it is something quite different from this when false teachers are said in the Pastoral Epistles to hinder marriage.[1] Procreation as such was considered sin, and the cause of death's domination. Christ came to break away from it.[2] On the other hand, we have the idealizing of Christian motherhood[3]; woman may fall into sin, but shall be saved through child-bearing. Sexual impulse is a foul frenzy, something devilish[4]; stories of the lust of the devil and his companions after beautiful women make up the gnostic romances. The horribleness and insatiableness of the sensual passions are illustrated by all sorts of terrible tales.[5] It may indeed have happened, as the Acts of Thomas report, that bride and bridegroom from the very marriage-day renounced wedlock, and man and wife separated from one another; in particular, the continually recurring narratives of a converted wife avoiding common life with her unbelieving husband seem to be taken from life. We have the express witness, not only of Christian apologists, but also of the heathen physician Galen, that among the Christians many women and men abstained all their life from the intercourse of sex. It is not possible for us to estimate the actual spread of this kind of absolute renunciation.[6]
On the one hand the women are little thought of. In the Clementine homilies (3:22) it is expressly declared that the nature of woman is much inferior to that of man. Women, except the mother of Clement, play almost no rôle in this romance.[7] Professor Donaldson[8] shows the error of supposing that Christianity raised the
