church of which the husband was the head. Just as Christ is the head of
the Church, St. Paul repeatedly asserted, so the husband is the head of
the wife; therefore, as it was constantly argued during the Middle Ages, a
man is bound to rule his wife. St. Augustine, the most influential of
Christian Fathers, even said that a wife should be proud to consider
herself as the servant of her husband, his _ancilla_, a word that had in
it the suggestion of slave. That was the underlying assumption throughout
the Middle Ages, for the Northern Germanic peoples, having always been
accustomed to wife-purchase before their conversion, had found it quite
easy to assimilate the Christian view. Protestantism, even Puritanism with
its associations of spiritual revolt, so far from modifying the accepted
attitude, strengthened it, for they found authority for all social
organisation in the Bible, and the Bible revealed an emphatic predominance
of the Jewish husband, who possessed essential rights to which the wife
had no claim. Milton, who had the poet's sensitiveness to the loveliness
of woman, and the lonely man's feeling for the solace of her society, was
yet firmly assured of the husband's superiority over his wife. He has
indeed furnished the classical picture of it in Adam and Eve,

"He for God only, she for God in him,"

and to that God she owed "subjection," even though she might qualify it
by "sweet reluctant amorous delay." This was completely in harmony with
the legal position of the wife. As a subject she was naturally in
subjection; she owed her husband the same loyalty as a subject owes the
sovereign; her disloyalty to him was termed a minor form of treason; if
she murdered him the crime was legally worse than murder and she rendered
herself liable to be burnt.

We see that all the influences on our civilisation, religious and secular,