extinguished, the honour and modesty of continency are injured, and all its glory and dignity are profaned.” At the same time we ought to do justice to the self-control and perseverance with which many pursued their high ideal--for the ideal was a high one, as the purity aimed at was not corporeal merely, but extended over the whole range of life. “For it would be ridiculous,” says one of the virgins in Methodius, “to preserve the lustful members pure but not the tongue, or to preserve the tongue but neither the eyesight, the ears, nor the hands, or, lastly, to preserve these pure but not the mind, defiling it with pride and anger.”[162] Such, then, was the position of women among the early Christians. We have said nothing of Christian legislation, for we have been treating of a period when the legislation was carried on entirely by pagans. But we ought to mention two facts, or two phases of one fact, which had a great effect on the destinies of mankind, but especially of woman, and which have found their way into modern legislation. The Roman father had absolute power of life and of death over his children in the primitive times of Rome. Gradually this power slackened, but he retained to the end of heathendom the right to expose his children, and pagan sentiment supported him in such conduct. The infants, on their birth, might be drowned or exposed to the cold air, or starved, or abandoned to wild beasts. In this way deformed and weakly children were left to perish. A very large number of the children who were thus disposed of were girls. Christianity condemned this practice from the first as murder. It went further. It was a question with the ancients at what time the human fœtus became a living being, and many maintained that the soul came to it only when it was born. Tertullian has discussed this subject fully in his ‘Treatise on the Soul.’[163] He says: “This view [that the fœtus has no soul] is entertained by the Stoics, along with Aenesidemus, and occasionally by Plato himself, when he tells us that the soul, being quite a separate formation, originating elsewhere and externally to the womb, is inhaled when the new-born infant first draws breath.” This was the opinion prevalent among all classes of the Pagan world, and the practice was universal and avowed of killing the fœtus by drugs. But Christianity took the other view, that the soul came at the earliest stage, and maintained that it was equally sinful “to take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth.”[164] Accordingly the heathen practice was forbidden by the Church. The prohibition made its appearance at an early period in Christianity, for it occurs in the Epistle of Barnabas,[165] written about the beginning of the second century, and we are told that Peter says in the Apocalypse (an apocryphal writing probably of early date) “that abortive infants shall share the better fate: that these are committed to a guardian angel, so