The spirit of progress was to breathe its inspiration first over the surface of Europe, whence it would in time pass over the rest of the earth. From the end of the Middle Ages culture slowly ascended once more to its ancient height, and with its progress the position of woman steadily improved. It is well known that the re-awakening of Europe was due to a revival of Greek culture; but it is not so often recognised that the inspiration came at two periods, in two different forms. The first period was when the light of the Arabian civilisation in Spain sent its reflection over the Pyrenees and impelled the theological schools of Europe to a broader activity. By the twelfth century there was a ferment of scholastic life in many parts of Europe; but it was a barren employment of the intelligence, isolated at once from inanimate nature and from the social and political life. Architecture and sculpture had been kept alive from Roman days, because the Church had use for them. Natural science was dead--had not outlived its infancy--and social or political science had no place under a theocracy. Christian scholars were, therefore, greatly stimulated by the broader culture of the Arabs, which their more adventurous members went south to study or learned from the intermediate Jews; and Christian nobles, whose halls and persons still retained much of the coarseness and dirtiness of their ancestry, were quickened by the refined luxury of the Moors and the "Paynims." By the twelfth century Arabian Spain was deeply influencing Europe, and the advance in the thirteenth century plainly shows the great indebtedness to them. It is as obvious in Thomas Aquinas and Dante as it is in Pope Silvester or Roger Bacon. And there is no dispute that the progressive principles in Arabian civilisation were due to the Greek culture that had made its way to the new nation through Syria. In this form, however, the revival of Greek culture had no direct influence on the position of woman, because it was associated with Mohammedanism. In his fine work, _Die Frauen des Orients_ (1904), Baron von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld shows that in the pre-Islamic period the Arabian women had a good deal of freedom and influence. What they have become under the influence of Islam is so well known that I need not describe their situation. It is one more calamity that women owe to the teaching of the Old Testament, which Mohammed absorbed. Under the Ommejad princes the women of the orient had, like the philosophers and the artists, a good deal of liberty, and their position in Spain approached this. But the more rigid ideal prevailed, and the Mohammedan woman sank lower than the Christian.