a description of the newly discovered tomb, by Lanciani, " Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries," p. 282.

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Roman rulers, the Roman world had not wholly abandoned its ancient ways of domestic integrity and social peace, and among such Roman homes, in cities of the Roman provinces, there was a welcome for the missionary preaching of St. Paul.

Yet, if one may fairly call the perfected rose a different flower from its wayside progenitor, it remains true that the "Caritas" of the Christian spirit was a new virtue, with an aroma of its own. "Christianity," said Mr. Lecky, "for the first time made charity a rudimentary virtue."1 It is not, however, its rudimentariness which gives to Christian philanthropy a peculiar beauty and fragrance; it is the scope of its sympathy, the dimensions of its giving, and its recognition of fellowship with lives hitherto ignored or rejected by the world. The worship and the fraternal relations of the first Christians abound in a quality of comprehensive tenderness quite unparalleled either in Rome or in Israel. In the earliest forms of Christian worship are special prayers for the poor, the outcast, the prisoners. "Save among us," concludes the first epistle of Clement of Rome, "those who are in tribulation, have mercy on the lowly; lift up the fallen; show thyself unto the needy; heal the ungodly; convert the wanderers of the people; feed the hungry; release our prisoners; raise up the weak; comfort the faint-hearted."2 The same spirit of tender and self-effacing service

1"History of European Morals," II, 84.

2 Lightfoot, "Clement of Rome," Appendix, p. 376.

is repeated in all the early liturgies, adorns the conduct of the primitive congregations, and illuminates the dark period of theological controversy in which the first fair visions of the Christian Church were so soon to be eclipsed. From century to century this vast enterprise of Christian charity has expanded with the growth of the Church; has atoned for many superfluous or cruel controversies; has brightened the sombre history of monasticism and of the mendicant Orders; and has drawn to the influence of the Christian religion millions of persons who could not have been compelled by threats of perdition, but who could not turn from the witness of love. Never was this sense of responsibility for the poor so profoundly felt by the Christian Church as at the present time. No body of Christians, however humble, can maintain its self-respect without an elaborate organization of compassion and relief. The Church welcomes for itself not only the test of truth, but the test of public utility. "I by my works will shew thee," it says, "my faith." The giving and doing of Christians has become a vast and elaborate form of business. Special churches are established to be agencies of philanthropic work as much as places of preaching and prayer. To many a modern mind which dismisses the claims of Christianity to dogmatic truth, its maintenance is abundantly justified as an instrument of human pity and brotherhood.

1 James ii. 18.

1