A certain part of the charge was true, too. Men had filched from her.
The theft was not a new one. If the statute of limitations could ever run in crimes against nature it might have almost ceased to be a wrong in this case, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years.
Morgan in his "Ancient Society," dealing with the question of Mütter-Recht, declares that throughout the earliest period of human existence regarding which any knowledge is attainable, descent and all rights of succession were traced through the women of the gens or clans, into which primitive man was organized. Women, as being the bearers and protectors of the young, were regarded as the natural land owners, and therefore did not leave their homes to follow the fathers of their children, lest they should lose their own possessions and rights of inheritance. Instead, the men married into the sept of their wives. The power and independence of women was lost at last through the practice of making female captives in war. These had no land and were the property of, and dependent upon the will of, their male captor. In course of time men naturally grew to prefer these subservient wives. The Arab advises his son: "It is better to have a wife with no claims of kin and no brethren near to take her part."
Women therefore began to dread capture as the greatest of evils. After the movements of vast hordes began—the marches of the race columns across the continents—with their wars of spoliation and conquest, there was no security save in physical strength, and the females yielded all claims to the men in return for protection. It was better, they thought, to be a slave at home than a slave among strangers. Still the man, while asserting physical superiority, claimed none morally. Under the pagan rule of Rome, the jurisconsults, by their theory of "Natural Law," evidently assumed the equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity. Sir Henry Maine says there came a time "when the situation of the female, married or unmarried, became one of great personal and proprietary independence; for the tendency of the later law ... was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage conferred on the husband no compensating superiority."
Among the Germanic races of the Roman period, a woman was occasionally ruler of the tribe, and the blue-eyed wife of the roving Barbarian, as well as the proud Roman matron, were held alike in high esteem for their functions as wife and mother. The priestess crowned with oak leaves, officiating at the sylvan altars of the forest, or the Vestal Virgin serving the fires of the white temples of Rome, were alike held worthy of speaking face to face with the gods and of conveying their blessings to man. It was the humble religion of Judea—which women embraced with ardour, and to which they were early and willing martyrs—that cursed them with a deadly curse. It denied woman not only mental and physical, but moral equality with man, and besmirched the very fountain and purpose of her being with a shameful stain. It made her presence in the most holy places a desecration, and for the first time regarded her feminine functions as a disgrace rather than a glory. And this although the founder of the Christian faith had set an example of reverence and tenderness for the sex in his own life, and had left his mother to be raised to a heavenly throne by his worshippers. Never from his lips had fallen a word that could give warrant for the insult offered woman by his church. He was the first of all men living to denounce the injustice of visiting upon the woman the whole penalty of a double sin, and his life was beautified with the tenderest friendships with women. But already, before a church had been fairly organized, Paul was dictating silence to women, covered heads and supreme submission to the male, and was declaring against marriage as a weakness. If a man must marry because of his weakness, he might do so, but not to marry was better.
Scorn of woman and her functions grew. Antagonism to marriage intensified. Woman by the very law of her existence was a curse and a temptation to sin. Hear Tertullian—one of the fathers of the Church—on this subject:
"Do you not know that each one of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of the forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him who the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert—that is death—the Son of God had to die!"
This is but one of a thousand similar insults by the early writers of the Church—all Patristic books bristle with them.
Lecky, comparing the Roman jurisprudence with the canon or ecclesiastical law, remarks that "the Pagan laws during the earlier centuries of the Empire were constantly repealing the disabilities of women, whereas it was the aim of the canon law to substitute enactments which should impose upon the female sex the most offensive personal restrictions and stringent subordination."
Even marriage and the production of offspring—which in the pagan world had been an honour to both sexes—was stigmatized. No priest of God might approach a woman, scarcely even look at her, and no woman was allowed to serve at God's altar. Celibacy was a virtue so great in man that none set apart for the highest duties might marry, and woman was encouraged to suppress in herself all the sweet and wholesome instincts for motherhood—an instinct upon which the race hung dependent, one for which she willingly suffered the sharp pangs of childbirth—and instead to immure herself in convents and endeavour to find solace in the spiritual ecstasies of morbid meditation.