of the Jews, involving the conception of the wife as almost her husband’s chattel, and marriage as a purchase.  All these influences clashed and often appeared side by side, though they could not be harmonized.  The result was that the fifteen hundred years that followed the complete conquest of Christianity represent on the whole the most degraded condition to which the marriage system has ever been known to fall for so long a period during the whole course of human history.

At first indeed the beneficent influence of Rome continued in some degree to prevail and even exhibited new developments.  In the time of the Christian Emperors freedom of divorce by mutual consent was alternately maintained, and abolished.[318] We even find the wise and far-seeing provision of the law enacting that a contract of the two parties never to separate could have no legal validity.  Justinian’s prohibition of divorce by consent led to much domestic unhappiness, and even crime, which appears to be the reason why it was immediately abrogated by his successor, Theodosius, still maintaining the late Roman tradition of the moral equality of the sexes, allowed the wife equally with the husband to obtain a divorce for adultery; that is a point we have not yet attained in England to-day.

It seems to be admitted on all sides that it was largely the fatal influence of the irruption of the barbarous Germans which degraded, when it failed to sweep away, the noble conception of the equality of women with men, and the dignity and freedom of marriage, slowly moulded by the organizing genius of the Roman into a great tradition which still retains a supreme value.  The influence of Christianity had at the first no degrading influence of this kind; for the ascetic ideal was not yet predominant, priests married as a matter of course, and there was no difficulty in accepting the marriage order established in the secular world; it was even possible to add to it a new vitality and freedom.  But the Germans, with all the primitively acquisitive and combative instincts of untamed savages, went far beyond even the early Romans in the subjection of their wives; they allowed indeed to their unmarried girls a large measure of indulgence and even sexual freedom,—­just as the Christians also reverenced their virgins,[319]—­but the German marriage system placed the wife, as compared to the wife of the Roman Empire, in a condition little better than that of a domestic slave.  In one form or another, under one disguise or another, the system of wife-purchase prevailed among the Germans, and, whenever that system is influential, even when the wife is honored her privileges are diminished.[320] Among the Teutonic peoples generally, as among the early English, marriage was indeed a private transaction but it took the form of a sale of the bride by the father, or other legal guardian, to the bridegroom.  The beweddung was a real contract of sale.[321] “Sale-marriage” was the most usual form of marriage.  The ring,