Tertullian waxes furious over the thought of a woman learning much, and still more, venturing to use such acquirement; but heretical Christians insisted that the respect which Romans had paid to the Vestal Virgin was her right, and each founder of a new sect had some woman as helper.  But as a rule, her highest post during the first three centuries of Christianity was that of doorkeeper or message-woman, her economic dependence upon man being absolute.  Social problems remained chiefly untouched.  No objection was made to the existence of slavery.  In this gospel of love the Christian slave became the brother of all, and kindliness was his right; but their faith demanded contentment with all present ills, since a glorious future was to compensate them.  A Christian slave-woman was the property of her master, who had absolute power over her; but no objection seems to have been made to this.

In the mean time many doubts as to marriage seem to have arisen.  Paul had set his seal on the subjection of women, and Peter followed suit.  Antagonism to marriage grew and intensified, till hardly a Father of the early Church but fulminated against it.  Fiercest, loudest, and most heeded of all, the voice of Tertullian still sounds down the ages.  This is his address to women: 

“Do you not know that each one of you is an Eve?  The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too.  You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.  You destroyed so easily God’s image, man.  On account of your desert, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die.”

Clement of Alexandria supplemented this verdict with one as bitter, and Cyprian and the rest echoed the general anathema.  As marriage grew thus more and more degraded, the number of the women in the world steadily increased, and posterity in like ratio deteriorated.  The summary of Principal Donaldson, in the article already referred to, is the keynote to the whole situation.

“The less spiritual classes of the people, the laymen, being taught that marriage might be licentious, and that it implied an inferior state of sanctity, were rather inclined to neglect matrimony for more loose connections; and it was these people alone that then peopled the world.  It was the survival of the unfittest.  The noble men and women, on the other hand, who were dominated by the loftiest aspirations and exhibited the greatest temperance, self-control, and virtue, left no children.”

Sir Henry Maine comes to the same conclusion, and deplores the fact of the loss of liberty for women, adding:  “The prevalent state of religious sentiment may explain why it is that modern jurisprudence, forged in the furnace of barbarian conquest, and formed by the fusion of Roman jurisprudence with patriarchal