elation was
regarded by many priests with holy horror as a continuance of the evil
which first brought sin into the world. It was declared that God would
have found some method of populating the world outside of marriage,
and that condition was looked upon as one of peculiar temptation and
trial. Another class taught its necessity, though in it woman was
under complete subordination to man. These views can be traced to the
early fathers; through clerical contempt of marriage, the conditions
of celibacy and virginity were regarded as those of highest virtue.
Jerome respected marriage as chiefly valuable in that it gave virgins
to the Church, while Augustine, although he admitted the possibility
of salvation to the married, yet spoke of a mother and daughter in
heaven, the mother shining as a dim star, the daughter as one of the
first magnitude.

In the "Apostolic Constitutions," held by the Episcopal Church as
regulations established by the apostles themselves, and which are
believed by many to be among the earliest Christian records, there are
elaborate directions for the places of all who attend church, the
unmarried being most honored. The virgins and widows and elder women
stood, or sat first of all. The Emperor Honorius banished Jovinius for
asserting the possibility of a man being saved who lived with his
wife, even though he obeyed all the ordinances of the Church and lived
a good life.

St. Chrysostom, whose prayer is repeated at every Sunday morning
service of the Episcopal church, described woman as "a necessary evil,
a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly
fascination, and a painted ill." The doctrine of priestly celibacy
which was early taught, though not thoroughly enforced until the
eleventh century, and the general tenor of the Church against
marriage, together with its teaching woman's greater sinfulness, were
the great causes of undermining the morals of the Christian world for
fifteen hundred years. With these doctrines was also taught the duty
of woman to sacrifice herself in every way to man. The loss of
chastity in a woman was held as a light sin in comparison to the
degradation that marriage would bring upon the priesthood, and young
girls ruined by some candidate or priest, considered themselves as
doing God service by refusing a marriage that would cause the
expulsion of their lovers from this order. With woman's so-called
divine self-sacrifice, Heloise chose to r