_The Law._—It must be remembered that the mass of the “common people” were little affected by “the law” before the seventeenth century. “Common law” was the law of the nobles,[547] while farming people and artizans alike were chiefly regulated in their dealings with each other by customs depending for interpretation and sanction upon a public opinion which represented women as well as men. Therefore the changes which during the seventeenth century were abrogating customs in favour of common law, did in effect eliminate women from what was equivalent to a share in the custody and interpretation of law, which henceforward remained exclusively in the hands of men. The result of the elimination of the feminine influence is plainly shown in a succession of laws, which, in order to secure complete liberty to individual men, destroyed the collective idea of the family, and deprived married women and children of the property rights which customs had hitherto secured to them. From this time also the administration of the law becomes increasingly perfunctory in enforcing the fulfilment of men’s responsibilities to their wives and children. Footnote 547: _Holdsworth_, Vol. III., p. 408. _Church_.—According to modern ideas, religion pertains more to women than to men, but this conception is new, dating from the scientific era. Science has solved so many of the problems which in former days threatened the existence of mankind, that the “man in the street” instinctively relegates religion to the region in which visible beauty, poetry and music are still permitted to linger; to the ornamental sphere in short, whither the Victorian gentleman also banished his wife and daughters. This attitude forms a singular contrast to the ideas which prevailed in the Middle Ages, when men believed that supernatural assistance was their sole protection against the “pestilence that walketh in darkness” or from “the arrow that flieth by day.” Religion was then held to be such an awful power that there were men who even questioned whether women could, properly speaking, be considered religious at all. Even in the seventeenth century the practice of religion and the holding of correct ideas concerning it were deemed to be essential for the maintenance of human existence, and no suggestion was then made that religious observances could be adequately performed by women alone. Ideas as to the respective appropriateness of religious power to men and women have differed widely; some races have reserved the priesthood for men, while others have recognised a special power enduing women; in the history of others again no uniform tendency is shown, but the two influences can be traced acting and reacting upon each other.