the kiss, which ought to be mystic, occasions foul suspicions and evil reports.” These customs prove that considerable freedom prevailed among the earliest Christians, and doubtless sometimes this freedom was abused. In the very first epoch some of the Corinthian Christians sided with a man who committed incest and persisted in it after rebuke, and the Apostle had to exert himself to the utmost to repress the sympathy and the sin, but the accusations, speaking generally, were hideously false and unfounded. They are of some consequence for our purpose, for they must have acted powerfully on the minds of Christians in inducing them to avoid everything that might furnish even the semblance of justification for them. CHAPTER II. EXPLANATION OF THE DEGRADATION. From a very early date two currents can be traced in the Church--one in the direction of upholding marriage, another in that of despising and rejecting it. No one with the New Testament as his guide could venture to assert that marriage was wrong, and the tradition remained firm in the Church during the Ante-Nicene period that it was unlawful and heretical to forbid marriage. The Apostolic Fathers[138] offer exhortations to wives to love their own husbands truly, and to love all others with no partiality for any one and in all chastity, and to train up their children in the knowledge and fear of God. As time moves on, such exhortations become less frequent, but still marriage is held up as a modified blessing. Tertullian,[139] whose words in an opposite direction are very strong and numerous, has this passage, “Whence are we to find language adequate to describe the happiness of that marriage which the Church cements and the oblation confirms, and the benediction signs and seals, which angels report and the Father holds as ratified?” And then he describes the joys of the couple: “Together they pray, together prostrate themselves, together perform their fasts, mutually teaching, mutually exhorting, mutually sustaining.” But Tertullian, it has to be noticed, is not here insisting on the blessings of marriage, but on the blessedness of a marriage between two believers celebrated in the face of the Church, in contrast with a marriage between a believer and an unbeliever not sanctioned by the Church. The duties of the wife were simple: She had to obey her husband, for he was her head, her lord and superior; she was to fear him, reverence him, and please him alone; she had to cultivate silence; she had to spin and take care of the house, and she ought to stay at home and attend to her children. The only occasions for her going out were when she went to church, or with her husband to visit a sick brother.[140]