ine speaks of the later growth of Pagan law and of Christian
influence upon it, he says: "But the chapter of law relating to married
women was for the most part read by the light, not of Roman [or Pagan]
but of Canon [or Church] Law, _which in no one particular departs so
widely from the [improved] spirit of the secular jurisprudence as in the
view it takes of the relations created by marriage_. This was in part
inevitable, _since no society which possesses any tincture of Christian
institutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty
conferred on them by the middle Roman law_."

Women who support the clergy with one hand, and hold out the other for
the ballot; who one day express indignation at the refusal to them of
human recognition, and the next day intone the creeds, will have to
learn that there is nothing which has so successfully stood, and still
so powerfully stands, in the way of the individual liberty, human
rights, and dignity of wives, as the Church which they support.

Blackstone says: "In times of popery a great _variety_ of impediments
to marriage were made, which impediments might, however, be _bought off
with money_."

You could, for instance, buy a more distant relationship to your future
wife for so much cash down to the Church. If your inamorata were your
first cousin, you could remove her several degrees with five hundred
dollars, and make her no relation at all for a little more. Such little
sleight-of-hand performances are as nothing to a well-trained clergyman.
Slip a check into one hand, and a request to marry your aunt into the
other, let a clergyman shake them up in the coffers of the Church, and
when one comes out gold, the other will appear as a blushing bride
not even related to her own father, and not more than third cousin to
herself.

Of the claim made by the early Christian Fathers, that it was because of
the mental inferiority and incapacity of women that the more unjust and
binding laws were enacted for them, thus doing all they could to create
and intensify by law the incapacity which they asserted was imposed by
God, Maine says: "But the proprietary disabilities of married females
_stand on quite a different basis from personal incapacity_, and it is
by the tendency of their doctrines to keep alive and consolidate the
former, that the expositors of the _Canon Law have deeply injured
civilization_."

He adds that there are many evidences of a struggle between