of marriage, no description of the proper family, and no exposition of domestic virtues. Down to the time of Christ it appears that each man was free to arrange his family as he saw fit. The rich and great had more than one wife or they had concubines. The Talmud allowed each man four wives, but not more. In fact, at the birth of Christ, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, all except the rich and great had no more than one wife each, on account of the trouble and expense of having more. Yet if circumstances, such as childlessness, seemed to make it expedient, anyone might take a second wife. Therefore it became a fact of the mores, of all but the rich and great, that all practiced pair-marriage and were educated in it.
Christianity took root in the lowest free classes. It got the mores from them and in later centuries gave those mores authority and extension, and this is the origin and historical source of the Christian family. The Pharisees are credited with introducing common sense into domestic relations. They made the Sabbath an occasion of "domestic joy," bringing into increasing recognition the importance and dignity of woman as the builder and guardian of the home. They also set aside the seclusion of women at childbirth, in spite of the law.[1] A leader of the Pharisees introduced the Ketubah, or marriage document, "to protect the wife against the caprice of the husband." The Shammaites would not permit a wife to be divorced except on suspicion of adultery, but the Hillelites allowed more easy divorce, for the "welfare and peace of the home."[2] The ancient Romans practiced pure monogamy, but after they developed a rich leisure class, in the second century B.C., they developed a luxurious polygamy. The
