One Church historian goes so far, in his vindication of the Reformer’s statements concerning the mediæval “contempt felt for womankind,” as actually to lay the blame for Luther’s sanction of polygamy on the low, “mediæval view of the nature of matrimony.” Another theologian, a conservative, fancies that he can, even to-day, detect among “Romanists” the results of the mediæval undervaluing of marriage. According to Catholics “marriage is not indeed forbidden to everyone--for otherwise where would the Church find new children?--but nevertheless is looked at askance as a necessary evil.” Perfection in Catholic theory consists in absolute ignorance of all that concerns marriage. One scholar declares the Church before Luther’s day had taught, that “marriage had nothing to do with love”; “of the ethical task [of marriage] and of love not a trace is to be found” in the teaching of the Middle Ages. An eminent worker in the field of the history of dogma also declares, in a recent edition of his work, that, before Luther’s day, marriage had been “a sort of concession to the weak”; thanks only to Luther, was it “freed from all ecclesiastical tutelage to become the union of the sexes, as instituted _by God_ [his italics], and the school of highest morality.” Such assertions, only too commonly met with, are merely the outcome of the false ideas disseminated by Luther himself concerning the Church of olden days. The author of the fable that woman and marriage were disdained in the Middle Ages scored a success, of which, could he have foreseen it, he would doubtless have been proud.