Ecclesiastical jurisprudence enacted penalties against “masters who took from their theows (Saxon slaves) the money they had earned; against those who slew their theows without just cause; against mistresses who beat their theows so that they died within three days.... Above all, the whole machinery of ecclesiastical discipline was set in motion to shelter the otherwise unprotected chastity of the female slaves” (Wright’s _Political Condition of the English Peasantry in the Middle Ages_). “That Church which seemed so haughty and so overbearing in its dealings with kings and nobles,” writes Lecky, “never failed to listen to the poor and the oppressed, and for many centuries their protection was the foremost of all the objects of its policy” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 260). Simultaneously with the gradual abolition of slavery, we find the elevation of woman, and her redemption from polygamy, a natural concomitant of slavery. “No ideal,” writes Lecky, “has exercised a more salutary influence than the mediæval conception of the Virgin [he means devotion to]. For the first time, woman was elevated to her rightful position and the sanctity of weakness was recognized. No longer the slave, the toy of man, no longer associated only with ideas of degradation and sensuality, woman rose, in the person of the Virgin Mother, into a new sphere, and became the object of a reverential homage of which antiquity had no conception. Love was idealized. The moral character and beauty of female excellence was for the first time felt ... a new kind of admiration was fostered. Into a harsh, and ignorant, and benighted age this ideal type infused a conception of gentleness and purity, unknown to the proudest civilizations of the past.... In the millions who have sought with no barren desire to mould their characters into her image ... in the new sense of honour, in the softening of manners in all walks of society, in this, and in many ways, we detect its influence. All that was best in Europe clustered around it [the devotion to Mary], and it is the origin of many of the purest elements of our civilization” (_History of Rationalism_, I, 231). These are striking words from the pen of a rationalist, and would that all women understood that the laws of divorce, the first-fruits of the weakening of the Christian principle, and the pagan renaissance in Europe, mark also the first steps of their retrogression to the condition, from which they were uplifted by Christianity. After centuries of judicious preparation, the emancipation of all Christians was proclaimed by Pope Alexander III. “This law alone,” writes Voltaire, “should render his memory precious to all, as his efforts on behalf of Italian liberty should endear him to Italians” (_Essai sur les mœurs_).