What we want first and above all things in our ministers of religion is _that they should be intensely religious_; and knowing this, and that all other gifts and acquirements are comparatively of small avail for the purpose, we deliberately exclude from the sacred office that moiety of the community among whom this special and most precious grace is, at all events, least rare.[27] The reasons for this exclusion are, however, amply sufficient to account, historically, for the anomaly. They are of two kinds, which I shall take leave to characterize as the Bad and the Good. There is a very deep-rooted prejudice, inherited from the ascetics of early Christianity, whereby the idea of womanhood is connected with very base associations. It is impossible to ignore this fact in any review of the religious position of the sex; and it is therefore better to say bluntly that, from this point of view, a woman is looked upon rather as an emissary from the pit than a “daughter of the Lord Almighty,” rather a temptation to earthly passion than a helpmate to heavenly purity. Springing up when the old classical world had sunk into a corruption and foulness which we can now probably little realize in imagination, the frenzy of asceticism which was nourished among the deserts of the Thebaid and attained its full growth in the monasteries of Greece and Italy,--the origin of all the legends of which the “Temptation of St. Anthony” is the type,[28]--has left almost ineffaceable traces throughout the nations of Europe; of course much more sharply marked in the Latin and Greek Churches, which have canonized these poor fanatics, and still set apotheosized virginity on one of the thrones of heaven, than among Protestant communities, wherein marriage has been always placed on a moral level with celibacy, and Martin Luther has been thoroughly absolved for his conjugal affection for the singularly plain old lady whose portrait by Lucas Cranach we beheld some years ago in the Exhibition of Old Masters in Burlington House.[29] Nevertheless, even among Protestant Christians, a certain impression has remained, the reverse of the faith of their old Teuton forefathers, that women were nearer to the mind of the Divinity than men. The highest religious _status_ a woman could attain in Milton’s opinion was a sort of deputy piety,-- “He for God only, she for God in him”;