morals, raise the character, and make happy the life of foundlings,
outcast girls and boys and orphans, we can easily understand that the
source of the charities of civilized nations has been especially in
Christ; and knowing how vital the moral care of unfortunate children is
to civilization itself the most skeptical among us may still put Him at
the head of even modern social reform.

EXPOSURE OF CHILDREN.

The "exposure of children" is spoken of casually and with indifference
by numerous Latin authors. The comedians include the custom in their
pictures of the daily Roman life, usually without even a passing
condemnation. Thus, in Terence's play (Heauton: Act iii., sc. v.), the
very character who uttered the apothegm which has become a proverb of
humanity for all ages--"I am a man, and nothing belonging to man is
alien to me"--is represented, on the eve of his departure on a long
journey, as urging his wife to destroy the infant soon to be born, if it
should prove to be a girl, rather than expose it. She, however, exposes
it, and it was taken, as was usual, and brought up as a prostitute. This
play turns in its plot, as is true of many popular comedies, on this
exposition of the abandoned child.

It is frequently commented on by Roman dramatists, and subsequently by
the early Christian preachers, that, owing to this terrible custom,
brothers might marry sisters, or fathers share in the ruin of their
unknown daughters in houses of crime.

Seneca, who certainly always writes with propriety and aims to be
governed by reason, in his treatise on Anger (De Ira: i., 15), comments
thus calmly on the practice: "Portentos foetus extingnimus; liberos
quoque si debiles, monstrosique editi sunt, mergimus. Non ira, sed
_ratio_ est, a sanis, inutilia secernere." (Monstrous offspring we
destroy; children too, if weak and unnaturally formed from birth, we
drown. It is not anger, but reason, thus to separate the useless from
the sound.)

In another work (Controversi, lib. v., 33), he denounces the horrible
practice, common in Rome, of maiming these unfortunate children and then
offering them to the gaze of the compassionate. He describes the
miserable little creatures with shortened limbs, broken Joints, and
carved backs, exhibited by the villainous beggars who had gathered them
at the _Lactaria,_ and then deformed them: "Volo nosse," "I should like
to know" says the moralist, with a burst of human indigna