Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/95

Rh anarchy in the mores, which are the everyday guides of men as to what they ought to do. On the one side we find asceticism and extreme rigor and then by the side of it, in the Christian church, extravagant license and grotesque doctrine. What element conquered, and why, it seems impossible to say. The society of western Europe emerged from the period of decay and rejuvenation in the twelfth century with some wild passions and dogmas of commanding force. Overpopulation produced social pressure and distress with the inevitable tragedy in human affairs. The other world was figured by unrestrained imagination and religion went back to primitive daimonism.

Out of this period came the canon law. "Of all civil institutions, marriage is the one which the canon law most carefully regulated, and this is the idea from which all its prescriptions were derived; viz., marriage is a necessary evil which must be tolerated, but the practice of which must be restrained." The doctrine of this law is that "woman was not made in the image of God. Hence it appears that women are subordinated to men, and that the law meant them to be almost servants in the household." From this starting-point the law went on rationally, although it contained two inconsistent ideas, the merit of wedlock and the merit of celibacy. The product of such inconsistency was necessarily base. Some parts of the literary record which remain to us would lead us to believe that the whole society was brutal and vicious, but when we think of the thousands of families who died without ever making a mark on the record we must believe that domestic virtue and happiness were usual and characteristic of the society. The best proof of this is presented by the efforts at reform