People with little or no knowledge of those portions of history that specially bear upon the question are easily deceived. The average woman's ideas concerning the pre-Christian civilisations are decidedly vague. Her ideas may also be further confused by lurid accounts from the pulpit of the licentiousness prevalent among the upper classes during the earlier and also the last years of the Roman Empire; while nothing is told her about the unrestrained licence of the aristocracy during the Middle Ages, and the degraded condition of the masses during, say, the eighteenth century, "when," says Sir Walter Besant, "for drunkenness, brutality, and ignorance, the Englishman of the baser kind reached the lowest depth ever reached by civilised man." Clerics who unconsciously mislead their congregations with this argument cannot be aware of those hard facts of history which render it untenable. For their benefit, and for the benefit of their dupes, let us glance at a few of these facts. The status of women among the "barbarians" is vouched for by the Romans, their enemies, and therefore unexceptionable witnesses. Nothing impressed the Romans more than the equality of the sexes among the northern nations, the man's reverence for womanhood, the woman's sympathy with manhood, and the high code of morality that was the natural outcome of this well-balanced state of society. At a time when the men of the "Chosen People" were insulting and unjust to their women, heathen women enjoyed a position which their Christian, not to mention their Mohammedan, descendants might well envy. "Polygamy only began to disappear among the Jews in the fifth century B.C., and so curious was the influence of the Old Testament on the early Christian Church that several of the Fathers could not bring themselves to condemn it, and it was not officially suppressed by the Church until A.D. 1060. Luther and the Reformers allowed it even later. Yet polygamy was one of the surest signs of a contempt of woman, and it had been rejected by Greeks, Romans, and barbarians long before the Hebrews began to perceive its enormity." [244]