if, at the general return, I stay
in Alexandria. I pray and beseech you, take care of the little
child, and as soon as we have our wages, I will send you up
something. If you are delivered, if it was a male, let it live; if
it was a female, cast it out . . . . How can I forget you? So don't
fidget."[15]

The letter is not an unkind one; it is sympathetic, masculine,
direct, and friendly. And then it ends with the suggestion,
inconceivable to us to-day, that if the baby is a girl, it need not
be kept. It can be put out either on the land or in the river, left
to kite or crocodile. The evidence of satirists is generally to be
discounted, because they tend to emphasize the exceptional; and it
is not the exceptional thing that gives the character of an age, or
of a man. It is the kind of thing that we take for granted and
assume to be normal that shows our character or gives the note of
the day; and what we omit to notice may be as revealing.

In the plays of the Athenian comic poets of the third and fourth
centuries B.C. we find, to wearisomeness, one recurring plot. The
heroine turns out to be, not just a common girl, but the daughter of
the best family in Athens, exposed when she was a baby. When Plato
sketched his ideal constitution, in addition to the mating of
suitable pairs to be decided by government, he added that, if the
offspring were not good enough, it should be put away where it would
not be found again. Aristotle allowed the same practice. The most
cultured race on earth freely exposed its infants; and this letter
of Hilarion to Alis--a dated letter by the way, of September or
October in the year 1 A.D.--makes it clear that the practice of
exposure of children still prevailed; and there is other evidence
which need not now detain us. It is a hard world, where kind people
or good people can think of such things as ordinary and natural.

Evidence of the character of an age is given by the treatment of
criminals; and that age was characterized by crucifixion. They would
take a human being, spread him out on a cross on the ground, drive
nails through his hands and feet; and then the cross was raised--the
agony of the victim during the movement is not to be imagined. It
was made fast; and there the victim hung, suspended between heaven
and earth, to live or die at his leisure. By and by crows would
gather round him. "I have been good," said the slave. "Then you have
your reward," says the Latin poet, "you wil