usband's chattel, and
marriage as a purchase. All these influences clashed and often appeared
side by side, though they could not be harmonized. The result was that the
fifteen hundred years that followed the complete conquest of Christianity
represent on the whole the most degraded condition to which the marriage
system has ever been known to fall for so long a period during the whole
course of human history.

At first indeed the beneficent influence of Rome continued in some degree
to prevail and even exhibited new developments. In the time of the
Christian Emperors freedom of divorce by mutual consent was alternately
maintained, and abolished.[318] We even find the wise and far-seeing
provision of the law enacting that a contract of the two parties never to
separate could have no legal validity. Justinian's prohibition of divorce
by consent led to much domestic unhappiness, and even crime, which appears
to be the reason why it was immediately abrogated by his successor,
Theodosius, still maintaining the late Roman tradition of the moral
equality of the sexes, allowed the wife equally with the husband to obtain
a divorce for adultery; that is a point we have not yet attained in
England to-day.

It seems to be admitted on all sides that it was largely the fatal
influence of the irruption of the barbarous Germans which degraded, when
it failed to sweep away, the noble conception of the equality of women
with men, and the dignity and freedom of marriage, slowly moulded by the
organizing genius of the Roman into a great tradition which still retains
a supreme value. The influence of Christianity had at the first no
degrading influence of this kind; for the ascetic ideal was not yet
predominant, priests married as a matter of course, and there was no
difficulty in accepting the marriage order established in the secular
world; it was even possible to add to it a new vitality and freedom. But
the Germans, with all the primitively acquisitive and combative instincts
of untamed savages, went far beyond even the early Romans in the
subjection of their wives; they allowed indeed to their unmarried girls a
large measure of indulgence and even sexual freedom,--just as the
Christians also reverenced their virgins,[319]--but the German marriage
system placed the wife, as compared to the wife of the Roman Empire, in a
condition little better than that of a domestic slave. In one form or
another, under one disguise or another, the sy