Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/91

Rh status of women. "It is rather a formulation due to dogmatic than historical interests to assert that the worth of women came to recognition first in Christianity and in Christianity from the very beginning."

Renan says that Christianity, in the second century of the Christian era, "gave complete satisfaction to just those needs of imagination and heart which then tormented the populations" around the Mediterranean. It offered a person and an ideal, and made no such demand on credulity as the old mythologies which had now lost their sense. It joined stoicism in hostility to idols and bloody sacrifices, and the faith in Jesus superseded ritual. Renan thinks it a wonder that Christianity did not sooner win control, but at Rome all the civil maxims were against it. The latest scholars also recognize the strong rivalry between Christianity and Mithraism.

Tertullian (born 160 A.D.) was an extremist among Christian ascetics, but he was one of the ablest and most influential men of his time. Addressing womeni he says : "Woman, thou shouldst always be dressed in mourning and in rags, and shouldst not offer to the eyes anything but a penitent drowned in tears and thus shouldst thou pay ransom for thy fault in bringing the human race to ruin! Woman, thou art the gate by which the demon enters! It was thou who corruptedst him whom Satan did not dare to attack in face [man]. It is on thy account that Jesus Christ died." It was the doctrine of the church fathers who lived about 400 A.D. that marriage is a consequence of original sin, and that, but for the first sin, God would have provided otherwise for the maintenance of the human species. "Let us cut up by