all
tendency toward her freedom among those who adopted the new religion,
and by various decretals taught her defilement through the physical
peculiarities of her being. It placed the legality of marriage under
priestly control, secured to husbands a right of divorce for causes
not freeing the wife, and so far set its ban upon this relation as to
hold single women above the wife and mother in holiness. After having
forbidden woman the priestly office, it forbade her certain benefits
to be derived therefrom, thus unjustly punishing her for an
ineligibility of its own creation; offices in the Church, learning,
and property rights, freedom of thought and action, all were held as
improper for a being secondary to man, who came into the world, not as
part of the great original plan, but as an afterthought of the
Creator.

While it took many hundred years to totally exclude woman from the
priesthood, the strict celibacy of the male clergy was during the same
period the constant effort of the Church. At first its restrictions
were confined to a single marriage with a woman who had never before
entered that relation. A Council of A.D. 347, consisting of twenty-one
bishops, forbade the ordination of those priests who had been twice
married, or who had married a widow. A Council of A.D. 395, ruled that
a bishop who had children after ordination, should be excluded from
the major orders. The Council of A.D. 444, deposed Chelidonius, Bishop
of Besancon, for having married a widow; while the Council of Orleans,
A.D. 511, consisting of thirty-two bishops, decided that any monk who
married should be expelled from the ecclesiastical order.

In the sixth century a Council was held at Macon (585), consisting of
forty-three bishops with sees, sixteen bishops without sees, and
fifteen envoys. At this Council the celebrated discussion took place
of which it has often been said, the question was whether woman had a
soul. It arose in this wise. A certain bishop insisted that woman
should not be called "homo"; but the contrary was argued by others
from the two facts that the Scriptures say that God created man, male
and female, and that Jesus Christ, son of a woman, is called the son
of man. Woman was, therefore, allowed to remain a human being in the
eyes of the clergy, even though considered a very weak and bad one.

The Church held two entirely opposing views of marriage. Inasmuch as
it taught that the fall came through marriage, this r