 Well, we'll get to antiquity eventually, but I want to begin with a line from William Wordsworth, the poet, Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. And I'm speaking not as Wordsworth did of the French Revolution, but of the first century when a savior had arrived on the world scene, and the savior's name was Augustus Caesar. He called himself first citizen, Prince Chep's Chivitatis, but everyone knew he was the emperor. He was the king of the world. During a long and astonishing reign, he unified lands and peoples stretching from Great Britain to Egypt, from Morocco to Georgia. He suppressed rebellions and he practically eradicated piracy on the high seas. He developed a system of roads for easy transport and a postal service for worldwide communication. These are all firsts in history. And he inaugurated a period of relative peace in the world. Peace was unimpeded and Romans were the great beneficiaries. Taxes and tribute flowed into the capital from as far away as India, where Roman settlements were raising temples to Augustus, genius. Bliss it was to be alive in the age of such prosperity. But Augustus at age 70 saw clearly that all his achievements were destined to crash. The reason was simple. Romans were not reproducing. They weren't even marrying. Over the decades of ease they had come to enjoy an unmoored leisurely lifestyle drifting from pleasure to pleasure without the encumbrance of children. Now in the year we call 9 AD, Augustus observed that there was not much that he could call a younger generation. Rome was heading for demographic winter. And the first citizen was alarmed. He saw that it was a desperate situation. Who would man the armies? Who would run the institutions? The stock gap solution was to job the tasks out to foreign mercenaries and slaves. But increased immigration brought other problems. Who would carry forward the distinctively Roman legacy? How would armies of mercenaries affect homeland security? Augustus unfortunately was almost alone in his care. Someone else it seems was having a good time. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, to be male and noble and single and childless was very heaven. But Augustus was in charge. And so that year 9 AD, a new law went into effect to promote marriage. It outlawed bachelorhood and spinsterhood, punishing both by fines and taxation. It criminalized adultery and homosexual acts, prescribing penalties as severe as flogging and death. Childbearing on the other hand was rewarded by state grants and subsidies. This legislation is known to history as the Lexpapia Epopeia. It was named after the two consuls who introduced the law at the behest of Augustus. They were Marcus Papius Mutalis and Quintus Popaeus Secundus. Both men were bachelors. They were two wild and crazy guys. So the law seemed doomed from the get-go. It was a joke. The nobles who could afford it paid the fines and went on living as they wished. But they weren't pleased with the expense. They didn't like the tax. Who likes taxes? Nobody. They complained bitterly at every opportunity. Nothing changed except the level of discontent. Augustus was distraught. Rome itself was doing a slow fade and he was the only one who cared. The historian Cassius Deal preserves for us a strange and pathetic moment that took place in the spring of that year, 9 A.D. Augustus found himself at one of those meet-and-greet moments, the grip and grins that defined the life of all heads of state. The day was to consist of ceremonies and games, a light celebration to welcome home Tiberias, Augustus' adopted son and heir. But throughout the day, the nobles, the equestrians, made known their bitterness about the new taxes. So Augustus pulled a stunt that looks almost solemnonic. He asked the men to divide into two camps. Those who were married on one side and those who were unmarried on the other. And the scene, Dio tells us, was ridiculously lopsided, with the singles vastly outnumbering the marrieds. Augustus was filled with grief at the site, filled with grief. From his heart, he delivered two anguished speeches, one to each group. And in the process, he left us a kind of pagan theology of the body. It's an amazing, amazing record. He began by praising the married men because he said, you have shown yourselves obedient and are helping to replenish the fatherland. He went on to say they're fulfilling a divine purpose. Listen to him. It was for this cause, most of all, that the first and greatest God who fashioned us divided the race of mortals into making one half of it male and the other half female and implanted them love and the compulsion to mutual intercourse, making their association fruitful. And by the young continually born, he might in a way render even mortality immortal. Indeed, even of the gods themselves, some are accounted male and others female. And the tradition prevails that some have begotten others, some have been begotten of others. So even among those beings who need no such device, marriage and the beginning of children have been approved as a noble thing. Augustus told the married men that they had done right therefore to imitate the gods and right to emulate your fathers so that just as they begot you, you may also bring others into the world. It's poetry. It even dips, as I said, into theology. But then Augustus turned toward the single man, the big crowd, and all he had for them was contempt. You know, you've seen it in the movies, you see the statues. When an orator went in front of a crowd and he was going to give a speech, he put his hand out like this. And he said, oh, and then he spoke in the vocative. Augustus put his hand out and he said, oh, oh, but what shall I call you, men? But you are not performing any of the offices of men, citizens. But for all that you are doing, the city is dying. Romans, but you are undertaking to blot out this name altogether for what seed of human beings would be left if all the rest of mankind should do what you are doing. He said what he felt he needed to say. But there was no happy ending for Augustus. No one listened. The laws were a joke and Augustus himself was hardly a model of the kind of citizen he was trying to encourage. He had been married three times before he ascended to the throne. He had only one child, a daughter, and her life was scandalous and rule-breaking. Three generations later, the historian Tacitus observed that in spite of the penalties and in spite of the incentives, quote, marriages and the rearing of children did not become more frequent. So powerful were the attractions of childlessness. So powerful were the attractions of childlessness. In his contemporary, Pliny, the younger, spoke of the burden of having even one child, as he did, and the rewards of childlessness. In times of prosperity, people looked at the fines and decided that they could afford them. They were lifestyle expenses. Various emperors after Augustus tried to encourage childbearing through legislation, but their efforts uniformly failed. The law makes a lousy aphrodisiac, and not even the emperor could require citizens to transcend their most immediate desires for the sake of the common good. The empire, for all of its marvelous achievements, think about it. Clean water, world peace, easy commerce. For all those marvelous achievements, the empire could not compel its citizens to trust in the future. Lacking that hope, Romans didn't want children, and so they didn't have them. What they had instead was electively sterile sex. They used contraceptives. They practiced perversions. If they happened to conceive, they procured abortion. The satirist juvenile observed that childbearing was an occupation for the lower classes. He writes, poor women endure the perils of childbirth and all the troubles of nursing to which their lot condemns them. But how often does a gilded bed contain a woman that is lying in? So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs of the abortionist, paid to murder mankind within the womb. We're reading texts from the third century. Failing to abort, a woman could commit infanticide, having the midwife drown the baby at birth, or abandon it at the town dump. And they did. Most of the infants drowned or exposed were female. Just in the last two decades, archaeologists have turned up at least three baby dumps that I know of. All of them very large, one in Athens, another in Ashkelon, and yet another in Scotland. They're all roughly from the same time period. The Scottish site held the bones of more than a thousand children. So the practice was geographically widespread and very common, as the written record suggests. It was almost universal, almost. Jews throughout antiquity had set themselves apart from other peoples in many ways and one was their condemnation of infanticide. And in the ancestral land of the Jews, in the first century, there was a religious movement rising, which would soon gain adherence in all the cities of the Roman world. In the city of Antioch, the movement was first called Christian. At the heart of Christian life was a savior, far different from Caesar Augustus. Indeed, Christian authors would later observe that Virgil's consciously predictive fourth eclog, which hailed the birth of a divine leader who seemed to be a lot like Augustus, should more appropriately be applied to Jesus. Both were hailed as saviors, but the ideals of Jesus and Augustus seemed to be across purposes. Augustus penalized celibacy, for example, while Jesus praised it. Augustus absolutized national and family bonds, while Jesus relativized them. In Christianity, all family and social relationships were reordered. Now they were subordinate to the relationship with Jesus. Jesus said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. And St. Paul declared, there is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Jesus and the apostles were hardly strong advocates for the Roman idea of family or national piety. And yet the relationship with Christ was itself cast in familial terms. And it carried strong implications for family life. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Husbands love your wives and do not be harsh with them. These were radical statements in a world where playwrights referred to women as odious daughters and where women were not permitted to give testimony in courts of law and where female offspring were often drowned at first. Still more radical were Christian statements about children. Children. The Roman upper classes did everything in their power to ward away the little ones. But Jesus said, let the children come to me and do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven. He also said, truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. The Christian converts of the earliest generations came mainly from the Greek and Roman religious traditions. Their conversion certainly involved a revaluation of children, of women, and of the marriage bond. We see almost immediately a more welcoming attitude toward children that we find it expressed negatively in the Christian prohibition of contraception, abortion, and infanticide. The earliest Christian documents speak with one voice in their condemnation of these practices. Both the didache and the letter of Barnabas produced in the mid to late first century speak of contraceptive and abortivation potions in their discussions of the way of death. Barnabas also includes rather blunt denunciations of those who practice perversions in order to evade conception. He doesn't pull any punches. He doesn't mince any words. Clear condemnations of contraception, abortion, and infanticide continued from Christian authors in the second and third centuries. Listen to this lineup. Saint Athenagoras of Athens, minutious Felix in Rome, Tertullian in North Africa, Clement of Alexandria in Egypt. The geographic diversity of the authors and the consistency of the teaching over time show us that this was hardly a local quirk. It was hardly a passing fad. The later authors were increasingly more specific in their critique. They condemned not only the general category of potions of sterility, but also particular methods. The second century letter to Diagnetus, an anonymous plea addressed to a government official, puts the matter in positive terms. It speaks of the Christians' wonderful and striking way of life. They were set apart, says the author, by their lifelong fidelity in marriage and their welcoming of children. These are things that set them apart from their Roman neighbors, their Greek neighbors. If these were indeed peculiarly Christian characteristics, then it's not a great leap for us to assume a higher level of satisfaction in Christian home life. If you eliminate infidelity and child murder, you've removed two great stressors from marriage. The Roman jurist, minutious Felix, seems to intimate that Christian homes reflected a recognizable stability and happiness. He's writing this to his contemporaries, and he couldn't very well lie because the evidence was all around. In our heart, he said, we gladly abide by the bond of a single marriage. In the desire of procreating, we know either one wife or none at all. The Christians' attitude towards sex and family often proved an irritant to their tradition-minded Roman neighbors and overlords. Some stories of the martyrs begin how, with the wife's conversion to Christianity, and her subsequent refusal to cooperate with immoral bedroom practices. From there, the narrative proceeds to the woman's denunciation, her trial, her sentence, and execution. Other stories begin with a young consecrated virgin's refusal of a marriage proposal, and they end the same way. Think of all the great saints of the first Eucharistic Prayer, the Virgin martyrs, Agnes and Cecilia, Agatha, Lucy, Anastasia, all of them killed because they would not marry when the Romans needed wives. The very idea of consecrated virginity was a provocation to tradition-minded Romans. Why? When marriageable women were in short supply, would the church remove so many young lovelies from the market? It seemed cruel and senseless, and by the standards of Augustus, it was downright unpatriotic. Christian standards were hardly mainstream in the Roman world, yet the fathers seemed eager to highlight the differences. They didn't look for common ground so much as highlight the differences. You want to know the reason why so many of you are miserable and Christians are happy? Here's why. Here's the difference. In the late 2nd century, Clement of Alexandria argued, for example, against the common practice of child marriage, in which girls of 11 or 12 were married off to much older men. Clement said this was a sin equal in gravity to fornication, and he bladed the blame with the girl's parents as much as with the husband. Such condemnation seemed calculated to alienate the people who practiced these customs. But Clement was on to something. Behind his prohibition was an assumption. The assumption was that women deserved vocational freedom. And there was another assumption that child marriage was not a psychologically healthy situation for the child, and it didn't make for happy homes. In any event, Christian doctrine on family life appears to have worked and on many different levels. Rather than drive people away from Christianity, it seems to have drawn them into it. The sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the Christian population increased steadily during this period in spite of persecution and other challenges, including natural disasters and climate change. It's documented from the 3rd century as a result of climate change. There were famines, there was pestilence, and the Christian church kept growing. Stark concludes in fact that the church grew at a steady rate of 40% per decade over the course of its first 300 years, 40% per decade. When I first read that statistic, I was so surprised. I know you're not surprised because your parish has been growing at the rate of 40% per decade for as long as you can remember, but mine hasn't. So it shocked me, and it's growing at this rate in spite of persecution, when Christianity was not only a crime, but a capital crime, for which if you were caught, you were executed on the morrow. Stark believes that this growth is attributable in part to the Christian view of marriage. Christianity held out more appeal for women because it respected them as women. It respected their dignity and freedom, and not to mention their childhood. And so women made up an outsized share of converts. The outsized number of women then made Christianity more attractive to pagan men who wanted marriage. They couldn't find a pagan woman to marry because there were none, but they saw all these beautiful women going to mass on Sunday. Moreover, since Christianity emphasized mutual respect and service, Christians who married were probably much more likely to find themselves in a happy spousal relationship, which would itself, in many cases, lead to increased fertility. When homes are happy, the population grows. Funny how that happens. Outside the Christian church, however, the Roman population was still falling. As the second century turned to the third, the emperors were still alarmed by the population implosion, but still powerless to change the situation. One of the Roman poets, Horace, said, it is a sweet and lovely thing to die for the fatherland. That may or may not be true, but very few people were willing to bear a child for the fatherland. Instead, they made do with pets. I'm not making this up. Clement of Alexandria observed that his neighbors who killed their newborns nevertheless lavished attention and money on their animals. This is a quote, they expose children that are born at home and take up the hatchlings of birds and prefer irrational to rational creatures. The wealthy who put their children out with the trash sometimes buried their dogs and cats in tombs that were architectural marvels. You can still visit them today in Rome and in Egypt, tombs for their pets while they were killing their babies. By the rise of the Severan dynasty, it was clear that the laws of Augustus did not work. At the same time, it was equally clear that Christians were succeeding where the Romans had failed. Christians were having babies and they seemed to like it. So the emperors crafted a new and very interesting kind of legislation. They fashioned laws that imposed select tenets of Christianity and Christian morality upon the entire Roman populace. Very interesting. Under Septimius Severus 193-201, Roman law for the first time in history, first time criminalized abortion and the use and sale of abortifacients. In his survey of ancient attitudes toward abortion, Michael Gorman, the historian, finds this development remarkable. All of the revered thinkers of Greek and Roman antiquity, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, they all found no moral problem with abortion or infanticide. That had changed with the Severan emperors and changed so suddenly. Gorman believes it was the influence of Christianity, which had just reached a critical mass in the wider population. Here's what he says. Is it only coincidental that the apologetic writings of Athenagoras and Tertullian immediately preceded the first Roman laws against abortion? It seems quite possible that a growing Christian populace influenced public and government opinion toward punishing abortion and promoting life. Perhaps the Romans merely needed ways to counteract the decrease in their population and they took advantage of the Christian moral perspective. But whatever the Roman motives may have been, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Christians contributed to the third century anti-abortion statutes. Well, here's a surprise for you. The laws of the Severans failed just as surely as the earlier laws of Augustus had failed. They all failed because they had no coherence with the rest of Roman law. In the name of preserving Roman tradition, they broke with long-standing Roman customs. The Fathers of the Church could point out and they did that Greco-Roman custom was debased from of old because it had deviated centuries before from the laws of nature inscribed upon the heart. It should have been unnatural to kill one's own child, yet to the Romans this had become second nature. Similarly, it should have seemed unnatural to make an individual's childhood miserable through the practice of pedorasty. But this too was considered an acceptable recreation by the Roman upper classes. The educational reformer Quintilian tells us that parents who sent small boys to school assumed that the tutors would molest them. The ancient historians praised the Emperor Trajan because he was a moderate pedophile and tried not to harm the boys with whom he dallied. Nero, on the other hand, had no such delicacy and insisted on having his young sex slaves surgically altered. The Fathers who had little patience for child marriage condemned child sex without exception. St. Cypherian pointed out what should have been obvious to everyone but never is. He said that unchastity had made people miserable. In fact, he said, we must say that adultery is not pleasure but mutual contempt. It cannot be delightful because it kills both the soul and modesty. A century later, St. Basil noted that humans alone of all the animals will cause themselves harm and pain by making choices that run contrary to their nature. He said, if the lioness loves her cubs, if the she-wolf fights to defend her little ones, what shall man say who is unfaithful to the precept and violates nature herself or the son who insults the old age of his father or the father whose second marriage has made him forget his first children? During the Romans, patterns of vice had settled into custom, making individuals unhappy, families brittle and society sick unto death. And it would be easy, I suppose, to exaggerate the change produced by Christianity. We could read selections from the Fathers and conclude that Christian families were fairly sinless and free of sorrow. And that was, of course, not the case. Christians committed sins, big news. Christians committed adultery. They used contraceptives. They visited prostitutes and pursued sexual perversions. Otherwise, we would find no exhortations against these practices in ancient homilies. Homilies were for us, for the family, for inside the church. Never would we find penalties for these practices in the canons of ancient councils. It grieves me to report that the ancient church even suffered from the sexual abuse of minors by clergy. Christians failed then as they do in every age. But no one can deny that Christians held themselves accountable to a high standard of sexual purity that was alien to Greek and Roman society in their time. And in having children, they succeeded to a degree unmatched by that society. By stabilizing marriage, Christianity reversed the long downward demographic trend. Jillian Clark, in her study of childhood in the early church, concludes that Christianity made a difference to children's lives in much the same way as it made a difference to women's lives. She emphasizes the unprecedented vocational freedom enjoyed by both children and women. You can contrast that today, too. So many people now are talking about contraceptives and how these have just made women feel pressured into sex. Like it takes away a reason for them saying no. We need to remind ourselves of the dignity of both children and women. A dignity recognized and revealed by Jesus Christ. That dignity, human dignity, made an enormous difference for young people in late antiquity. When you treat children with respect, this is what happens. Plato considered children to be like animals, only worse because they were more intractable. OK, he had a point. Aristotle had taught that young people, like women and slaves, lacked sufficient reason to participate in society. Roman law treated minors as property to be disposed of as their fathers wished. A father even had the authority, though it was rarely exercised, to condemn a child to death for misdeeds. Fathers also had the right to reject a newborn baby and demand its death on site. To the poor in the Roman world, children were useful as laborers. To the upper classes, they were admired as sex objects. A Christian youth were prized not for their usefulness or their physical beauty, but because they were people created in God's image and likeness. And as such, they were children of God and not property of men. This had very practical consequences. Children and adolescents were full members of the church, and they could participate in Christian society in ways that were unimaginable in old Rome. Think about it. An adolescent named Origen taught adults in the intellectual capital of the empire, Alexandria. He took over the school. When his father died, he was just a teenager. St. Agnes exercised more influence in the Roman church than even adult females could muster in wider Roman society. St. Agnes, who died at the age 11 or 12, was admired for her courage. Young women had a voice in the church. Outside the church, women and children were confined to silence. You know, the great work of the third century is the diary of St. Perpetua, who died in North Africa. And this diary was published widely and became a bestseller not only in North Africa, but all through Europe. And she was revered as a hero throughout the church immediately upon her death. I defy you to name me another author, a female author of that stature who was pagan from the third century. This is the big change. Outside the church, women and children were confined to silence. Christian children, children chose to submit themselves to martyrdom. And their parents respected their choice. Ordinary young people were welcomed to participate in the central mysteries of the Christian faith. This was not the case with the Greek or Roman mystery religions. You had to have age. In many cases, you had to have status, you had to have money. The church encouraged parents to baptize their sons and daughters as babies. And some churches even admitted infants to Holy Communion. In recent decades, we have been the beneficiaries of several extensive studies of childhood in the early church. One speaks of the Christian difference in the strongest terms, summarized in the book's title. We love this title, when children became people, when children became people, the birth of childhood in early Christianity. Another more cautious study bears as its title the saying of Jesus, let the children come to me. And though the language in that latter work is more guarded, it arrives at a similar conclusion. Listen to this. We should not underestimate the advances in the lives of children which Christianity brought. The opportunity to share in life itself and the opportunity to be free of sexual violence. Nor can we omit the most significant spiritual reality that children, as children, were seen to be valid partakers of the kingdom of heaven. Which basic doctrine made all the difference, not only in the lives of the children who were loved in this way, but in the lives of the parents who loved them without the coercion of laws and seemingly without effort. Christianity achieved what the empire found perpetually elusive, population increase with its attendant advances in economy and culture and happiness. Beginning with homes that welcome children, Christians established societies more welcoming toward children. Grace restored nature, building upon it, and began the work of healing and perfecting it. And for that, for this example of our most ancient ancestors, let's give God the glory and the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.