war is quieted, relationship and good friendship formed, and the whole human race perpetuated. Matrimony is also a merry, pleasurable, and sweet thing. What is merrier and sweeter than the names of father and mother and the children hanging on their parents' necks? If married people have the right love and the right will for one another, their joy and sorrow are common to them and they enjoy the good things the more merrily and bear the adverse things the more easily.

Yet the position of woman was not high: her sphere was the home, and she was seldom mentioned.

The Protestant Revolution changed markedly the old order of life. The movement that is known as the Reformation had a strong economic element." It signified the rise to power of a new sovereign-the industrial, mercantile, commercial middle-class-which had long been falling heir to the power slipping from the hands of a decadent feudal aristocracy. Since the Reformation, the moneyed type has dominated the world.

Where this economic class was not strong enough, the Reformation proved abortive and spelled tragedy to the families that accepted it. Thus, in France, the Huguenots were forbidden to train their children in the faith. A royal decree in 1685 required that every child of five years and over be removed by the authorities from his Protestant parents. Protestant marriages were illegal and the offspring illegitimate. Girls were carried away to shame and parents had no power to interfere. Coligny was at first reluctant to publish his faith because of the suffering that would be entailed on his wife and household; but she preferred to be bold, so he avowed

14 Adams. Law of Civilization and Decay, 187-208; Patten. Development of English Thought, 102-105, 117; Forrest. Development of Western Civilization, 291-298; Stillé. Studies in Medieval History, 443-445; Traill and Mann. Social England, vol. iii, 59; Pollard. Factors in Modern History, 4650; Seignobos. History of Medieval and Modern Civilization, 283, 290-292.

his religion and held worship daily in his family. Not all families in the riven lands enjoyed such unison.

An understanding of the significance of this great social revolution is essential, both on account of its general influence on the European institutions from which our civilization is derived and from the fact that it was this revolutionary middle-class, stern, sober, prudential, industrial, driven into exile by temporary triumphs of reaction or coming freely in pursuit of opportunity and economic gain, that made America.

Feudal militancy had subordinated family life to the affairs of war. With the passing of the old chivalric notions a good deal of false sentiment died away and the attitude of men toward women was markedly altered. The Reformation developed a rather matter-offact view. The bourgeoisie may well claim the honor of being first to assert that romantic love is the ideal basis of marriage; but the constraints of private wealth have always operated to frustrate this ideal. Though suppression of convents curtailed woman's opportunity, the Reformation did remove the stain put on marriage and the family by the law of celibacy. Celibates began to marry. Luther, by word and example, glorified marriage and the family. He said: "O! what a great rich and magnificent blessing there is in the married state; what joy is shown to man in matrimony by his descendants!" 15 His recognition of the normal sex impulse to propagation appears in this utterance: "Unless specially endowed by a rare, divine grace, a woman can no more dispense with a man, than with food, drink, sleep, and other natural needs. In the same way a man cannot do without a woman.'

99 16

15 Richard. History of German Civilization, 253-255; Painter. Luther on Education, 113-116.

16 Bebel. Woman and Socialism, 78.

Luther gave woman no chivalric admiration; yet, while emphasizing motherhood, he did not regard woman as a mere bearer of children. Marriage signified to him the moral restraint and religious sanctification of natural impulse. None should marry unless competent to instruct their children in the elements of religion. He emphasized the nurture of children, stressing honor to parents and reverence to God and making no distinction between boys and girls as to need of education nor between men and women as to right to teach. Home should be made a delight but firmness must not be sacrificed. According to him the wife's union to the husband is a fit symbol of the soul's union to Christ by faith. Whatever Christ possesses, the believing soul may claim as its own."7

It might be supposed that such liberal views, coming at a time when society thrilled with the longing to establish more firmly the individual personality by means of marriage and family life, would mean an era of emancipation for woman. But this did not immediately follow. The reformers did not recognize woman as in all points equal to man. "Let woman learn betimes to serve according to her lot" was their opinion. She was to be trained to faith and for the calling of housewife and mother. The home under the Reformation continued under the old laws. Woman was to be under obedience to the male head. employed for his benefit. He chose her society, for he was responsible for her, and to him as a sort of Father Confessor she was accountable. Neither talent nor genius could emancipate her without his consent. about the time of the Reformation it was said, "She that

She was to be constantly

At

17 Compare Scherr, Geschichte der deutschen Frauenwelt, Band ii, 19-21; Vedder, Reformation in Germany, 124; Cooke, Woman in the Progress of Civilization, 358-359; Painter, Luther on Education, chapter vi.

knoweth how to compound a pudding is more desirable than she who skillfully compoundeth a poem." It was the maxim of Luther that "no gown or garment worse become a woman than that she will be wise." Abolition of convents brought a period of two or three centuries in northern lands during which the intellectual \training of women largely ceased. Luther pictures the real German housewife-a pious, God-fearing woman, domestic toiler, comforter of man, a rare treasuretrustworthy, loving, industrious, beneficent, blessed. "When a woman walks in obedience toward God," says Luther, "holds her husband in love and esteem, and brings up her children well-in comparison with such ornament, pearls, velvet, and tinsel are like an old, torn, patched, beggar's cloak." It is evident that the faithful, unobtrusive, industrious German Hausfrau is the ideal woman of the Reformation.18

The reformers had large problems to solve. The Reformation spelled individualism and the decay of the modern family can be traced back to this source. The reformers were not fundamentally to blame. Marriage had been regarded in Germany as a civil contract, yet mystical elements were present such as the notion. that marriage would purge away crime, in consequence of which view felons condemned to death would be released if some one would marry them.19 At the time of the Reformation there was growing up a church theory which treated unblest marriages as concubinage.20 Confusion arose from prevalent usage. It became customary in one town for betrothed to live together before

18 Compare Scherr, Geschichte der deutschen Frauenwelt, Band ii, 22-23; Otto, Deutsches Frauenleben, 94; Gage, Woman, Church, and State, 146-147; Cooke, Woman in the Progress of Civilization, chapter iv, 47.

19 Baring-Gould. Germany, Present and Past, vol. i, 159, 162, 163.

marriage. The consistory held such cohabitation to be true marriage. Luther wrote,

It has often fallen out that a married pair came for me, and that one or both had already been secretly betrothed to another: then there was a case of distress and perplexity and we confessors and theologians were expected to give counsel to those tortured consciences. But how could we? 21

Luther had slight thought of human interdependence. He looked at morals in a superficial way, as scarcely more than a department of politics belonging to the care of the state. Consequently he followed the secular theory of marriage. He said,

Know that marriage is something extrinsic as any other worldly action. As I may eat, drink, sleep, walk, ride, and deal with any heathen, Jew, Turk, or heretic, so to one of these I may also become and remain married. Do not observe the laws of fools that forbid such marriages. In regard to matters of marriage and divorce let them be subject to worldly rule since marriage is a worldly extrinsic thing.22

Of course Luther desired that the civil authority should be "pious." But not till the end of the seventeenth century was religious ceremony considered necessary to legal marriage among Protestants. Till then "conscience [common-law] marriage" sufficed." Luther and other reformers also opposed restrictions to marriage.

For a time the new era threatened to return to pagan laxity and licentiousness. The reformers did not always avoid immorality in their loose handling of marriage. For instance, Luther says,

If a healthy woman is joined in wedlock to an impotent man. and could not, nor would for her honor's sake openly choose

21 Baring-Gould. Germany, Present and Past, vol. i, 147, 154.

22 Bebel. Woman and Socialism, 78-79.