Such ideas had necessarily a very powerful effect on the place and position of woman and on the conception of her nature. What was that effect? I will attempt to describe it in a few words. I may define man to be a male human being, and woman to be a female human being. They are both human beings, both gifted with reason and conscience, both responsible for their actions, both entitled to the freedom essential to this responsibility, and both capable of the noblest thoughts and deeds. As human beings they are on an equality as to their powers, the differences in individuals resulting from the surroundings and circumstances of spiritual growth. But man is a male and woman is a female, and this distinction exists in Nature for the continuance of the race. Now what the early Christians did was to strike the male out of the definition of man, and human being out of the definition of woman. Man was a human being made for the highest and noblest purposes; woman was a female made to serve only one. She was on the earth to inflame the heart of man with every evil passion. She was a fire-ship continually striving to get alongside the male man-of-war to blow him up into pieces. This is the way in which Tertullian[150] addresses women: “Do you not know that each one of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die.” And the gentle Clement of Alexandria[151] hits her hard when he says: “Nothing disgraceful is proper for man, who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, to whom it brings shame even to reflect of what nature she is.” Gregory Thaumaturgus[152] asserts: “Moreover, among all women I sought for chastity proper to them, and I found it in none. And verily, a person may find one man chaste among a thousand, but a woman never.” The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs[153] makes a similar statement, and adds: “By means of their adornment they deceive first the minds of men, and they instil poison by the glance of their eye, and then they take them captive by their doings,” and therefore “men should guard their senses against every woman.” “The angel of God showed me,” it says in another passage, “that for ever do women bear rule over king and beggar alike; and from the king they take away his glory, and from the valiant man his strength, and from the beggar even that little which is the stay of his poverty.”[154]