n, in
order to exhibit their native gracefulness and allurements,
divest themselves of all their garments, and long to show their
naked beauty, being conscious that they shall please more by the
rosy redness of their skin than by the golden splendor of their
robes." (Thomas Taylor's translation of _Metamorphosis_, p. 28.)

Christianity seems to have profoundly affected habits of thought
and feeling by uniting together the merely natural emotion of
sexual reserve with, on the one hand, the masculine virtue of
modesty--_modestia_--and, on the other, the prescription of
sexual abstinence. Tertullian admirably illustrates this
confusion, and his treatises _De Pudicitia_ and _De Cultu
Feminarum_ are instructive from the present point of view. In the
latter he remarks (Book II, Chapter I): "Salvation--and not of
women only, but likewise of men--consists in the exhibition,
principally, of modesty. Since we are all the temple of God,
modesty is the sacristan and priestess of that temple, who is to
suffer nothing unclean or profane to enter it, for fear that the
God who inhabits it should be offended.... Most women, either
from simple ignorance or from dissimulation, have the hardihood
so to walk as if modesty consisted only in the integrity of the
flesh, and in turning away from fornication, and there were no
need for anything else,--in dress and ornament, the studied
graces of form,--wearing in their gait the self-same appearance
as the women of the nations from whom the sense of _true_ modesty
is absent."

The earliest Christian ideal of modesty, not long maintained, is
well shown in an epistle which, there is some reason to suppose,
was written by Clement of Rome. "And if we see it to be requisite
to stand and pray for the sake of the woman, and to speak words
of exhortation and edification, we call the brethren and all the
holy sisters and maidens, likewise all the other women who are
there, with all modesty and becoming behavior, to come and feast
on the truth. And those among us who are skilled in speaking,
speak to them, and exhort them in those words which God has given
us. And then we pray, and salute one another, the men the men.
But the women and the maidens will wrap their hands in their
garments; we also, with circumspection and with all purity, our
eyes looking