Those tendencies may indeed be regarded as operating in the intellectual life, which, though it is in reality only a side of the sociological whole, we shall conveniently consider apart. Under that head too we shall note the influence of the Church for culture on the side of art. But on the side of ordinary life the influence of the clergy as teachers had two specific tendencies which may here be noted. One was the disparagement of women; the other the encouragement of cruelty. On the first head, as on so many others, the conventional view is a fallacy. That Christianity raised the status of women is still a general assumption; but exact research, even when made by an orthodox theologian, proves the contrary. Down to the nineteenth century, the solidest rights women possessed were those secured to them by ancient Roman law; and the tendency of Christian legislation was certainly to restrict rather than to expand such rights. At the same time the so-called "Manichæan" element in gospel Christianity, the tendency to regard the sexual instinct as something corrupt and unclean, gave to the ordinary language of the Fathers concerning women a tone of detraction and aversion. The one remedy for an overpoise of the sexual element in life, and for over-emphasis of female function on that side, is to secure the community of the sexes in the intellectual life; and organized Christianity, instead of inculcating this, minimized the intellectual life all round, thus making self-restraint a matter of morbid asceticism as against the excess inevitably following on disuse of mind. In particular, a priesthood nominally committed to celibacy, yet always practising in the confessional a morbid inquisition into sexual matters, was committed to treating women disparagingly as forces of "temptation" when it was not yielding thereto. Nothing could be more injurious to women's real credit. It is true that the worship of the Virgin would in some measure counteract the discredit; but this held equally true of the worship of many pagan Goddesses; and there is nothing to show that the status of women was higher in medieval Christendom than in ancient Egypt. Among the Teutons, the moral status of women seems to have been greatly lowered by the introduction of Christianity.