The relation between the priesthood and the State has been one of the burning questions of the secular and religious history of Europe. To understand fully all the features in the State organisation of the Church and the many points of controversy, we need often to go far back into the records of early Aryan and Mediterranean society. We may mark here and there in the pagan Anatolian region the emergence of the idea that the priest should be temporal lord,[51.1] while in most early Aryan societies the subordination of the spiritual to the secular power appears to have been maintained. A study of the sagas of the North suggests the reflection that the struggle fought out to a definite decision at the Reformation had already been decided in the {52} Teutonic North in the far-off days before Christianity;[52.1] also that the secular character of the married English priesthood in our pre-Conquest period is only the reflex of old Teutonic custom. The celibacy of the priesthood is, again, a question that has agitated and divided the churches, nor does it appear that we ourselves have finished with it. To trace its origin and inner significance, a wide anthropological study is necessary, and I may be able to return to it in another association in a later lecture. Within the history of the Church, we may trace back the religious ideas underlying the dogma of celibacy to the ascetic enthusiasm of the third and fourth centuries, and we may be right in connecting it with the growth of Mariolatry. But the original source of the phenomenon lies far in the background of our religion; the impulse to religious celibacy had long been congenial to the temperament of {53} some of the Anatolian races. We find it powerful in the Judaic sect of the Essenians; and in the anthropology of primitive societies we are often confronted with the idea that the virgin body is the only fit organ for the full divine afflatus. In another question of administration, in the position of women in regard to the ministry, we can trace the opposing forces of differing pre-Christian traditions.[53.1] Their present total exclusion from sacred functions in all but a few sects shows the triumph of the Judaic rule sanctioned and insisted upon by St Paul; it is not at all in accordance with Teutonic or Greco-Roman religious custom; and in fact we find in the early centuries of the Church, when Greek influence was strongest, that certain offices of the ministry could be fulfilled by women; we even hear of a heretic sect in the fifth century that signalised itself by the orgiastic processions of the “priestesses {54} of the Virgin Mary.”[54.1] It is still possible that the old Teutonic view in this matter may reassert itself.