The Christian ideals are essentially feminine ones. They exalt love, not force, and glorify the finest and most distinctive traits of womanhood. “Heavens, what wives these Christians have!” said a pagan ruler, struck with their spirit of supreme self-sacrifice. “Kill me,” said Eve to Adam, as they were being driven from the Garden of Eden; “then perhaps God will put you back into paradise.” So wrote a man centuries later who was trying to illustrate the unselfishness of woman at the crucial point of her history. But the obedience which was so beautiful to the husband was quite another matter when demanded by a spiritual director, and family life began to suffer. Perhaps this state of affairs is partly responsible for the bitter denunciations of women in the writings of the fathers, though by no means confined to them. “You are the devil’s gateway,” says Tertullian, “the unsealer of the forbidden tree, the deserter from the divine law. You persuaded him whom the devil was not brave enough to attack. You destroyed God’s image, man.” “Eve was the principle of death,” wrote St. Jerome; but remembering, perhaps, how far the work of his life had been aided by women, he adds that “Mary is the source of life.” His attacks elsewhere are frequent and merciless. “Woman has the poison of an asp and the malice of a dragon,” is the kindly tribute of Gregory the Great. “Of all wild beasts the most dangerous is woman,” says St. Chrysostom, who owed so much to his own mother and loved her so devotedly. “It brings great shame to reflect of what nature woman is,” writes Clement of Alexandria. One might fill a book with similar quotations. “A woman is an evil.” “A woman is a whited sepulcher.” This is the burden of priestly complaint from St. Augustine to the Protestant Calvin and John Knox, who sang variations on the same theme in a different key. Not even the classic Greeks were more abusive. All this is specially surprising, since we find no such spirit in the words of Christ, who was invariably gentle toward women and tender even to their faults. St. Paul was disposed to keep them in a very humble place, but, after all, he was never incurably bitter.