The Jews' idea of a woman was sanctioned by no less an authority than Jehovah; nor did the Christ of the Gospels give one word of clear guidance on this or any other social problem, or enter one word of explicit protest against the injustice of the Judaic treatment of women. Again, the teaching of St. Paul was based on the Old Testament, and the teaching of the Fathers was based on the Old Testament and St. Paul. A few quotations from the sayings of some of these Fathers, whose contempt of marriage became one of the great errors of the Church, may prove instructive:-- Fornication is a lapse from one marriage into many.--Clement of Alexandria. Digamists (widowers who re-marry) are saved in the name of Christ, but are by no means crowned by him.--Origen. Second marriage is "a decent sort of adultery."--Athenagoras. It was no part of God's primitive design that the race should be continued by sexual union. Marriage is the outcome of sin.--St. Gregory of Nyssa (a married bishop). Blessed is the one who leads a celibate life, and soils not the divine image within him with the filth of concupiscence. Fierce is the dragon, and cunning the asp; But woman has the malice of both. --St. Gregory of Nazianzum. Why was woman created at all?--St. Augustine. Thou art the devil's gate, the betrayer of the tree, the first deserter of the divine law! Marriage is not far removed from fornication.--Tertullian. She is more fitted for bodily work.... Remember that God took a rib out of Adam's body, not a part of his soul, to make her. She was not made to the image of God, like man.--St. Ambrose. Woman is the root of all evil.--St. Jerome. At the Council of Auxerre, in 578, the bishops forbade women, on account of their "impurity," to take the sacrament in their hands as men did. If women only knew of these sayings, would they approve of the "appeal to the first six centuries"? Bad as the position of woman was under the influence of the early Church teaching, it was, in many respects, still worse during the Middle Ages. "Life-long seclusion in the inner apartments of the house of a man she has not chosen, or internment in a nunnery--that is, either degraded or unnatural--is the choice (within limits) of the daughter of the wealthy. Life-long drudgery, with few and coarse pleasures, with a long vista of sticks and whips, and scold's bridles, and ducking stools--with, perhaps, the brutal 'ordeal' on the slightest suspicion, or the ghastly death of the witch, is the prospect of the daughter of the poor." [254] Even the Reformation altered more than it improved the condition of woman. How could it be otherwise when the Reformers were nothing if not Bibliolaters?