Early Christianity’s Regard for Life

✔ The ancient Roman world reveled in bloodshed. However, in the book The Catacombs of Rome, W. H. Withrow points out that early Christianity “gave a new sanctity to human life, and even denounced as murder the heathen custom of destroying the unborn child. The [killing by] exposure of infants was a fearfully prevalent pagan practice, which even Plato and Aristotle permitted. We have had evidences of the tender charity of the Christians in rescuing these foundlings from death, or from a fate more dreadful still​—a life of infamy. Christians also emphatically affirmed the Almighty’s ‘canon ’gainst self-slaughter,’ [suicide] which crime the pagans had even exalted into a virtue. It taught that a patient endurance of suffering, like Job’s, exhibited a loftier courage than Cato’s renunciation of life.”