The social importance of
marriage being ignored, its functions became those of ministering to
sexual passion and the perpetuation of the race. In view of the supposed
approaching end of the world, the desirability of this last was
questioned, and in the name of purity the former was strongly denounced.
It is from these points of view that Tertullian describes children as
"burdens which are to most of us perilous as being unsuitable to faith,"
and wives as women of the second degree of modesty who had fallen into
wedlock. Jerome said that marriage was at best a sin, and all that could
be done was to excuse and purify it. Epiphanius said that the Church was
based upon virginity as upon a corner-stone. Augustine was of opinion
that celibates would shine in heaven like dazzling stars. Married people
were declared, by another authority, to be incapable of salvation. The
most powerful and most influential of writers concurred that the sexual
relation was an almost fatal obstacle to religious salvation.

Hardly any movement ever struck so hard against social well-being as
did this teaching of celibacy. Wives were encouraged to desert their
husbands, husbands to forsake their wives, children their parents.
Parents, in turn, were exhorted to devote their children to the monastic
life; and although at first children who had been so condemned were
allowed to return to the world, should they desire it, on reaching
maturity, this liberty was taken from them by the fourth Council of
Toledo in 633.[167] Some few of the Christian writers protested against
children being taught to forsake their parents in this manner, but the
general spirit of the time was in its favour.

"Children were nursed and trained to expect at every instant more than
human interferences; their young energies had ever before them examples
of asceticism, to which it was the glory, the true felicity of life, to
aspire. The thoughtful child had all his mind thus preoccupied ...
wherever there was gentleness, modesty, the timidity of young passion,
repugnance to vice, an imaginative temperament, a consciousness of
unfitness to wrestle with the rough realities of life, the way lay
invitingly open.... It lay through perils, but was made attractive by
perpetual wonders. It was awful, but in its awfulness lay its power over
the young mind. It learned to trample down that last bond which united
the child to common humanity, filial reverence; the fond and mysterious
attac