consequently a high value is set upon their labor. As we have already
seen, these female slaves usually serve at the same time as concubines,
if not legal wives of their masters.

(4) Another cause which we can perhaps hardly appreciate at the present
time is the high valuation set on children. We see this cause operating
particularly in the case of the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Under
the patriarchal family great value was set upon children as necessary to
continue the family line. Where the device of adoption was not resorted
to, therefore, in case of barrenness or the birth exclusively of female
children, nothing was more natural than that polygyny should be resorted
to in order to insure the family succession. In the patriarchal family
also a high valuation was necessarily set upon children, because the
larger the family grew the stronger it was.

(5) Finally, religion came to sanction polygyny. The religious sanction
of polygyny cannot be looked upon as one of its original causes, but
when once established it reacted powerfully to reenforce and maintain
the institution. How the religious sanction came about we can readily
see when we remember that very commonly religions confuse the practice
of the nobility with what is noble or commendable morally. The
polygynous practices of the nobility, therefore, under certain
conditions came to receive the sanction of religion. When this took
place polygyny became firmly established as a social institution, very
difficult to uproot, as all the experience of Christian missionaries
among peoples practicing polygyny goes to show. We may note also the
general truth, that while religion does not originate human institutions
or the forms of human association, it is preeminently that which gives
fixity and stability to institutions through the supernatural sanction
that it accords them.