Numbers of Greek women were disciples of the philosophers, some even were their inspiration. Generally courtesans, these women represented the “emancipation” of that time from the servile condition of the legitimate married women and also showed that women already longed to share in the interests of men and to acquire their culture. History has preserved also words and deeds of wives and mothers of the past which show that these also at times attained “masculine” greatness of soul and civic virtue. Pythias and Sibyls, Vestals and Valas, are other witnesses that the power of woman’s soul was active and recognised long before Christianity. Even among the purely primitive races there were found—and are found—cases in which woman in power and rights was placed, not only on an equality with man, but even above him. And if, on the one hand, the rigid exactions which men from the earliest time have fixed upon the wife’s fidelity—while they themselves had full freedom for promiscuity—show that the wife was considered as the property of the husband, so, on the other hand, this very conception was a means of elevating and refining the soul life of woman. For the self-control which she had to impose upon herself deepened her feeling for a devotion which embraced only one, the man to whom she belonged. Nothing would be more superficial than to estimate the real position of woman, among any special people, only by what we know of their laws. It is as if one, in a few centuries from now, should judge the actual position of the modern European wife by referring it to the wretched marriage laws which now obtain. They forget the deep gulf between law and custom who declare that marriage devotion, veneration for the sanctity of the home, esteem for the spiritual being of the wife first arose as a result of Christianity. It is significant enough for the freeing of woman that Jesus raised the personal worth of _all_ mankind through His teaching that—whoever or whatever the person in outer respects may be—every soul possesses an eternal value comprised, as it were, in God’s love; significant enough that Jesus Himself, because of this point of view, treated every woman, even the sinner, with kindness and respect. Because of the increasing uncertainty concerning the real ideals of Jesus, one is compelled to assume that—just as Veronica’s handkerchief preserved the imprint of Jesus’ outer image—the manner of life of the oldest Christian communities has preserved the imprint of His teaching. It is significant of their doctrines that in these communities women and men stood side by side in the same faith, in the same hope, in the same exercise of love, and in the same martyrdom. Here was “neither man nor woman,” but all were one in the hope of the speedy second coming of Jesus to establish God’s Kingdom.