after the Word had brought in virginity, He did not altogether abolish the generation of children; for though the moon may be greater than the stars, the light of the other stars is not destroyed by the moonlight." There thus arose the gradation of virgins, widows, and wives. Tertullian speaks of wives as women of the second degree of modesty who have fallen into wedlock.

The current of thought which I have exhibited displays itself, first of all, in the condemnation of second marriages. The Apostle Paul permitted these, and the Church could not forbid them. In the Pastor of Hermas they are not condemned, but Athenagoras raises his voice against them. "He who deprives himself," he says, "of his first wife, even though she be dead, is a cloaked adulterer. The argument used against them was that God made husband and wife one flesh, and one flesh they remained, even after the death of one of them. If they were one flesh, how could a second woman be added to them? She could not become one flesh. Tertullian, diverging from the Catholic to the Montanistic faith, maintained that a second marriage was equal to a marriage with two wives at one time, and therefore forbidden. But whatever their arguments were, at the root of the opinion lay the ascetic tendency of thought. This is seen in Tertullian, who wrote a treatise addressed to his wife, admonishing her not to marry again if he died first. In speaking of the resurrection he says to her: "There will at that day be no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us ;" and in another treatise he remarks: Let us ponder over our consciousness itself to see how different a man feels himself when he chances to be deprived of his wife. He savors spiritually."

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Tertullian, for his age, is exceptional in the strength of his denunciations, and the Church so far adhered to the Apostolic permission as to allow layinen to marry twice. This antagonism to marriage had a great influence on family life. It is strange how seldom children are mentioned in the Christian writings of the second and third centuries. Almost nothing is said of their training; no efforts are mentioned as being made for their instruction. The Christians had come to the belief that the world had enough of children, and was fully stocked, and that every birth was a

cause of sorrow and not of joy. One writer interprets the wail of the infant as he enters the world thus: "Why, O mother, didst thou bring me forth to this life, in which prolongation of life is progress to death? Why hast thou brought me into this troubled world, in which, on being born, swaddling bands are my first experience? Why hast thou delivered me to such a life as this, in which a pitiable youth wastes away before old age, and old age is shunned as under the doom of death? Dreadful, O mother, is the course of life which has death as the goal of the runner. Bitter is the road of life we travel, with the grave as the wayfarer's inn.' Tertullian says: "Further reasons

Το

for marriage which inen allege for themselves arise from anxiety for posterity, and the bitter, bitter pleasure of children. us this is idle. For why should we be eager to bear children, whom, when we have them, we desire to send before us to glory (in respect, I mean, of the distresses that are now imminent); desirous as we are ourselves to be taken out of this most wicked world and received into the Lord's presence." He describes children as burdens which are to us most of all unsuitable, as being perilous to faith.' again:

And

66 Let the well known burdensomeness of children, especially in our case, suffice to counsel widowhood-children whom men are compelled by laws to have, because no wise man would ever willingly have desired sons. And he exclaims, "A Christian forsooth will seek heirs, disinherited as he is from the entire world."

Such ideas had necessarily a very powerful effect on the place and position of woman and on the conception of her nature. What was that effect? I will attempt to describe it in a few words. I may define man to be a male human being, and woman to be a female human being. They are both human beings, both gifted with reason and conscience, both responsible for their actions, both entitled to the freedom essential to this responsibility, and both capable of the noblest thoughts and deeds. As human beings they are on an equality as to their powers, the differences in individuals resulting from the surroundings and circumstances of spiritual growth. But man is a male and woman is a female, and this distinction exists in Nature for the continuance of the race. Now what the early Christians did was to strike the

male out of the definition of man and human being out of the definition of woman. Man was a human being made for the highest and noblest purposes; woman was a female made to serve only one. She was on the earth to inflame the heart of man with every evil passion. She was a fireship continually striving to get alongside the male man-of-war to blow him up into pieces. This is the way in which Tertul. lian addresses women : 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 that forbidden tree; you are the first déserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die." And the gentle Clement of Alexandria hits her hard when he says: "Nothing disgraceful is proper for man, who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, to whom it brings shaine even to reflect of what nature she is." Gregory Thaumaturgus asserts: Moreover, among all women I sought for chastity proper to them, and I found it in none. And veri ly, a person may find one man chaste among a thousand, but a woman never. The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs makes a similar statement, and adds: "By means of their adornment they deceive first the minds of men, and they instil poison by the glance of their eye, and then they take them captive by their doings," and therefore men should guard their senses against every woman." "The angel of God showed me," it says in another passage, "that forever do women bear rule over king and beggar alike; and from the king they take away his glory, and from the valiant man his strength, and from the beggar even that little which is the stay of his poverty." How, then, were men to treat this frivolous, dress-loving, lust-inspiring creature? Surely the best plan was to shut her up. Her clear duty was to stay at home, and not let herself be seen anywhere. And this duty the Christian writers impress upon her again and again. She is not to go to banquets, where her looks are sure to create evil thoughts in the minds of men who are drinking largely of wine. She is not to

go to marriage feasts, where the talk and the songs may border on licentiousness. Of course she is not to wander about the streets in search of sights, nor to frequent the theatre, nor the public baths, nor the spectacles. Does she want exercise ! Clement of Alexandria prescribes for her: "She is to exercise herself in spinning and weaving, and superintending the cooking, if necessary."

He adds: Women are with their own hand to fetch from the store what we require; and it is no disgrace for them to apply themselves to the mill. Nor is it a reproach to a wifehousekeeper and helpmeet-to occupy herself in cooking, so that it may be palatable to her husband. And if she shake up the couch, reach drink to her husband when thirsty, set food on the table as neatly as possible, and so give herself exercise tending to sound health, the Instructor will approve of a woman like this." During the only occasions on which she may quit her own house, namely, when visiting the sick or going to church, she must be veiled-not a portion of her face must be seen, and when she is in church she must remain covered. These are the injunctions which occur repeatedly in the Christian writers. Voices were raised against this ascetic treatment, among them that of one Bishop of Rome, but they were drowned in the current of invectives that were uirected against woman's love of dress and finery and show. These invectives and discussions on the dress of women and veiling of virgins are numerous. Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, Commodian, and the Apostolic Constitutions deal minutely with the subject-all on the idea that woman is a most inflammatory being. Is a woman beautiful? "Natural grace, says Tertullian, "must be obliterated by concealment and negligence, as being dangerous to the glances of the beholder's eyes.' Then she must clothe herself from head to foot. In speaking of her going to church, Clement of Alexandria says: Let her be entirely covered, unless she happen to be at home. For that style of dress is grave and protects from being gazed at. And she will never fall who puts before her face modesty and her shawl; nor will she invite another to fall into sin by uncovering her face. For this is the wish of the Word, since it is becoming for her to pray veiled."

son.

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Then she must not adorn herself in any way. "It is not right in God," says Commodian, that a faithful Christian woman should be adorned." The purpose of clothing is to defend the body against excess of cold and intensity of heat, and the simplest materials are sufficient for this purpose. The Christian woman must therefore bid farewell to embroidery of gold and Indian silks; she is strictly forbidden to wear gold ornaments of any kind, and she is to avoid all dyed clothes, as the dye is unnecessary for health, afflicts greedy eyes, and moreover it is false; for God would have made the sheep purple, if He had wished the woollen clothes to be purple. Strong condemnation is uttered against any attempt to trick out the per"Head dresses," says Clement of Alexandria, "and varieties of headdresses, and elaborate braidings, and in finite modes of dressing the hair, and costly mirrors in which they arrange their costume, are characteristic of women who have lost all shame." And if the adornment of the natural body is thus condemned, the endless variety of artificial contrivances employed by the Roman and Greek ladies is necessarily considered abominable. In regard to the hair, Cyprian addresses virgins thus: "Are sincerity and truth preserved when what is sincere is polluted by adulterous colors, and what is true is changed into a lie by the deceitfu! dyes of medicaments? Your Lord says, Thou canst not make one hair black or white,' and you in order to overcome the word of your Lord, will be more mighty than He, and stain your hair with a daring endeavor, and with profane contempt; with evil presage of the future, make a beginning to yourself already of flamecolored hair." And he uses equally strong expressions in regard to tinting the eyes. "You cannot see God, since your eyes are not those which God made, but those which the devil has spoiled. You have fol lowed him, you have imitated the red and painted eyes of the serpent. As you are adorned in the fashion of your enemy, with him also you shall burn by and by.' And he thus sums up the exhortations which he addresses to the virgins: "Let your countenance remain in you incorrupt, your neck unadorned, your figure simple : let not wounds be made in your ears, nor let the precious chain of bracelets and necklaces circle your arms or your neck; let your feet be free from golden bands,

your hair stained with no dye, your eyes worthy of beholding God." Notwithstanding all the exhortations which were showered upon the wives and virgins, the Christian writings prove that human nature often had its own way. Both Clement and Cyprian tell dreadful stories of some of the virgins, and in the treatise of Cyprian, from which I have quoted, there are lamentations like this: "For this reason, therefore, the Church frequently mourns over her virgins; hence she groans at their scandalous and detestable stories; hence the flower of her virgins is extinguished, the honor and modesty of continency are injured, and all its glory and dignity are profaned." At the same time we ought to do justice to the self-control and perseverance with which many pursued their high ideal-for the ideal was a high one, as the purity aimed at was not corporeal merely, but extended over the whole range of life. "For it would be ridiculous?" says one of the virgins in Methodius, 66 to preserve the lustful members pure, but not the tongue, or to preserve the tongue, but neither the eyesight, the ears nor the hands, or lastly to preserve these pure but not the mind, defiling it with pride and anger."

Such then was the position of women among the early Christians. We have said nothing of Christian legislation, for we have been treating of a period when the legislation was carried on entirely by pagans. But we ought to mention two facts, or two phases of one fact which had a great effect on the destinies of mankind, but especially of woman, and which have found their way into modern legislation. The Roman father had absolute power of life and of death over his children in the primitive times of Rome. Gradually this power slackened, but he retained to the end of heathendom the right to expose his children, and pagan sentiment supported him in such conduct. The infants on their birth might be drowned or exposed to the cold air, or starved or abandoned to wild beasts. In this way deformed and weakly children were left to perish. A very large number of the children who were thus disposed of were girls. Christianity condemned this practice from the first as murder.

It went further. It was a question with the ancients at what time the human fœtus became a living being, and many maintained that the soul came to it only when it was born. Tertullian has dis

cussed this subject fully in his Treatise on the Soul. He says: This view [that the fœtus has no soul] is entertained by the Stoics, along with Aenesidemus, and occasionally by Plato himself, when he tells us that the soul, being quite a separate formation, originating elsewhere and externally to the womb, is inhaled when the new-born infant first draws breath. This was the opinion prevalent among all classes of the Pagan world, and the practice was universal and avowed of killing the fœtus by drugs. But Christianity took the other view, that the soul came at the earliest stage, and maintained that it was equally sinful" to take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth." Accordingly the heathen practice was forbidden by the Church. The prohibition made its appearance at an early period in Christianity, for it occurs in the Epistle of Barnabas, written about the beginning of the second century, and we are told that Peter says in the Apocalypse (an apocryphal writing probably of early date) "that abortive infants shall share the better fate that these are committed to a guardian angel, so that, on receiving knowledge, they may obtain the better abode, having had the same experiences which they would have had, had they been in the body."

This view of the Christians in regard to infanticide would tend largely to increase the number of women in the world, as infant girls were the most frequent victims of the practice. The ascetic tendency, on the other hand, repressed the growth of population. It had also a deteriorating effect on posterity. The less spiritual classes of the people, the laymen, being taught that marriage might be licentious and that it implied an inferior state of sanctity, were rather inclined to neglect matrimony for more loose connections,

and it was these persons alone that then peopled the world. It was the survival of the unfittest. The noble men and women, on the other hand, who were dominated by the loftiest aspirations and exhibited the greatest temperance, self-control and vir tue, left no children. During this period there is a striking absence of home life in the history of Christians. No son succeeds his father, no wife comforts the wearied student, no daughter soothes the sorrow of the aged bishop. Perhaps this absence of domestic affection, this deficiency in healthy and vigorous offspring, this homelessness, may account in some degree for the striking features of the next century, and especially the prevalent hardness of heart. Then men disputed with the utmost bitterness and ferocity about minute points of doctrine which are now incomprehensible almost to every one, and matters of absolute indifference to this generation, and they pronounced sentence of eternal damnation without the slightest compunction on all who differed from them. Then treatises were written to show why every heretic should be put to death in this life and tortured eternally in the life to come. And there is scarcely a champion of the faith orthodox or heterodox who was not accused of fearful crimes. If a lesson is to be drawn it surely is that, as with individuals there is no place like home, so with a State, there is no institution like home; that a community can be great only where there are happy, harmonious and virtuous homes, and that homes cannot be happy and harmonious and virtuous unless woman is accorded a worthy place in these homes, with freedom of action, with a consciousness of responsibility, and with the right, unfettered by circumstance or prejudice, to develop all that is best and noblest in her to the utmost perfection.- Contemporary Review.

-Academy.

THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE.

THE HANSA TOWNS. By Helen Zimmern. ("The Story of the Nations Series.") New

York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

The Hanseatic League, so called from the old German word hansa, meaning union, was one of the most extraordinary products of the Middle Ages. Like the "Monastery" system in religion, it served a most important part in the early period of medieval civilization, but it finally outlived the necessities which brought it into being. What had been salutary and useful became with long prosperity oppressive and rapacious. It still lives in its remote consequences, however, as we see such cities as Hamburg, Lubeck, and Bremen constitut. ing States in the German Empire, and represented as such in the German Parliament. Society in Northern Europe in the early part of the thirteenth century was in a chaotic state, the strong preying on the weak without mercy, Commerce where it existed was bled at every pore, not only by kings and emperors, but by every petty tyrant and robber baron according to his power. The maritime cities of Germany were among the chief sufferers, and their rich burghers were made to yield heavy tithes to the titled highwaymen of the period, both on land and sea. Venice and Genoa, the mas. ters of Eastern commerce, made the cities of the Elbe their northern depots, and thus the rich Baltic trade yielded fat tolls to that kind of piracy which, under the name of protection, laid its hands on the throat of traffic. Swarms of pirates also infested the ocean, and the merchant was obliged to transact his business under the most serious drawbacks. In 1239 three cities, of which Hamburg was chief, formed an alliance to keep the mouth of the Elbe and the adjacent waters free from marauders. This was the beginning of the Hanseatic League. Other cities asked admission very shortly with their quota of money, soldiers, and armed ships, and the progress of the league was so rapid that after 1260 the affairs of this commercial union were transacted by a triennial diet. The capitals of the league were at Hamburg, Lubeck, and Cologne, Lubeck being the chief centre, though the diet meetings were sometimes held in other cities. At the height of power to which this remark. able union attained, there were eighty-four cities in the league. The number was vari.

able, as at each decennial meeting a city could retire from the league if it wished. It was then, too, that fresh candidates could be admitted. Beside the ordinary members of the league, the richest commercial cities of Europe were affiliated by close ties, such centres as London, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Bruges, Dunkirk, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Cadiz, Lisbon, Naples, Venice, and Genoa. edicts of the Hanseatic diet were made obligatory on the syndics of the different league cities, and were like the laws of the Medes and Persians. In all matters, aside from purely local questions, these decisions were despotic.

The

At the outset the declared objects of the league were the protection and expansion of trade, the prevention of piracy and shipwreck, the increase of agricultural products, fisheries, mines and manufactures, and self-defence against the aggression of adjoining States. Four great factories or depots were established at London, Bruges, Novgorod, and Bergen, and from these centres the league soon threatened to monopolize not only the commerce of Europe, but of the world. The foreign factories were conducted with the rigidity of monastic establishments, and the servants of the league had all the fierce enthusiasm of ascetics and fanatics in pushing the interests of Hansard trade. The unscrupulous course of the league, and the single-eyed purpose with which it devised and executed its plans, finally enabled the Hansa towns to control the export and import commerce of the principal countries of Europe, to the exclusion of the domestic traders. The jealousies aroused were necessarily violent, and the extraordinary privileges which had been accorded to the Hansa factories and merchants were in many cases revoked. For one hundred and fifty years the league exercised extraordinary power and influence, and nearly engrossed the carrying trade of the world, which it clutched and held with the haughtiness of a sovereign power. The arrogance of the Hanseatic merchants and officials equalled that of throned monarchs. The objects which now animated the league were far different from those which first justified its being. The vast increase of power and wealth developed a brutal selfishness, which laughed at all scruple. The Hanseatic League at last proclaimed its purpose to be to monopolize foreign commerce to the exclusion of all competitors, and to maintain