The weaker sex, whether from the greater value attached to the purity of woman or from her presumed frailty, as well as from some difference in the nature of the engagement entered into, was the first to become the subject of distinct legislation, and the frequency of the efforts required shows the difficulty of enforcing the rule of celibacy and chastity. Allusion has already been made to a law of Jovian which, as early as 364, denounced the attempt to marry a nun as a capital crime. Subsequent canons of the church show that this was wholly ineffectual. The council of Valence, in 374, endeavored to check such marriages. The synod of Rome, in 384, alludes with horror to these unions, which it stigmatizes as adultery, and drawing a distinction between virgins professed and those who had taken the veil, it prescribes an indefinite penance before they can be received back into the church, but at the same time it does not venture to order their separation from their husbands.[210] A year later, the bolder Siricius commands both monks and nuns guilty of unchastity to be imprisoned, but he makes no allusion to marriage.[211] Notwithstanding the fervor of St. Augustin’s admiration for virginity and the earnestness with which he waged war in favor of celibacy, he pronounces that the marriage of nuns is binding, ridicules those who consider it as invalid, and deprecates the evil results of separating man and wife under such circumstances, but yet his asceticism, satisfied with this concession to common sense, pronounces such unions to be worse than adulterous.[212] From this it is evident that these infractions of discipline were far from uncommon, and that the stricter churchmen already treated such marriages as null and void, which resulted in the husbands considering themselves at liberty to marry again. Such view of monastic vows was not sustained by the authorities of the church, for about the same period Innocent I., like St. Augustin, while condemning such marriages as worse than adulterous, admitted their validity by refusing communion to the offenders until one of the partners in guilt should be dead; and, like the synod of 384, he considered the transgression as somewhat less culpable in the professed virgin than in her who had consummated her marriage with Christ by absolutely taking the veil.[213] It was probably this assumed marriage with Christ—a theory which St. Cyprian shows to be as old as the third century, and which is very strongly stated by Innocent—which rendered the church so much more sensitive as to the frailty of the female devotees than to that of the men. As yet, however, the stability of such marriages was generally accepted throughout the church, for, a few years before the epistle of Innocent we find it enunciated by the first council of Toledo, which decided that the nun who married was not admissible to penitence during the life of her husband, unless she separated herself from him.[214]