St. Augustine asked why women were born at all, and warned young men to beware of the Eve in every woman. St. Jerome described woman as the root of all evil; and Luther, although he swept away the preposterous doc trine that celibacy is one of the highest moral virtues, advocated the withholding of culture from women on the ground that no gown worse becomes a woman than the desire to be wise. Under a statute of Henry VIII. Women and others of low condition were forbidden to read the Scriptures. I could fill this chapter with quotations from the Fathers, showing how deep was the distrust and the misunderstanding Of woman during the period when minstrels and poets sang in?ated paeans to the beauty and purity of their mistresses. Many of these pious passages are, to say the least, written in unseemly language; they are all characterised by a spirit of contempt or disgust for women.