he same time, Christianity, with its
Judaic-Pauline antagonism to homosexuality, was rapidly spreading. The
statesmen of the day, anxious to quicken the failing pulses of national
life, utilized this powerful Christian feeling. Constantine, Theodosius,
and Valentinian all passed laws against homosexuality, the last, at all
events, ordaining as penalty the _vindices flammae_; but their enactments
do not seem to have been strictly carried out. In the year 538, Justinian,
professing terror of certain famines, earthquakes, and pestilences in
which he saw the mysterious "recompense which was meet" prophesied by St.
Paul,[266] issued his edict condemning unnatural offenders to the sword,
"lest as the result of these impious acts" (as the preamble to his Novella
77 has it) "whole cities should perish, together with their inhabitants;
for we are taught by Holy Scripture that through these acts cities have
perished with the men in them."[267] This edict (which Justinian followed
up by a fresh ordinance to the same effect) constituted the foundation of
legal enactment and social opinion concerning the matter in Europe for
thirteen hundred years.[268] In France the _vindices flammae_ survived to
the last; St. Louis had handed over these sacrilegious offenders to the
Church to be burned; in 1750 two pederasts were burned in the Place de
Greve, and only a few years before the Revolution a Capuchin monk named
Pascal was also burned.

After the Revolution, however, began a new movement, which has continued
slowly and steadily ever since, though it still divides European nations
into two groups. Justinian, Charlemagne, and St. Louis had insisted on the
sin and sacrilege of sodomy as the ground for its punishment.[269] It was
doubtless largely as a religious offense that the _Code Napoleon_ omitted
to punish it. The French law makes a clear and logical distinction between
crime on the one hand, vice and irreligion on the other, only concerning
itself with the former. Homosexual practices in private, between two
consenting adult parties, whether men or women, are absolutely unpunished
by the _Code Napoleon_ and by French law of today. Only under three
conditions does the homosexual act come under the cognizance of the law
as a crime: (1) when there is _outrage public a la pudeur_,--i.e., when
the act is performed in public or with a possibility of witnesses; (2)
when there is violence or absence of consent, in whatever degree the act
may