Good point, Jon J,

...or set to 14 hour working days in stifling hot factories - locked in, beaten and flogged or deformed by restrictive work while their bodies needed fresh air and freedom to grow. Children were often procured for this type of toil from orphanages in the cities by that very "moral" class of factory and mill owner that attended church every Sunday and sat piously in the front pew.

So-called 'slippery slopes' have being around for a long time, runner…

I'm sure you'll recall 1833 – that was the year that slavery was abolished in England – for which, as I recall you have credited Christianity despite it being the mainstream religion there for onwards of 1500 years before it finally happened.

That same year saw the introduction of the Factory Act. An enlightened piece of legislation which prohibited children under nine from working in a factory - up to 14 they could only work eight hours a day matched with two hours schooling, a 60 hour week in other words.

Of course from 14 they were rightly expected to work full-time!

You might wish to also learn about the Ragged Schools, and don't forget to check about the Poor Law Institutions.

Such widespread piety, such widespread child abuse – and apparently not a same-sex marriage in sight.

Heh, a blogger I follow recently claimed that a real man would want to live in a society where the Symposium could be written, not one in which it would be burned.
He also imagined a drunk Alcibiades lurching aside Mitt Romney, elbowing him in the ribs, winking lasciviously and saying "Well done on the gay marriage thing, but you know that sort of thing is strictly between a man and a boy ..right?".
So do we get to make whip cracking noises to all the married Homosexuals, once they've been duly Christianised by the institution of marriage?

'runner, the worst child abuse in history took place in the Victorian era, '

actually Jon J at least they had a chance to live unlike tens of thousands in the womb today.

runner,

"...at least they had a chance to live unlike tens of thousands in the womb today."

That is a cop-out. Here's a sample of the situation from John Fielden MP, from "The Curse of the Factory System" - titled, "Dismal Solitudes of Torture."

"...The small and nimble fingers of little children being far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up of procuring "apprentices" from the different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many, many thousands of these little hapless creatures were sent down into the North, being from the age of seven, to the age of thirteen or fourteen years old.
The custom was for the master to clothe his apprentices, and to feed and lodge them in an "apprentice house" near the factory; overseers were appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work they could exact.....cruelties of the most heart-rending were practiced upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of the master-manufacturers; that they were flogged, fettered, and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; that they were in many cases, starved to the bone while flogged to their work, and that even in some instances, they were driven to commit suicide to evade the cruelties of a world, in which, though born to it so recently, their happiest moments had been passed in the garb and coercion of a workhouse."

(Taken from "Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain")

You can bet your bottom dollar that those "master-manufacturers" were "God-fearing and pious churchgoers" - not to mention the "parish' authorities who sent their charges off to such conditions.

'That is a cop-out. Here's a sample of the situation from John Fielden MP, from "The Curse of the Factory System" - titled, "Dismal Solitudes of Torture."

Not really Poiret it just shows how cruel people who have not got God's love in their heart can be. Theyn have more in common with secularist who are comfortable with slaying babies than the happy clappy's whom you seem to despise.