ity to the conjugal relations, instead of caprice and selfishness, and has enshrined marriage in a sanctity before unknown. In the old heroic days of the Republic woman's virtue was "the most immediate jewel of her soul." This the Lucretias and Virginias of those early times held dearer than their lives. But under the Empire the vast influx of foreign wealth, foreign slaves, and foreign superstitions, brought with them their avenging Nemesis. Even the wives of the emperors flaunted their shame in the high places of the earth. Philosophers and sages, by both precept and example, undermined the foundations of the family, which are also the foundations of the State. Cicero, who reasoned so profoundly concerning the nature of the gods, basely put away his wife that he might repair his wasted fortunes by marrying his wealthy ward. Woman, says Gibbon, was not a person, but a thing. She had no rights, no interests. of her own; nor should she have any friends nor any gods, says Plutarch, but her husband's. The recklessness of divorce and prevailing profligacy of life was recognized even by a licentious poet as the cause of national decay.* But Christianity came to rescue woman from this abyss of shame, to enthrone her amid the sanctities of home, to invest her with the household virtues, and to employ her in the tender ministrations of love. It recognized in her an immortal soul. It treated her as a fellow-pilgrim with man through a world of probation to an eternal reward. Marriage, therefore, was sanctified as a type of the mystical union between Christ and his Church, and modesty was regarded as the crown of all the graces. Divorce, which had attained a fatal facility among the heathen, was regarded as a flagrant sin, save only for the cause which Christ himself assigns as rendering it lawful. In a passage of great beauty, addressed to his own wife, Tertullian expresses the dignity and purity of Christian wedlock. He exclaims :

How can I paint the happiness of a marriage which the Church ratifies, the sacrament confirms, the benediction seals, angels announce, and our heavenly Father declares valid! What a union of two believers-one hope, one vow, one discipline, one worship! They are brother and sister, two fellow-servants, one spirit and one flesh. They pray together, fast together, exhort and support one another. They go together to the house of God, and to the

Hoc fonte derivata clades

In patriam populumque fluxit.-HORACE.

table of the Lord. They share each other's trials, persecutions, and joys. Neither avoids nor hides any thing from the other. They delight to visit the sick, succor the needy, and daily lay their offerings before the altar without scruple or constraint. They do not need to keep the sign of the cross hidden, nor to express secretly their joy, nor to receive by stealth the eucharist. They join in psalms and hymns, and strive who best can praise God. Christ rejoices at the sight, and sends his peace upon them. Where two are joined in his name he also is; and where he is there evil can

How infinitely superior is such an ideal of marriage to that of Cicero, or even of Cato the Censor, who ceded his wife to his friend Hortensius, with the approval of her father, and took her back again after his death.

The peril of intermarriage with the heathen was strongly urged in the primitive Church, and believers were enjoined, under pain of ecclesiastical penalties, to marry only in the Lord. "Women married to pagans," says St. Jerome, "become parts of the bodies whose ribs they are." Where a heathen matron was converted to Christianity, she was exhorted, by faith and prayer and the exhibition of the Christian graces, to strive to win her companion to the truth. Tertullian thus describes the obstacles which the Christian wife of an idolator must meet in her religious life: "At the time for worship the husband will appoint the use of the bath; when a fast is to be observed, he will invite company to a feast. When she would bestow alms both safe and cellar are closed against her. What heathen will suffer his wife to attend the nightly meeting of the Church, the slandered Supper of the Lord, to visit even in the poorest hovels the sick and the afflicted, to kiss the martyr's chains in prison, to rise in the night for prayer, to show hospitality to stranger brethren?"* Secret marriages were forbidden, and Tertullian exhorts that the approbation of the earthly as well as of the heavenly parent should accompany this sacred rite.

A conformity on the part of Christian households to the pomps and vanities of the heathen, all of which they had solemnly renounced at baptism, was strictly forbidden by primitive discipline. In their apparel and the modest adornments of their houses, they avoided the ostentatious luxury and costly adornings of the pagans around them. Christian women were

* Ad Uxorem, ii, 8.

exhorted to be patterns of sobriety and godliness, abstaining from the wearing of golden ornaments, which often were contaminated by heathen symbols. "Let woman breathe the odor of the true royal ointment, that of Christ," writes Clement of Alexandria, "and not of unguents and scented powders. Let her be anointed with the ambrosial chrism of industry, and find delight in the holy unguent of the Spirit, and offer spiritual fragrance. She may not crown the living image of God as the heathen do dead idols. Her fair crown is one of amaranth, which groweth not on earth, but in the skies."*

In similar strain, also, Tertullian exhorts Christian matrons to wear the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit as the truest adorning of the female character. "Be arrayed in the ornaments of the apostles and prophets," he writes, "drawing your whiteness from simplicity, your ruddy hue from modesty, painting your eyes with bashfulness, your mouth with silence, implanting in your ears the word of God, fitting on your neck the yoke of Christ. Clothe yourself with the silk of uprightness, the fine linen of holiness, the purple of modesty, and you shall have God himself for your lover and spouse." +

tissue.

A conspicuous symptom of the decay of primitive simplicity and piety was an increased sumptuousness of apparel. Against this the writings of the Fathers especially inveigh, and sumptuary regulations prohibited the use of gold brocade or silken Clement of Alexandria denounces with indignation the extravagance and luxury that had invaded the Church of that city--a sort of ancient Paris, setting the fashion of folly and frivolity and oriental extravagance and effeminacy even to Rome itself. Wealthy ladies, instead of succoring the poor and maintaining widows and orphans, expended their means on chariots and gilded litters, in baths and banquets, in costly cabinets and couches, and in luxurious draperies and jewelry; and wasted their sympathies, not unlike some of their modern sisters, on parrots, peacocks, monkeys and Maltese dogs. He compares, let us hope with unnecessary severity, the fashionable women of Alexandria to "an Egyptian temple, gorgeous indeed without, but enshrining only a cat or a crocodile; so beneath their meretricious adorning were concealed vile and *Pædagogus, ii, 8. De Cultu Feminarum, ii, 3–18. Pædagogus, iii, 4.

loathsome passions."* "Nevertheless," he adds, "they cannot with their bought and painted beauty avoid wrinkles or evade death." Yet he does not condemn riches in themselves, but urges sanctified wisdom in their use. "They are like the deadly asp," he says, "which will sting us unless we know how to take it by the tail."

Few objects are more common among the disinterred relics of old Roman life at Pompeii than the rouge pots, ceruse vases, and other articles of toilet luxury of the proud dames of that gay summer city. It appears, from the indignant protest of Jerome, that after the peace of the Church, when Christianity had become fashionable with the court party, this worldly example was copied by some professed disciples of the lowly Nazarene. "What business," he scornfully asks, "have paint and rouge on a Christian cheek? Who can weep for her sins, when her tears wash bare furrows on her skin? With what trust can faces be lifted to heaven which their Maker cannot recognize as his workmanship?"+ St. Cyprian satirically suggests of such, that the Almighty might not be able to recognize them at the resurrection. Moreover, he adds, they should not dye their hair, since it is an attempted violation of the decree: "Thou canst not make one hair white or black." This practice seems to have been not uncommon among the fair dames of Carthage, another great center of wealth and fashion, as also the custom, not unlike certain modern modes, of wearing the hair, often false, in a towering mass, and tortured into unnatural forms. With characteristic vehemence Tertullian denounced these "flame-colored heads, built up with pads and rolls, the slough, perhaps, of some guilty wretch now in hell." S

An important chapter of Pressensé treats of Christianity and asceticism. The tendency in this direction was largely the result of the moral recoil of the Christians from the selfish and often polluting indulgence of the senses encouraged by heathen life. The ascetic notions of the Essenes among the Jews, and of the Therapeetæ of Egypt probably encouraged this spirit Pædagogus, iii, 6.

+ Polire faciem purpurisso, et cerusa ora depingere, Hieron. 1 Ep., 54.

+ "Ornare crinem," remarks Jerome, "et alienis capillis turritam verticem struere. Ep. 54.

§ De Velandis Virginibus, ii, 17

among the early Christians. The Gnostic and Manichæan heresies still more widely diffused the conception of the inherent evil of matter and the antagonism of the flesh to the spirit. One of the earliest manifestations of this principle was the exaggerated sanctity of single life. From this bitter root sprang the whole monastic system of later times, with all its evil fruit, putting asunder what God has joined, as holier than he. On the Procrustean rack of this iron rule the tenderest and most sacred affections of the human heart were ruthlessly tortured. But during the first three centuries of the Christian era there is no trace of a celibate clergy. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence of the marriage of ecclesiastics of every rank. Nay, according to Clement of Alexandria, he is most truly heroic who, in marriage, and in the duties of a family and the care of a home, rises above mere pleasure and pain, arming himself against all the temptations that come to him through wife and children, servants and goods. The celibate, on the other hand, escapes the most difficult of all ordeals: he is occupied only with himself; hence his inferiority to the man, who, instead of being absorbed only in his own salvation, devotes himself also to the good of his household.*

The testimony of the Roman Catacombs distinctly shows that in the earlier and purer ages of the Church the compulsory celibacy of the clergy was unknown. In numerous inscriptions, even of a comparatively late period, ecclesiastics of various ranks lament the death of their wives, "chaste, just, and holy." "Would to God," exclaims our author, "that all their successors had such!"

It was not till the fourth century that this ordinance of "forbidding to marry," which has been fraught with such appalling moral evils to society, was formulated in a canon of the Church. The conception of the superior sanctity of celibacy now spread rapidly. Jerome writes with characteristic enthusiasm of single life. "The community of virgins are the vessels of gold and silver; that of the married, only of wood and earthenware." "Marriage replenishes earth," he says; "virginity, heaven." In expounding the parable of the sower, he writes: "The thirty-fold refers to marriage, the sixty-fold to widow+ Hieron., Adv., Jour., i. ‡ Nuptiæ terram repleut, virginitas Paradisum, Ib.

*Stromata, vii, 12, 70.