which
led the Empire to its destruction. Upon the excesses, bordering on
insanity, followed the other extreme,--the most rigid abstinence. As
excess, in former days, now asceticism assumed religious forms. A
dream-land-fanaticism made propaganda for it. The unbounded gluttony and
luxury of the ruling classes stood in glaring contrast with the want and
misery of the millions upon millions that conquering Rome dragged, from
all the then known countries of the world, into Italy and slavery. Among
these were also numberless women, who, separated from their domestic
hearths, from their parents or their husbands, and torn from their
children, felt their misery most keenly, and yearned for deliverance. A
large number of Roman women, disgusted at that which happened all around
them, found themselves in similar frame of mind; any change in their
condition seemed to them a relief. A deep longing for a change, for
deliverance, took possession of extensive social layers;--and the
deliverer seemed to approach. The conquest of Jerusalem and of the
Jewish kingdom by the Romans had for its consequence the destruction of
all national independence, and begot among the ascetic sects of that
country, dreamers, who announced the birth of a new kingdom, that was to
bring freedom and happiness to all.

Christ came, and Christianity arose. It embodied the opposition to the
bestial materialism that reigned among the great and the rich of the
Roman Empire; it represented the revolt against the contempt for and
oppression of the masses. But originating in Judaism, which knew woman
only as a being bereft of all rights, and biased by the Biblical
conception which saw in her the source of all evil, Christianity
preached contempt for woman. It also preached abstinence, the
mortification of the flesh, then so sinful, and it pointed with its
ambiguous phrases to a prospective kingdom, which some interpreted as of
heaven, others as of earth, and which was to bring freedom and justice
to all. With these doctrines it found fertile ground in the submerged
bottom of the Roman Empire. Woman, hoping, along with all the miserable,
for freedom and deliverance from her condition, joined readily and
zealously. Down to our own days, never yet was a great and important
movement achieved in the world without women also having been
conspicuously active as combatants and martyrs. Those who praise
Christianity as a great achievement of civilization should not forget