the family life. From the first the church worked to abolish divorce,
and fought as evil such vices as concubinage and prostitution, that came
to flourish to such an extent in the Pagan world. Only very slowly did
the early leaders of the church win the mass of the people to accepting
their views as to the permanency of the marriage bond. In order to aid
in making this bond more stable the early church recognized marriage as
one of the sacraments, and, as implied, steadily opposed the idea of the
later Roman Law that marriage was simply a private contract. The result
was, eventually, that marriage came to be regarded again as a religious
bond, and the family life took on once more the aspect of great
stability. After the church had come fully into power in the Western
world, legal divorce ceased to be recognized and legal separation was
substituted in its stead. Thus the church succeeded in reconstituting
the family life upon a stable basis, but the family after being
reconstituted, was of a semipatriarchal type. Nothing was more natural
than this, for the church had no model to go by except the paternal
family of the Hebrew and Greek and Roman civilization. Nevertheless, the
place of women and children in this semipatriarchal religious family
established by the church was higher on the whole than in the ancient
patriarchal family. The church put an end to the exposure of children,
which had been common in Rome, and protected childhood in many ways. It
also exalted the place of woman in the family, though leaving her
subject to her husband. The veneration of the Virgin tended particularly
to give women an honored place socially and religiously. Only by the
advocacy and practice of ascetic doctrines may the early church be said
to have detracted from the social valuation of the family. On the whole
the reconstituting of the family by the church must be regarded as its
most striking social work. But the thing for us to note particularly is
that the type of the family life created by the church was what we might
call a semipatriarchal type, in which the importance of husband and