upon the majority of her son came under his wardship. The meaning of this was that she might never be allowed to go by herself, to rule her house and children, or to rule herself. Generally she might not dispose of her property by will; sometimes of not more than a bushel of barley. By all these regulations man showed that he could not trust her.

But when we look at her in marriage, we look at her in her highest position. Except when so considered the degradation was incomparably worse. Diminished as was her honour as wife and mother, all her honour lay in these two characters. Outside of them, that is, as a human being, she had none. Besides, the two great evils of human life, idolatry and slavery, had fallen with crushing weight upon her. Wherever there were male and female deities presiding over the propagation of the human race, and wherever there were licentious deities personifying human lusts, there the purity of woman was sacrificed as a religious offering. Wherever, again, slavery existed, and it was everywhere, this same virtue was in the hand of her master.

If we take, therefore, the condition of woman over the earth, at the best and under its fairest aspect, it might be expressed, with the utmost severity of philosophic truth, in those prophetic words: "I will multiply thy sorrows in thy conceptions; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children; and thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall

U

have dominion over thee." So far, the gentle subordination under a lawful headship had as a penalty been altered to a severe rule. But there was far more than this. Human sin had further converted it into a servile subjection, a pitiless tyranny. Not only did the shadow of Eve rest on all her daughters, so that they might not go alone, and could not be trusted, since the fatal day of the first deceit; but to the divine sentence the hand of man had superadded such severity of degradation, that the penance seemed turned into a curse.

Yet her degradation involved that of her children, nor could man humiliate woman without proportionably desecrating his home, the seat of his tenderest and strongest affections. The dishonouring of woman, the depreciation of marriage, the avoidance of its obligations and of supporting children, out of selfishness and moral corruption, to which a series of hideous crimes ministered, the facility of divorce and remarriage, unnatural lusts, open shamelessness of life, and the degrading numerous classes of men to be the despised instruments of voluptuousness, these moral abominations, says the historian,† hung together, ruled far and wide, desolated whole provinces. For a thousand years at least, civilisation had been advancing with an ever unbroken tide in the East, the West, and the South. There had intervened no assault of dark

*Genesis iii. 16.

Döllinger, Christenthum und Kirche, p. 384.

ness from without, no barbarism had burst in to break its continuity. The three great empires of Assyria, Persia, and Macedonia, had yielded up their stores of intellectual and material wealth unimpaired to the mightier Roman. All the arts which adorn life, and all which utilise it, had preserved their inventions for that majestic union of realms and races which the wise administrator Augustus in a rule of fifty years was welding cautiously into a world-wide dominion. He himself among all men who have wielded power may be said to personify civilisation. If in nothing else he had genius, his sagacity in gauging the spirit of the time, in measuring the power of wealth and the bond of prosperity as a hostage for the tranquil submission of men, amounts to this faculty. And when, in his later years, having secured personal supremacy, he looked round him and examined society, he acknowledged that its primary basis was fearfully shaken, and endeavoured at least to restore its solidity. Greek and Roman life had been founded on the sanctity of marriage and the careful rearing of children, and now at the highest point of civilisation men hated the bond of marriage and cast away from them the burden of children. The very richest and noblest classes were dying out for want of heirs. No love of wife or children was so attractive to the Roman senator, knight, or freedman, as the humble deference, the perpetual court, paid to a childless rich old man. How was the emperor to restore

purity and tenderness to the domestic affections? With infinite labour, against the wish of the higher classes, he caused laws to be passed fining the profligate celibacy of the times, rewarding and honouring marriage when accompanied with children, punishing adultery as a civil crime. These in his mature age and ripeness of judgment as a ruler were the acts of one who in his youth had torn Livia, just about to become a mother, from her husband, and in his middle age carried dishonour into numberless Roman households, his acts as the guardian of civilisation, the repairer of society. For how else could he deal with society but rudely and externally and with material force? How could he touch the secret springs of moral action? How could he neutralise the poison of a slavery which infected every vein of Roman life? If he ruled by making wealth secure, how could he lessen and regulate the homage paid to it by the sacrifice of domestic ties? His laws prove that he saw the greatness of the danger, and their ill success attests his impotence to meet it. But the example of the imperial house was more persuasive than law: his own acts bore fruit in his family; the taint breaks out in his own blood, and his only child, beautiful, accomplished, intellectual, once the cynosure of Roman society, calls down at length from him the bitter wish that he had never been a parent, is denounced by name to the Senate as an ignominy to her sex, is banished by her father in dishonour to a barren rock, where

at last she dies by her husband's judgment, yet had lived long enough to be Agrippina's ancestress and Messalina's precursor.

Vain, no doubt, was the attempt to restore the chastity and honour of woman, the sanctity of marriage, the love of offspring, the gentle sweet rule of home, by penal laws. But what was Augustus to do? The evil was instant and universal, striking at once every individual family and the whole empire in the first springs of life. Let us put ourselves in his place, and take a sketch of his resources.

Now the Greek mind stood before him, representing human reason in all its force. There a matchless language, which, compared with the rough railroad iron of our English idiom, seems like purest gold, fit to enchase the diamond and ruby, served to give adequate expression to a philosophic intellect, ever ceaselessly discussing all the problems of moral and social life. But what was the tangible result after these four centuries of incessant thought? What deposit had human reason stored up and presented to the accomplished ruler and guardian of society? The philosophers in their lives had been the vilest of men. Their names, far from being associated with honour to women or reverence to children, were connected with the most depraved excesses of immorality. A careful father kept his son specially from contact with philosophers. In fact, with all their genius, in the enjoyment of unbroken peace, wealth, and