upy the foreground. Slavery was a natural and
congenial institution under Pagan auspices; nor have we in all ancient
extra-Christian literature, unless it be in Seneca (in whom such
sentiments may have had indirectly(3) a Christian origin), a single
expression of a fellowship broad enough to embrace all diversities of
condition, much less, of race. But the Christian, so far as he consents to
receive the obvious and undoubted import of Christ's mission and
teachings, must regard all men as, in nature, in the paternal care of the
Divine Providence, in religious privileges, rights, and capacities, on an
equal footing. With this view, he cannot but perceive the fitness, and
therefore the obligation, of many forms of social duty, of enlarged
beneficence, of unlimited philanthropy, which on any restricted theory of
human brotherhood would be neither fitting nor reasonable.

*The immortality of the soul*, in the next place, casts a light at once
broad and penetrating upon and into every department of duty; for it is
obvious, without detailed statement, that the fitnesses, needs, and
obligations of a terrestrial being of brief duration, and those of a being
in the nursery and first stage of an endless existence, are very wide
apart,--that the latter may find it fitting, and therefore may deem it
right, to do, seek, shun, omit, endure, resign, many things which to the
former are very properly matters of indifference. Immortality was, in a
certain sense, believed before the advent of Christ, but not with
sufficient definiteness and assurance to occupy a prominent place in any
ethical system, or to furnish the point of view from which all things in
the earthly life were to be regarded. Indeed, some of the most virtuous of
the ancients, among others Epictetus, than whom there was no better man,
expressly denied the life after death, and, of course, could have had no
conception of the aspects of human and earthly affairs as seen in the
light of eternity.

Christianity makes yet another contribution to ethical knowledge in *the
person and character of its Founder*, exhibiting in him the very fitnesses
it prescribes, showing us, as it could not in mere precept, the
proportions and harmonies of the virtues, and manifesting the unapproached
beauty and majesty of the gentler virtues,(4) which in pre-Christian ages
were sometimes made secondary, sometimes repudiated with contempt and
derision. We cannot overestimate the importance of this