until the Middle Ages. Trajan in A.D. 100 supported 5,000
children at the expense of the State, and endowments were created by him
for this purpose. Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius made similar
benefactions, and Pliny endowed a charity for poor children.

In the pre-Christian period, social clubs existed for the purpose of
people having meals together, helping one another, and providing burial
funds. The Emperor Julian condemned the Christians for supporting not
only their own poor, but also poor strangers outside their faith. For
ages the Church took charge of the poor. Her enemies said that as much
pauperism was created as was relieved, and, no doubt, as is usual in the
distribution of charity, the good done was not unmixed with evil.

HOSPITALS.

With reference to the important question of the foundation of hospitals,
there are two opposing opinions--one, attributing their foundation
almost entirely to Christianity,[35] and the other denying to
Christianity any pre-eminent influence.[36] The truth lies between these
two conflicting views, but nearer to the statement of Mr. Brace than of
Mr. McCabe. The truths and influences of Christianity, in the mind of
the latter author, are obscured by the many errors of the Church,
especially in the Early and Middle Ages; and it is of the utmost
importance to distinguish, where necessary, between the teaching of the
Founder of Christianity as disclosed in the New Testament, and the
teaching of the Church which made many very evident errors, and whose
practice soon became different from that inculcated by its Founder, so
that at times the Christianity of the Church was as different from
Christ's teaching as the vine of Sodom from the grapes of Eshcol. The
fact that Christianity emerged from this eclipse points to it as
something more than a humanly devised system.

In very early times, the sick were allowed to remain at the temples for
the treatment of their diseases, and medical students also attended for
instruction. This system was the hospital system of later times,
although the temples were not hospitals in the present sense of the
word. The system in vogue in the temples of AEsculapius in Greece and
Rome has already been described in this book, but the temples of Saturn
served the same purpose in Egypt four thousand years before Christ.
Professor Ebers of Leipzig, a high authority on the subject, says that
Heliopolis undoubtedly had a clinique in connection wit