Rescuers of the Innocent: The Christian Witness in a Culture of Death

In ancient Rome, it was perfectly legal to discard your unwanted child in the city dump. The practice was called exposure. Infants—especially girls, the disabled, or simply the inconvenient—were left to die in the elements. Their tiny bodies were abandoned to the dogs, to the flies and their maggots, to the searing sun or freezing night air. No law forbade it. No priest condemned it. No culture mourned it.

But the Christians did.

While Roman citizens tossed their babies like trash, the early Church scoured the dumps. They listened for the cries. They found the dying. They wrapped them in blankets and brought them home—not as charity cases, but as sons and daughters. They fed them, named them, loved them. At great personal cost, they rescued the innocent whom the world had rejected.

These were the original abolitionists. And their spirit lives on today in every Christian who refuses to be silent while our own culture legally slaughters the unborn.

They were the remnant. The rescuers. The defenders of the defenseless. Will you be counted among them?