in the marital
relation. The women of Scandinavia were regarded with respect, and
marriage was held as sacred by both men and women. These old
Berserkers reverenced their Alruna, or Holy Women, on earth, and
worshiped goddesses in heaven.

All Pagandom recognized a female priesthood, some making their
national safety to depend upon them, like Rome; sybils wrote the Books
of Fate, and oracles where women presided were consulted by many
nations. The proof of woman's also taking part in the offices of the
Christian Church at an early date is to be found in the very
restrictions which were at a later period placed upon her. The Council
of Laodicea, A.D. 365, in its eleventh canon[179] forbade the
ordination of women to the ministry, and by its forty-fourth canon
prohibited them from entering into the altar.

The Council of Orleans, A.D. 511, consisting of twenty-six bishops and
priests, promulgated a canon declaring that on account of their
frailty, women must be excluded from the deaconship.

Nearly five hundred years later than the Council of Laodicea, we find
the Council of Paris (A.D. 824) bitterly complaining that women serve
at the altar, and even give to the people the body and blood of Jesus
Christ. The Council of Aix-la-Chapelle, only eight years previously,
had forbidden abbesses from taking upon themselves any priestly
function. Through these canons we have the negative proof that for
many hundred years women preached, baptized,[180] administered the
sacrament, and filled various offices of the Church, and that men took
it upon themselves to forbid them from such functions through
prohibitory canons.

A curious old black-letter volume published in London in 1632,
entitled "The Lawes and Resolutions of Women's Rights," says, "the
reason why women have no control in Parliament, why they make no laws,
consent to none, abrogate none, is their Original Sin."

This doctrine of her original sin lies at the base of the religious
and political disqualifications of woman. Christianity, through this
doctrine, has been interpreted as sustaining man's rights alone. The
offices held by her during the apostolic age, she has been gradually
deprived of through ecclesiastical enactments. To Augustine, whose
early life was spent in company with the most degraded of woman-kind,
is Christianity indebted for the full development of the doctrine of
Original Sin, which, although to be found in the religious systems of
several anc