The legal rights of women would be affected, moreover, by a difference in the spirit of the law.  The Roman jurist derived his whole sanction from reason and never allowed religious considerations, as such, to influence him when legislating on women.  He recognised that laws are not immutable, but must be changed to fit the growth of equity and tolerance.  No previous authority was valid to him if reason suggested that the authority’s dictum had outlived its usefulness and must be adapted to larger ideas.  It never occurred to him to make the inferiority of woman an act of God.  On the other hand, the Church referred everything to one unchanging authoritative source, the Gospels and the writings of the Apostles; faith and authority took the place of reason; and any attempt to question the injunctions of the Bible was regarded as an act of impiety, to be punished accordingly.  And as the various regulations about women had now a divine sanction, the permanence of these convictions was doubly assured.

SOURCES

I. The Bible.

II.  Patrologia Latina:  edidit J.P.  Migne.  Parisiis. 221 volumes (finished 1864).

NOTES: 

[212] Matthew 5, 27 ff.

[213] Matthew 5, 31 ff.; id. 19, 3 ff. Mark 10, 2-12. Luke 16, 18.

[214] Plutarch lived in the second century A.D.; but he has inherited the Greek point of view and advises a wife to bear with meekness the infidelities of the husband—­see Praecep.  Coniug., 16.  His words are often curiously similar to those of the Apostles, e.g., Coniug.  Praecep., 33:  “The husband shall rule the wife not as if master of a chattel, but as the soul does the body.”  Id. 37:  “Wives who are sensible will be silent when their husbands are angry and vent their passion; when their husbands are silent, then let them speak to them and mollify them.”  However, like the Apostles, he enjoins upon husbands to honour their wives; his essay on the “Virtues of Women”—­[Greek:  gynaikon aretai]—­is an affectionate tribute to their worth.

Some of the respectable Puritan gentlemen at Rome also held that a wife be content to be a humble admirer of her husband (e.g., Pliny, Paneg., 83, hoc efficiebat, quod mariti minores erant ... nam uxori sufficit obsequii gloria, etc.).  But Roman law insisted that what was morally right for the man was equally so for the woman; just as it compelled a husband himself to observe chastity, if he expected it from his wife.

[215] Ecclesiasticus 42, 14.

[216] Leviticus xii, 1-5.

[217] Romans 7, 2-4.

[218] Corinthians i, 7, 39.

[219] Corinthians i, 7, 1 ff.

[220] Corinthians i, 7, 37.

[221] Ephesians 5, 22 and 33.

[222] Peter i, 3, 7.

[223] Corinthians i, 14, 34.