1890-91.] CHRISTIANITY ON LEGISLATION. 159 



SOME EFFECTS OF CHRISTIANITY ON LEGISLATION. 



By The Hon. W. Proudfoot. 



\^Read ytJi February^ iSpi.] 



I shall not attempt to enumerate all the instances in which the 

 distinctive principles of Christianity have influenced legislators in enacting 

 laws for the government of nations and peoples ; — it would be far beyond 

 my power or my knowledge to do so ; — and it would perhaps be above 

 the capacity of any one, as the gradual prevalence of these principles 

 may have enlightened the minds and softened the maimers of statesmen, 

 in a way that would not be open to observation, and in many instances 

 not acknowledged or felt even by themselves. 



For the same reason it would be difficult to select instances in modern 

 times on which you could place your hand and say, t/ns is an outcome of 

 CJiristian principle, without being met by the objection that it was as 

 probably due to the general advance of civilization, to the progress of 

 the human mind, to reasons of state or expediency — perhaps to the 

 exigencies of party strife. 



I shall therefore ask you to turn back your glance to those earlier 

 times, when Christianity, after more than three centuries of oppression, 

 neglect and persecution, during which its teachings and the pure lives 

 and devotion of its worshippers had spread their beneficent effects in an 

 ever widening range, at length numbered the rulers of the world among 

 the disciples of the cross. It was then placed in a situation whence its 

 principles could be employed with legal effect to ameliorate the con- f^ \ 

 dition of the race, to repeal cruel and bloody laws, to abolish sanguinary^f V /v V;-; 

 customs, and lend its gentle and persuasive power to induce men t<? ^ 

 become more compassionate, more tender, more humane, to the poor, tWec- 

 helpless, and the suffering. i* . 



That it did not effect all this at once, that it has not fully effected it . w ,• 



' ■' \ -^ "■ .' 



yet, is no reproach to Christianity. It has to work with feeble and falliblok^ __/ " .' 

 instruments, it has to contend with passions, with the iron chain of^f*^"' 

 habit and custom, superstition and prejudice ; it has never claimed to 

 free men entirely from the liability to act wrongly and wickedly, it does 

 not make man perfect, to do that it must take him out of the world. 

 But if it has succeeded in staying the hand of the oppressor here and 

 there, in binding up the wounds of the oppressed, in wiping away the 

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