esteemed to be the insignia of honor and influence, they clave fast to that monogamic marriage which Jesus had elevated into a holy sacrament; and while throughout the world women were regarded as slaves, as domestic chattels, or, at the very best, as an inferior race and a necessary evil, so that the birth of a female child was looked upon as a household calamity, the Christian faith that the Holy Ghost conceived Christ before he was born of a virgin and manifested in the flesh, glorified and exalted the dignity of womanhood and maternity, and created the idea of personal responsibility, rights, and duties for both sexes alike. The logical tendency of Christianity was, therefore, to originate the idea of personal liberty for all men, unknown to the world before; to repudiate the heathen doctrine of the divine character and right of kings; to sit in judgment upon their laws, and to intelligently obey, or refuse to obey, them; in a word, to cultivate and exercise, as a matter of religious faith, that spirit of personal independence, both of action and of thought, which we in later times denominate democracy, the concrete form of which was the election of deacons, presbyters, and bishops by the people unto whom they ministered. But this habit of independent thought did not tend as in later times in the direction of ecclesiastical schisms; because, if any one embraced a doctrinal error, either it was maintained by him as an individual opinion; or if a mistaken zeal led him to proclaim it publicly, and seek thereby to bind the consciences of other Christians, the matter soon came to the knowledge of the churches, and, when the Church assembled to consider the alleged error, the Holy Paraclete directed the counsels of the assembled bishops and presbyters, so that their deliverances were infallibly correct, and were universally accepted as final. So that, during the first three centuries, no heresy could survive the condemnation of a Christian council, and no learning, zeal, and genius could give to heresy such vitality and power as to seriously threaten the peace of the Church. Even Peter could not force the observance of the rite of circumcision upon the free Christian communities; and the heresies of Menander, Cerinthus, Nicolaus, Valentinius, Marcion, Tatianus, Blastus, Montanus, Artimon, and others, perished almost as soon as they had been condemned.