marry freedwomen, laid down no special directions in regard to the marriage of daughters of senators.[266] But when some of these became Christian, they would find it difficult to marry in their own rank, and, adopting the Christian ideas of brotherhood and the equality of all men in the sight of God would ally themselves with the forbidden classes. If any of them formed a union with a converted actor or with the converted son of an actor or with a slave, her conduct would excite the utmost indignation among the aristocratic classes. Some such incidents may have induced Marcus Aurelius to take the matter up--for the legislation prohibiting the daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters of a senator from marrying a freedman occurred first in a speech of that emperor which was followed by a decree of the senate.[267] The statements of Hippolytus in regard to the motives of senatorial women for marrying actors or freedmen or slave may be regarded as mere calumnies. The senatorial women could legally marry men of equestrian or plebeian rank, but they and their children took the rank of the husband, and they were subject to the contracts involved in the marriage. But if they married an actor, freedman, or slave, it was no legal marriage, there was no contract and no loss of rank or of property. Such marriages had their disadvantages. The children were illegitimate and the husband might at any time refuse to acknowledge his wife. Besides this, if the woman did not lose her rank legally, no doubt she would be repudiated by all her aristocratic friends. There was, therefore, no great temptation to enter on such marriages. Allard[268] maintains, as a good Catholic, that Pope Callistus, in issuing such decrees, and declaring such unions legitimate before God, proclaimed loudly the distinction between the civil law and the religious law, and the independence of Christian marriage. But though it is likely that many Christians in the earlier period of Christianity agreed with the opinions of Callistus, yet there is nowhere any definite statement of this, and Callistus stands unique in the matter in the first three centuries. The passages which have been adduced by Allard prove nothing. In the Epistle to Polycarp,[269] attributed to Ignatius, occur the words, “It becometh men and women who marry to make their union with the consent of the bishop, that the marriage may be according to the Lord, and not according to lust.” But here, and in all other passages adduced, there is nothing said of the nature of the marriage. Certainly Hippolytus speaks in the strongest language against Callistus, and it is likely that Callistus is the person attacked by Tertullian in his ‘De Pœnitentia.’ Allard is forced to allow that the legislation of the Christian emperors did not follow the suggestions of Callistus. The laws may be read in Bingham’s chapter on the impediments of marriage in his ‘Antiquities of the Christian Church.’[270]