In the course of time the Hebrew sacred books, with a few additions, became the absolute authority of life and conduct in Europe, and the Judaic ideal came into collision with the later Roman ideal. I have shown elsewhere that all the Christian leaders in the Latin Empire--Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose--insisted sternly on the subjection of woman, denounced her as the agent of humanity's downfall, and gave only too serious ground for a revival of the old contempt for her. When these abler leaders had passed away and the age of mediocrity set in, we find bishops seriously doubting whether woman has a soul, refusing her the sacrament on the same terms as men, and rejecting her testimony in a court of justice. From the Gospels certainly no support can be derived for this contemptuous attitude, but it was one of the points of the Old Testament that had not been expressly repealed, and the harsh and dominating language of St. Paul fully supported it. It would be idle to question the extent of the influence that St. Paul and the Old Testament and the great Fathers of the Church had on the young nations that were now settling down in Europe. Professor Karl Pearson has suggested that the northern tribes embraced Christianity precisely because it taught the subjection of women. We must, at all events, acknowledge that it displaced the old traditions with a lamentable theory of woman's inferiority. During the "age of iron" (fifth to tenth century), therefore, the cause of woman was lost, and Europe entered upon the second phase of the subordination of woman, from which it is only emerging to-day. The life of the Middle Ages is so vast and varied a subject that different writers will, according to their prepossessions, give the most contradictory pictures of it. For most thoughtful women it will be enough to reflect that the position won by the women of Rome was obviously lost, or they would not again be laboriously assailing the barriers raised about their lives fifteen centuries later; and most of the recent women-writers--Mrs. Cady Stanton, Mrs. Gage, Mdlle. Chauvin, etc.--are very emphatic on the point. But I will try to sum up the changes in a few broad statements.