Early Christianity, as we have already seen, found the family life of the Greco-Roman world demoralized. The reconstruction of the family became, therefore, one of the first tasks of the new religion, and while other circumstances may have aided the church in this work, still on the whole it was mainly the influence of the early church that reconstituted the family life. From the first the church worked to abolish divorce, and fought as evil such vices as concubinage and prostitution, that came to flourish to such an extent in the Pagan world. Only very slowly did the early leaders of the church win the mass of the people to accepting their views as to the permanency of the marriage bond. In order to aid in making this bond more stable the early church recognized marriage as one of the sacraments, and, as implied, steadily opposed the idea of the later Roman Law that marriage was simply a private contract. The result was, eventually, that marriage came to be regarded again as a religious bond, and the family life took on once more the aspect of great stability. After the church had come fully into power in the Western world, legal divorce ceased to be recognized and legal separation was substituted in its stead. Thus the church succeeded in reconstituting the family life upon a stable basis, but the family after being reconstituted, was of a semipatriarchal type. Nothing was more natural than this, for the church had no model to go by except the paternal family of the Hebrew and Greek and Roman civilization. Nevertheless, the place of women and children in this semipatriarchal religious family established by the church was higher on the whole than in the ancient patriarchal family. The church put an end to the exposure of children, which had been common in Rome, and protected childhood in many ways. It also exalted the place of woman in the family, though leaving her subject to her husband. The veneration of the Virgin tended particularly to give women an honored place socially and religiously. Only by the advocacy and practice of ascetic doctrines may the early church be said to have detracted from the social valuation of the family. On the whole the reconstituting of the family by the church must be regarded as its most striking social work. But the thing for us to note particularly is that the type of the family life created by the church was what we might call a semipatriarchal type, in which the importance of husband and father was very much out of proportion to all the rest of the members of the family group. It was this semipatriarchal family which persisted down to the nineteenth century. SELECT REFERENCES _For brief reading:_ DE COULANGES, _The Ancient City_, Chaps. I-X. LECKY, _History of European Morals_, Chap. V. SCHMIDT, _Social Results of Early Christianity_, Chap. II. _For more extended reading:_