Under what living teacher I say; for those who
have supposed that Greece owed this or any other
blessing to Hebrew traditions are obliged in the first
place to interpolate history with fancies, and secondly
to deny the testimony of Scripture that there is one
Lord over all nations.
M. Comte has assuredly, then, no right to credit
the middle ages with the chief and most effectual
testimony on behalf of Monogamy. What he means
doubtless is that chivalry involved a reverence and
worship of women, which cannot be paralleled, though
there may be many foretastes of it, in the ancient
world. That worship, as a counteraction of the Maho-
metan tendency to degrade women into servants or
instruments of a tyrant's pleasure, was of inestimable
worth. But the abuses of the Courts of Love to
which M. Comte points as proofs that the mediaeval
Church — or as he calls it. Theology — ^was unable to
vindicate the purity of the household, grew out of
this worship ; in this instance, as in every other, the
idolater degraded the object of his idolatry. The



LECT. III.
How any

peoplehave

become

Monoga-

mic.
The

mediaval

chivalry.
54



DOMESTIC MORALITY,



LECT. ni.
The rela-
tion de-
stroyed by
the at-
tempts to
glorify
either sex
to the dis-
parage-
ment of
the other.
