It is of interest to notice how the attitude of the Early Fathers towards women differs from that of Our Lord as recorded in the Gospels. There indeed are women highly honoured, and it is to a woman that Christ often gives a message of the highest import. It was to Mary Magdalen that the Risen Lord first appeared and bade her tell the others, and again it was the woman of Samaria who became the instrument of salvation to her people. But to the Early Fathers the ascetic ideal was the predominant one, and in consequence thereof women were treated as the chief source of temptation to man. "Woman was represented as the door of Hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman. She should live in continual penance on account of the curses she has brought upon the world. She should be ashamed of her dress, for it is the memorial of her fall. She should be especially ashamed of her beauty, for it is the most potent instrument of the demon."[4] In fact a decree of the Council of Auxerre (A.D. 578) forbade women to receive the Eucharist in their naked hands owing to their impurity. Unfortunately "the bigotry of the Early Christian teachers gave the first check to the tendency to freer institutions, the next was given by the fall of the Empire." With the influx of the Teutonic tribes we find a new code of ideas and morals, but eventually a compromise was effected between the Germanic and Roman laws. Thus from very early times we find that it was a German custom to provide every bride with a dower, and this is remarked upon by Tacitus. Afterwards the Church adopted this custom, which was strangely enough both Roman and Teutonic in origin. From the time when the Empire went down in a cataclysm which shook the foundations of the world, until the beginning of the Middle Ages, we hear but little of woman. It was the Sturm and Drang period in the world's history, in which woman had no real position. The women of the upper classes were of necessity confined either to the castle or the convent, and woman's sphere was therefore a small one; man demanded nothing more than that they should minister to his physical wants in the short periods of peace he then enjoyed. Hallam says, "I am not sure that we could trace very minutely the condition of women for the period between the subversion of the Roman Empire and the First Crusade ... there seems however to have been more roughness in that social intercourse between the sexes than we find at a later period."[5]