Another move in the direction of asceticism was the prohibition by the Council of Laodicea in 352 of women serving as priests or presiding over the churches.[102] Although in later Judaism the Temple service was confined to men, the examples of Deborah and Huldah show that in earlier times women were considered as capable of inspiration and were sometimes revered as prophets; the Gentiles, among whom the infant churches were founded, had priestesses almost everywhere actively employed in the duties of worship and sacrifice; and it would have been strange if women, to whom the propagation of the Gospel was so greatly owing, had not been sometimes admitted to the function of conducting the simple services of the primitive church. We learn from St. Paul that Phœbe was a deacon (διάκονος) of the church at Cenchrea,[103] and the canon of Laodicea shows that until the middle of the fourth century they still occasionally occupied recognized positions in the active ministry of the church. They could not have been numerous, or the references to them in the history of the period would have been more frequent, and the enforcement of their disability for divine service would have required constant repetition in the canons of the general and local synods; but unquestionably the growth of Mariolatry and the adoration of female saints would have sufficed to prevent the inconsistency of regarding women as absolutely unfitted for any function in public worship, had it not been for the rising influence of asceticism, which demanded the separation of the sexes, and insisted upon an artificial purity in all concerned in the ministry of the altar. Even as late as the tenth century, so good a celibatarian as Atto of Vercelli was perfectly willing to assert that in the early church, when the laborers were few, women were admitted to share in the ceremonies of divine worship.[104] Still, as yet, the secular clergy were at liberty to follow the dictates of their own consciences, and if an attempt was made to erect the necessity of ascetic abstinence into an article of either faith or discipline, the church was prompt to stamp it with the seal of unequivocal reprobation. Eustathius, Bishop of Sebastia, in Cappadocia, himself the son of the Bishop of Cappadocian Cæsarea, Eulalius, carried his zeal for purity to so great an excess that his exaggerated notions of the inferiority of the married state trenched closely upon Manichæism, although his heretical rejection of canonical fasting showed that on other points he was bitterly opposed to the tenets of that obnoxious sect. His horror of matrimony went so far as to lead him to the dogma that married people were incapable of salvation; he forbade the offering of prayer in houses occupied by them; and he declared that the blessings and sacraments of priests living with their wives were to be rejected, and their persons treated with contempt.[105]