In order to enforce the doctrine of inferiority, the Church went further, and proclaimed that there was in woman a wickedness additional to the sin common to humanity. The “eternal feminine” was held before men’s eyes as a temptation to be warred against. To fly from the presence of woman was to resist evil. Celibacy was a saintly virtue, and family life a thing to be tolerated rather than approved. In the words of St. Chrysostom, woman was “a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.” The influence of the Fathers was not confined to their own age; their writings continued to affect the whole teaching of the Church, Anglican as well as Roman, which has always been in favour of the subordination of woman. She has been assigned a lower place in religious exercises, and has been excluded from the priestly office. In successive periods of history the Church was largely responsible for the terrible persecutions inflicted upon women--and chiefly upon the poorest and most helpless--on the ground of witchcraft. Once having disseminated the theory of woman’s inherent vice, it was only a natural corollary to impute to her both the desire and the power of working extraordinary mischief. The doctrine suited ages which believed not only in an embodied and omnipresent Power of Evil, but also in countless and multiform expressions of that power through natural objects and phenomena. The Feudal System, which prevailed in England up to the middle of the fifteenth century, and in France up to a much later period, had a repressive effect on women of the lower classes, though for women in the upper ranks it presented certain advantages. The women of the families of tenants on a feudal estate were regarded as chattels which went with the land. They were bound to the soil, and were fined if they either accepted work or married outside the lord’s domain. The age of chivalry had a twofold effect on the position of women. It created an ideal of womanhood which stirred the imagination and the poetic fancy. Chivalry had its sublime side. It was a protest against tyranny and vice; it inspired men to heroic deeds; it gave them a loftier conception of duty. It was the revulsion of noble minds from the coarseness, the unpitying indifference to wrong, and contempt for weakness, which characterized the Middle Ages. Like a new gospel, chivalry dawned upon a world in which the virtues of Paganism had declined, while its vices still triumphed.