estraint placed by law and duty upon his will; and to this we must
ascribe the licentiousness which has at all times afflicted society.
Passion acknowledges no law, and spares neither rights nor conventions;
where it has the power, it exercises it to the advantage of self, and to
the detriment of social order. The Church is by its very constitution
Catholic, and hence looks upon all men as brothers of the same family.
She acknowledges not the natural right of one man over another, and
hence her Catholicity lays a heavy restraint upon all the efforts of
self-love, and curbs with a mighty hand the temerity of those who would
destroy the harmony of life implied in the idea of Catholicity.

One of the first principles of all social happiness is, that before the
law of nature, and before the face of God, all men are equal. This
principle is based on the unity of the human race, the origin of all men
from one common father. If we study the History of Paganism, we find
that all heathen nations overturned this great principle, since we find
among all heathen nations the evil of _Slavery_. Prior to the coming of
Christ, the great majority of men were looked upon as a higher
development of the animal, as animated instruments which might be bought
and sold, given away and pawned; which might be tormented, maltreated,
or murdered; as beings, in a word, for whom the idea of right, duty,
pity, mercy, and law had no existence. Who can read, without a feeling
of intense horror, the accounts left us of the treatment of their slaves
by the Romans? There was no law that could restrain in the least the
wantonness, the cruelty, the licentious excess of the master, who, as
master, possessed the absolute right to do with his slaves whatsoever he
pleased. To remove this stain of slavery has ever been the aim of the
Catholic Church. "Since the Saviour and Creator of the world," says Pope
Gregory I., in his celebrated decree, "wished to become man, in order,
by grace and liberty, to break the chains of our slavery, it is right
and good to bestow again upon man, whom nature has permitted to be born
free, but whom the law of nations has brought under the yoke of slavery,
the blessing of their original liberty." Through all the middle
ages--called by Protestants the _dark ages of the world_--the echo of
these words of Gregory I. is heard; and in the thirteenth century Pope
Pius II. could say, "Thanks to God, and the Apostolic See, the yoke of
slaver