The cult, though unsupported by any law or statute, had acquired extraordinary power in the state. It undertook to summon before its council all persons charged with offenses against Demeter--Demeter standing amongst other things for the purity of domestic life. If the party summoned refused to appear before the council, the matter was referred to the attorney general, who, under the influence of the cult, prosecuted the charge in the criminal courts with the utmost severity; and whether the person accused was convicted or not, a refusal to appear before the council resulted in a social ostracism so complete that few ventured to incur it. If, on the other hand, the party charged appeared before the council, the case was likely to be treated with leniency, and conviction seldom resulted in more than the imposing of some penitential task. Should it, however, appear that the charge was more serious than could be dealt with by the cult, it was referred to the attorney general. The cult was careful to abstain from any act or teaching which could tend to encourage idolatry or superstition; thus, the statue of Latona, which had first inspired the Demetrian idea, was not placed in the temple where it might be thought properly to belong, but in the cloister. The temptation to worship it, therefore, was removed. Indeed, it was for the purpose of making the worship of a graven image the more impossible that Latona had asked that her body be consumed and the flame from it perpetuated on the altar. A flame could remain an emblem; it could hardly itself, in our day, ever become an object of worship. In this way was kept alive the idea that the divine, wherever else it might also exist, exists certainly within each and every one of us, and that by the cultivation of love and usefulness it can be made to prosper and increase in us. For men, the active scope of usefulness lay chiefly in the field of labor; for women, chiefly in the field of fertility--neither field excluding the other--but rather both including all. And so women contributed labor, in so far as labor did not impair their essential function of motherhood, and men contributed continence as the highest male duty in the field of fertility.