vate life. Unfortunately, lying in the interests of
piety was justified by Luther, while the Jesuits made a soul-rotting
art of equivocation.

[Sidenote: Unchastity]

The standard of sexual purity was disturbed by a reaction against the
asceticism of the Middle Ages. Luther proclaimed that chastity was
impossible, while the humanists gloried in the flesh. Public opinion
was not scandalized by prostitution; learned men occasionally debated
whether fornication was a sin, and the Italians now began to call a
harlot a "courteous woman" [Sidenote: c. 1500] (courtesan) as they
called an assassin a "brave man" (bravo). Augustine had said that
harlots were remedies against worse things, and the church had not only
winked at brothels, but frequently licensed them herself. Bastardy was
no bar to hereditary right in Italy.

The Reformers tried to make a clean sweep of the "social evil." Under
Luther's direction brothels were closed in the reformed cities. When
this was done at Strassburg the women drew up a petition, stating that
they had pursued their profession not from liking but only to earn
bread, and asked for honest work. Serious attempts were made to give
it to them, or to get them husbands. At Zurich and some other cities
the brothels were left open, but were put under the supervision of an
officer who was to see that no married men frequented them. The
reformers had a strange ally in the growing fear of venereal diseases.
Other countries followed Germany in their war on the prostitute. In
London the public houses of ill fame {507} were closed in 1546, in
Paris in 1560. An edict of July 23, 1566 commanded all prostitutes to
leave Rome, but when 25,000 persons, including the women and their
dependents, left the city, the loss of public revenue induced the pope
to allow them to return on August 17 of the same year.

[Sidenote: Polygamy]

One of the striking aberrations of the sixteenth century, as it seems
to us, was the persistent advocacy of polygamy as, if not desirable in
itself, at least preferable to divorce. Divorce or annulment of
marriage was not hard to obtain by people of influence, whether
Catholic or Protestant, but it was a more difficult matter than it is
in America now. In Scotland there was indeed a sort of trial marriage,
known as "handfasting," by which the parties might live together for a
year and a day and then continue as married or separate. But,
beginning with Luther, many of th