 In his own time, Russell was criticized severely for his view that the church’s attempt to keep sexual knowledge away from the young was “extremely dangerous to mental and physical heath” (A1957, 21). Against the practice of his time, he advocated sex education for the young. He also recommended temporary, childless marriages for those not ready to begin a family and held that “Christian ethics inevitably, through the emphasis laid upon sexual virtue, did a great deal to degrade the position of women” (1929, 60–61). In support of his view that the writings handed down by the church fathers were “full of invectives against Woman,” he quotes the historian, W.E.H. Lecky: “Woman was represented as the door to hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman. She should live in continual penance, on account of the curses she has brought upon the world” (1929, 61). Russell concludes that “It is only in quite modern times that women have regained the degree of freedom which they enjoyed in the Roman Empire” (1929, 60–61).