greatest of the Fathers, St. Basil, in the latter half of the fourth century, distinguished between adultery and fornication as committed by a married man; if with a married woman, it was adultery; if with an unmarried woman, it was merely fornication.  In the former case, a wife should not receive her husband back; in the latter case, she should (art.  “Adultery,” Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities).  Such a decision, by attaching supreme importance to a distinction which could make no difference to the wife, involved a failure to recognize her moral personality.  Many of the Fathers in the Western Church, however, like Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose, could see no reason why the moral law should not be the same for the husband as for the wife, but as late Roman feeling both on the legal and popular side was already approximating to that view, the influence of Christianity was scarcely required to attain it.  It ultimately received formal sanction in the Roman Canon Law, which decreed that adultery is equally committed by either conjugal party in two degrees:  (1) simplex, of the married with the unmarried, and (2) duplex, of the married with the married.

It can scarcely be said, however, that Christianity succeeded in attaining the inclusion of this view of the moral equality of the sexes into actual practical morality.  It was accepted in theory; it was not followed in practice.  W.G.  Sumner, discussing this question (Folkways, pp. 359-361), concludes:  “Why are these views not in the mores? Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented or imposed by theological authority or philosophical speculation.  They do not grow out of the experience of life, and cannot be verified by it.  The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts, by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man.”  There is, however, more to be said on this point later.

It was probably, however, not so much the Church as Teutonic customs and the development of the feudal system, with the masculine and military ideals it fostered, that was chiefly decisive in fixing the inferior position of women in the mediaeval world.  Even the ideas of chivalry, which have often been supposed to be peculiarly favorable to women, so far as they affected women seem to have been of little practical significance.

In his great work on chivalry Gautier brings forward much evidence to show that the feudal spirit, like the military spirit always and everywhere, on the whole involved at bottom a disdain for women, even though it occasionally idealized them.  “Go into your painted and gilded rooms,” we read in Renaus de Montauban, “sit in the shade, make yourselves comfortable, drink, eat, work tapestry, dye silk, but remember that you must not occupy yourselves with our affairs.  Our business is to strike with the steel sword.  Silence!” And if the woman insists she is struck