"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 deserter 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."

Clement of Alexandria supplemented this verdict with one as bitter, and
Cyprian and the rest echoed the general anathema. As marriage grew thus
more and more degraded, the number of the women in the world steadily
increased, and posterity in like ratio deteriorated. The summary of
Principal Donaldson, in the article already referred to, is the keynote
to the whole situation.

"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 people 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 virtue, left no children."

Sir Henry Maine comes to the same conclusion, and deplores the fact of
the loss of liberty for women, adding: "The prevalent state of religious
sentiment may explain why it is that modern jurisprudence, forged in the
furnace of barbarian conquest, and formed by the fusion of Roman
jurisprudence with patriarchal usage, has absorbed among its rudiments