“The services rendered,” says Mr. Lecky, “by the ascetics in imprinting on the minds of men a profound and enduring conviction of the importance of chastity, though extremely great, were seriously counterbalanced by their noxious influence upon marriage. Two or three beautiful descriptions of this institution have been culled out of the immense mass of patristic writings; but in general it would be difficult to conceive anything more coarse and more repulsive than the manner in which they regarded it.... The tender love which it elicits, the holy and beautiful domestic qualities that follow in its train, were almost absolutely omitted from consideration. The object of the ascetic was to attract men to a life of virginity, and, as a necessary consequence, marriage was treated as an inferior state.” “The days of Chivalry were not yet,” we read in Smith’s _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_, “and we cannot but notice even in the greatest of the Christian fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and, consequently, of the marriage relationship.” What an inexhaustible source of mediæval immorality this contemptuous treatment of marriage by the most influential class of society proved, has been so often depicted in glaring colours that these pages need not be tainted with illustrations. WOMAN’S LOWEST DEGRADATION Woman was represented by the Fathers “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. Women were even forbidden by a provincial council in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually maintained” (Lecky). Not even the Koran took such a degrading view of woman as these early “Christian Fathers.” For the current notion that the existence of a soul in woman is denied by the Mahometan faith is contradicted by several passages in the Koran. The lowest depths of feminine degradation and the sublimest heights of fanatical folly and crime, however, were not reached in this early period, but some centuries later, when the incredible brutalities of the witchcraft trials began. The vast majority of the victims were women; and Professor Scherr, in his _Geschichte der Deutschen Frauenwelt_, estimates that _in Germany alone_ at least one hundred thousand “witches” were burnt at the stake. No one on reading the accounts of these trials can help feeling that Shakspere made a mistake when he wrote that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” He should have said, “All the world’s a madhouse, And all the men are fools and demons.”