The Jews organized their religious and political practices about a patriarchal Deity ruling a patriarchal state; and their tradition handicapped all women with the sin of Eve, the sin of seeking knowledge. The Greeks, on the other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her beauty in Aphrodite but her chaste aloofness in Artemis, her physical strength in the Amazons, and her wisdom in Athena and Hera. They covered the Acropolis with matchless monuments in honor of Athena, patron goddess of their fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants on her anniversaries. So, too, republican Rome, while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal ideas in which the father was supreme, gave women positions of high honor in its religion, whether as deities or as servitors of the gods. In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied forth their splendid conceptions of female beauty, strength and passion in such figures as Brunhilda. These ideas must have done much to offset the physical weakness and functional handicaps of women in the ancient world. The Christian ideas, which have dominated us now for nearly two thousand years, are generally considered to have been favorable to women. In their insistence on the value of the human soul, and on democratic equality, they have doubtless helped to raise the status of women along with that of all human beings. But, as between man and woman, Christianity has given every possible advantage to men, and has added needlessly to the natural burdens of women.[19] [19] JAMES DONALDSON, _Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome and Among the Early Christians_, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907. From Judaism, Christianity borrowed Eve, with her eternally operative sin, and thus placed all women under a perpetual load of suspicion and guilt. The Founder of the new faith never assumed the responsibilities of a family, and he included no woman among his disciples. Example, even negative example, is often more powerful than precept. Paul, the most learned of the disciples, in his writings, and as an organizer of the Church, emphasized the older Jewish position. In the new organization, women filled only lesser places, while the men settled all points of dogma, directing and mainly conducting the services of worship. Meantime each woman's soul remained her own, to be saved only by her individual actions; therein lay her hope for the future, both on earth and in heaven.