_secular
principles in favor of justice for wives_, and _ecclesiastical
principles against it_, "but the Canon Law nearly everywhere prevailed.
The systems which are _least indulgent_ to married women are invariably
those which have followed the _Canon Law exclusively_.... It enforced
the complete legal subjection of wives."

Lecky says: "Fierce invectives against the sex form a conspicuous and
grotesque portion of the writings of the Fathers. Woman was represented
as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be
ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman.... Women were even
forbidden, in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to
receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially
subordinate position was continually maintained. This teaching in part
determined the principles of legislation concerning the sex.* The
Pagan laws during the empire had been continually _repealing the old
disabilities_ of women, and the legislative movement in their favor
continued with unabated force from Constantine to Justinian, and
appeared also in some of the early laws of the barbarians. _But in the
whole feudal [Christian] legislation women were placed in a much lower
legal position than in the Pagan empire_."

* See Appendix J.

And he adds that the French revolutionists (the infidel party)
established better laws for women, "and initiated a great reformation of
both law and opinion, _which sooner or later must traverse the world_."
And these reformations, being in Christendom, will be calmly claimed in
the future, as in the present, as due to the beneficent influence of the
Church. The Church always belongs to the conservative party, but after a
good thing is established in despite of her, she says: "Just see what I
have done! 'See what a good boy am I!"'

Not many years ago a few great-souled men who were "heretics" got a
glimpse of a principle which has electrified the world. They said that
individual liberty is a universal right; they maintained that humanity
is a unit, with interests and aims indivisible, and that liberty to use
to the utmost advantage all natural abilities cannot be denied one-half
of the race without crippling both. A few even went so far as to suggest
that the assumption of the inferiority of women, and the imposition
of disabilities upon them, under the claim of divine authority, is the
greatest crime in the great calendar of crime for which the Church h