point attacked being that the heretics made women priestesses. No woman was at any time a priestess to God: Eve herself was not; none in the Old Testament, none in the New. No woman was ever made a bishop or presbyter, and a deaconess is not a priestess, but a servant of the Church appointed for special purposes. Christ made none of the women who served Him priestesses--not Salome, not even His mother, nor Martha, nor Mary, &c. Such, then, was the position which woman occupied in the Church in the course of the first three centuries of Christianity. The highest post to which she rose was to be a doorkeeper and a message-woman, and even these functions were taken away from her during the Middle Ages. Was there a reason for this? Perhaps we may find some clue to this phenomenon in the conceptions which the Fathers of the Church formed of the nature of woman. It is one of the curious features of early Christianity that it did not discuss some of those social problems which would naturally have suggested themselves. Thus no objection is taken to slavery, though the Therapeutæ had already denounced it as unlawful and inhuman. Christianity proclaimed a gospel of love, which had no limit but that of the human race. And it applied this gospel to all classes. The Christian slave thus became the brother of all members of the community, received kindness from all, and was admitted to equal rights and privileges. But Christianity also enjoined on him submission to the will of his proprietor urging the belief that man is bound to be content with the position in which he is, to bear patiently all the ills of this life in the certain hope of a glorious future. The marriage laws and customs prevalent throughout the Roman world in the first ages of Christianity ought to have created difficulty, but nothing is said of this difficulty. Thus a Christian slave woman was the property of her master, her children were a source of gain to him, and he took entire control over this matter, as over the breeding of cattle. Yet we do not hear of any discussion in regard to this arrangement, nor of any attempt to rescue the slave woman from the treatment to which she must have been subjected. Again, the Roman law recognized marriages only between citizen and citizen; but a very large number of the early Christians had not the rights of citizenship until the beginning of the third century, and if they made associations of the nature of marriage, their children were deemed illegitimate by the civil law. Probably the Church defied the civil law. It became a maxim that Christians were not to go to law with each other, and the Church established laws and a jurisdiction of its own. In the case of marriage this was peculiarly necessary, as the marriage of a believer with an unbeliever caused to the former great inconvenience in carrying out his faith, and, indeed, supplied strong temptations to apostasy. Such marriages were therefore from the first forbidden, on pain of expulsion.