The great school of German jurists[1]. teach that ownership increases both physical and moral capacity, and that as owner, actual or possible, man is a more capable and worthy being than he would otherwise be. Inasmuch as under canon law woman was debarred from giving testimony in courts of law, sisters were prohibited from taking an inheritance with brothers, and wives were deprived of property rights, it is entirely justifiable to say ecclesiastical law injured civilization by its destruction of the property rights of women.[2]
The worst features of canon law, as Blackstone frankly admits, are those touching upon the rights of woman. These features have been made permanent to this day by the power the Church gained over common law,[3]between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, since which period the complete inferiority and subordination of the female sex has been as fully maintained by the State as by the Church. The influence of canon law upon the criminal codes of England and America has but recently attracted the attention of legal minds. Wharton, whose "Criminal Law" has for years been a standard work, did not examine their relation until his seventh edition, in which he gave a copious array of authors, English, German, and Latin, from whom he deduced proof that the criminal codes of these two countries are pre-eminently based upon ecclesiastical law.
Canon law gave to the husband the power of compelling the wife's return if, for any cause, she left him. She was then at once in the position of an outlaw, branded as a run-away who had left her master's service, a wife who had left "bed and board" without consent, and whom all persons were forbidden "to harbor" or shelter "under penalty of the law." The absconding wife was in the position of an excommunicate from the Catholic Church, or of a woman
- ↑ *Science of Law
- ↑ Gerard say the doctrines of the Canon Law most favorable to the power of the clergy, are founded on ignorance, or supported by fraud and forgery.
- ↑ Whoever wishes to gain insight into that great institution, Canon Law, can do so most effectively by studying Common Law, in regard to woman.—Blackstone.. I have arrived at conclusions which I keep to myself as yet, and only utter as Greek φωναντα, συνετοτσι, the principle of which is that there will never be a good world for woman till the last monk, and therewith the last remnant of the monastic idea of, and legislation for, woman, i.e., the Canon Law, is civilized off the face of the earth. Meanwhile all the most pure and high-minded women in England and in Europe, have been brought up under the shadow of the Canon Law, and have accepted it with the usual divine self-sacrifice, as their destiny by law of God and nature, and consider their own womanhood outraged when it, their tyrant, is meddled with.—Charles Kingsley, Life and Letters. Letter to John Stuart Mill, of June 17, 1849.
