CHAPTER V

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE

The great effort that we have sought to portray resulted finally in a profound religious revolution; starting from a crisis in belief, it led to a transformation of Christianity through the ministry of women.

In reality, feminism exalted the soul rather than the woman. Woman is born to cling to somebody; if man fails her she seeks a stay in God. It was thus inevitable that her religion of beauty should end in a mystic marriage, in a great dramatic act of religious sensibility, in a development of charity and hope on the basis of definite dogma, in the skilful interpretation of impressions of the unseen by means of external signs.

That women would fling themselves passionately into religious sensibility was only to be expected. This is their way.[390] Leaving out of account those who are never happy out of church, women love to fancy themselves queens by the grace of God. The incomprehensible, which irritates men, fascinates them, and they experience a singular joy in rummaging the mysteries. As we have already said, at the moment of the religious crisis a courtesan proffered the most judicious advice on the direction of ecclesiastical affairs.

In the Church, to mistrust the intrusion of women was a peremptory tradition, and indeed the ecclesiastical world may well be considered the citadel of anti-feminism. Religion had taken a logical and theological bent; it recognised only one morality, applying to noble ladies and eminent intelligences the rules taught to plainer folk. Erasmus repeats approvingly the maxim of St. Paul: “Christ is the head of man, man the head of woman; man is the image and glory of God; woman the glory of man.” With the Church Fathers it had been a long-established custom (going back to the wisest of the wise, Solomon) to compare women, and even the Virgin, to the moon. From sacred literature this comparison passed into profane literature, which employed it in season and out. Rabelais declares that women play hide and seek with their husbands, as the moon with the sun; Boccaccio and Brantôme revive the old proverb about the virtue of women needing to renew itself every month like the moon. One poet decries the moon, pale like woman’s love; another adores her, pure like his well-beloved.

The platonists were well content with this phantasmagoric comparison, which represented to them in all likelihood a whole world of freshness and domestic joys.

Dolce himself deems that the moon is feminine. “At night,” he says, “she streams through every chink and cranny, spite of blinds and shutters; she inspires the imagination of husbands.” In France, during the period of the fair Diana’s ascendency, the moon quite eclipsed the sun; the king sported a device of interlaced crescents.[391] But the Church did not go so far. It excluded women from the priesthood; its tradition granted them nothing except personal piety, or at most heroism like that of St. Catherine of Sienna of unfading memory. In order, therefore, to secure a place in an absolutely new order of ideas, women had to wash their hands once for all of eminent dogmaticians and subtle moralists, and to effect a complete change.

Many enlightened minds in the Church itself called for this renovation.

The weariness and disgust generally felt in regard to certain trivialities in religious observance, to the apologetics and the frigid ethics of the time, had caused the spirit of faith and faith itself almost entirely to disappear; and thus the Beautiful easily became the guiding principle of theology. Only, some people sought their theology in abstractions, others in the joys of art. The fall of Savonarola precipitated the movement in the direction of art. His friends were downhearted. Michelangelo clave to the Man of sorrows, the crucified Christ, “as a skiff to the harbour”; his faith became confidence, and dogmatic theology had no further interest for him.

So far from feeling itself harmed by this breath of philosophy, Rome, ancient and eternal, regarded itself as invigorated thereby. “I am a Christian platonist,” had been the saying of the early platonists. Too proud to have any love for the petty arguments and the material extravagances of every-day religion, these philosophical prelates wished to establish the authority of the Church on the liberty, not the anæmia, of the conscience.

The new philosophy declared itself to be more Christian than that of Aristotle, and bowed before the official dogmas, like the priest before the altar, declaring itself “unworthy”—before dogmas of almost insolent authority, stern, inexorable, but modified by tenderness. The new religion was the philosophy of the Lord’s Prayer. It sufficed to recite the Paternoster in the spirit of love harmonising with it; regarding God as the good Father, who gives life because He is life,—God, the celestial and ideal, whose will should be done because it is the very essence of love to seek its motives in the will of the beloved one. We love, not the idols of the world, silver and gold, but love and mercy; our daily bread is sufficient for us, love has loosened in us the springs of ambition; filled with tenderness and dignity, foes to intrigue, we have to spread abroad in the world this same tenderness and the tolerance it implies; may God in like manner pardon the evil we may do. We beseech Providence not to put temptation in our way, so that we may be saved from falling!

God is all love and all life. It is not His will to betray us by laying snares for us; His religion can be only the perfect manifestation of natural law. Goodness and piety do not mean pessimism and self-abdication.

The positive side of religion, namely, the creed, may well be left to reasoners and theologians, for it gives rise to insoluble problems. But religion also includes principles of practical morality, which have for object the happiness of man.

In regard to the second point, the Gospel leaves us great liberty. It lays down no dogmas in regard to beauty; it confines itself to bequeathing us love, not a love more or less alloyed with selfishness, vanity or interest, but a general love for God and our neighbours, resulting from an inward spirit of devotion.

That being so, what is the good of quirks and quiddities? What is the good of tight fetters? Love, and go straight on your way—that is the new formula,—a very effective one, since it converts dogmas into sentiments, and consequently gives them a direct bearing upon life; a very philosophical one, for nothing is so personal, so individual as sentiment. And, as Montaigne says, “it is a most excellent and commendable enterprise properly to accommodate and fit to the service of our faith the natural helps and human implements which God hath bestowed upon us.... Had we fast hold on God by the interposition of a lively faith; had we fast hold on God by Himself, and not by us; the love of novelty, the constraint of princes, the good success of one party, the rash and casual changing of our opinions, should not then have the power to shake and alter our belief.”[392]

Faith is the best and almost the only guarantee of liberty of thought.

That explains why, in the official apartments of the pope, the _School of Athens_, an eclectic homage to the philosophic spirit, is a companion picture to the _Controversy on the Holy Sacrament_, the synthesis of the spirit of faith, and why the _Parnassus_ appears to unite them. No one found anything to object to in this alliance. Erasmus insists on the fact that Christianity and Plato are in wonderful accord in regard to happiness; Cornelius Agrippa himself, who ventured to call Plato a “master of errors,”[393] attributes to Socrates inspiration from on high.

Leo X. acted as pope in countenancing Plato.

Mitigating circumstances have been urged in his favour; as the Roman tradition excels in accommodating itself to the needs of each successive age, some Catholic writers have thought that the alliance between Roman prelates and the new aesthetic cult was a prudent concession to circumstances. Our opinion, on the contrary, is that Rome, under the influence of a century and a half of ardent study, deliberately placed herself at the head of the movement. Rightly or wrongly, she believed that religion is the art of living freely and in peace. “The soul is far above the intellect.”

In virtue of this maxim there appeared, closely leagued with the prelates for the purpose of reforming the Christian practice and restoring to it its primitive motive force, the women, whether platonist or not, who have been called _bibliennes_, but whom we would rather call Mothers of the Church. In these days we stick pretty closely to the external and picturesque features of the Bible; we read it as a story that has come true, and love a realistic illustration. The _bibliennes_, too, after their fashion, sought impressions, rather than a doctrine; for what they called “my religion” was the doctrine of others, on which they drew their own patterns, like figure-skaters. What concerned them in the Gospel was its philosophy.[394] They wished to profit by it on their own system, that is, by intuition, by inspiration from on high. Faith in witchcraft flourished more than ever, and it seemed quite natural to regard women as the special interpreters of the unseen.[395] The bloody persecutions of the 16th century did not succeed in uprooting the belief in witches, who sometimes indulged in horrid midnight abominations, but who were the more habitually consulted by people who wanted to have their fortunes told, to have their ailments treated,[396] to obtain good weather, etc.[397] The boundless ambition of Julius II. sprang, it was said, from the prediction of a sorceress, who had told him to be of good cheer, for he would obtain the tiara and world-wide sway. The witches loosed or bound the devil at pleasure. Their power was evil, but supernatural. People said “witch”; in some parts the word “wizard” did not even exist. If the witch was to credulous people the incarnation of women’s special aptitude for medicine and religion, there was a good deal of truth in the idea, and women might well be supposed capable of exercising supernatural power. It was fashionable to extol the ancient sibyls in the same terms as the prophets. These celebrated beings formed the connecting link between antiquity and Christianity; instead of doing as Julius II. wished, and painting the twelve apostles, in other words, the active ministers of faith, Michelangelo boldly and triumphantly displayed on the vaulted arches of the Sistine chapel seven prophets and five sibyls, that is, the ministers of intuition.

Thus women substituted themselves for priests as they did for doctors, from a horror of materialism and professionalism, from a sense of duty, an idea of liberty, a spirit of charity, making no professions of profound study, but with the wholesome aim of protecting the youthfulness and beauty of their souls. Apostles of the religion of love and joy, they addressed themselves to the miseries that befall especially those whom the world calls happy; the unfortunate doubtless have no time to think of their woes; it has always been much more difficult to convert the rich, the healthy, and the young.

The idea of the feminine priesthood very easily made headway in Italy: “God is only seen through women.” Women addressed themselves to chosen spirits—philosophers, writers, preachers, men of action—who wished to see God, but were too short-sighted. In the religious as in the other arts, every prelate of importance had one woman, if not several, behind him. Bembo was the friend of Olympia Morata[398]—what could be more natural? A fiery, proud, austere monk like Ochino, with his large, bloodless face and long, shaggy white beard, hardly seemed likely to prove a grand master in the feminine freemasonry; yet he came in the end to lean upon a bevy of ardent women, with Caterina Cibo, one of the pope’s ladies, as their brilliant head. The pope himself came to terms with the ladies: Paul III. displayed his deference for them on various occasions, and especially by a visit to Ferrara, the notable seat of a feminist council.

Vittoria Colonna shines in the front rank of these Mothers of the Church; she is the classical woman _par excellence_. She got up lectures at Naples and Rome. She sustained and consoled prelates of the highest eminence. “Since the hatred of others, the price I pay for my devotion, has not bereft me of your Excellency’s good-will,” wrote Giberto from the chancellery at Rome, “every other loss seems to me but a trifle. Your Excellency can do me no more singular favour than to command me.”

Bishop Selva wrote to Cardinal Pole: “Thanks for the copy of your letter to the marchioness of Pescara on recent events; it is worthy of that Christian lady.” And the good Sadoleto, writing also to Pole, said: “I have read the letter addressed to you by the very saintly and prudent lady the marchioness of Pescara, in which she speaks of me and appears to approve of our staying here; it is an indescribable pleasure to me to see my counsels approved by so much virtue and wisdom.”

The holy passion of the marchioness for Cardinal Pole burned with a highly mystical glow. Vittoria wrote to this beloved prelate “as the intimate friend of the Bridegroom, who will speak to me through you, and who calls me to Him, and whose will it is that I should converse on this subject for my own encouragement and consolation.”

Religious feminism acclimatised itself in France with considerable difficulty, through the fault of the women themselves. They were habituated to tread unswervingly the authorised paths to Paradise—fasts and abstinences, indulgences and pardons, relics, vows and pilgrimages. To follow in the procession of Corpus Christi among their lackeys bearing torches emblazoned with their arms, to wash the feet of the poor on Good Friday and hand the poor a basket of provisions, never to miss a sermon, to have a mass said every morning at a private altar, to purchase indulgences—that was the religion of the great ladies of France. This religion was accused of proceeding from a somewhat mechanical severity, and of proving nothing; and indeed there were among those old-style ladies some who were virtuous without purity, and some who were devout without piety. Among the middle classes it was still worse: “angels at church, devils at home, apes in bed!” How many husbands lost their tempers at finding dinner not ready, and learning that Madame was at her prayers or “slobbering over images”! An old writer declares that there is no mean with religious women; they are either sour-tempered, peevish or disagreeable, or adulteresses. And yet the same preachers whom we have already seen obstinately bent on preserving the dead level of morality vaunted equally the dead level of religion; they were desperately afraid of getting above it. They liked women to remain little girls, incessantly tormented by infinitesimal scruples; their narrowness of thought, their passive and minute obedience were precisely what the preachers praised, such were the traits they pretended to admire in the Clotildes and Theodelindes.[399] And if the Saviour after His resurrection went first of all to knock at the gate of the Magdalene’s garden, that boon, according to them, was motived solely by the purely passive and docile spirit of women. At Paris, where women were said to be deficient in high philosophy, “there were more works of charity done and more masses said than were done or said between Paris and Rome.” However, certain flatterers saw virtue everywhere, and went so far as to cite Charles VIII. as an angel, and the boulevards of Paris as a sanctuary. Such reasonings naturally ended _in statu quo_.

At Rome the exact contrary was the case; liberty was especially rife among the mob of functionaries, and their contempt for the easy-going government they served was unmistakeable. Far back in the 15th century Lorenzo Valla, to hasten his advancement, declared publicly that this government rested on a usurpation and a lie. It was all so peaceful and happy! More than one man, like Burckhardt, would kiss the pope’s toe in the morning, and in the evening utter blasphemies. The dogma of infallibility served as a shelter and defence. Just as Titian sent to the Emperor a _Trinity_ and a _Venus_ together; or Sigismundo Malatesta had a portrait painted showing him on his knees before madonnas; or the irreverent Poggio destined his sons to the priesthood: so Aretino, speaking of Saints and Venuses, lumped them all as “these ladies,” and confessed before he died.

Far from being disturbed by theological attacks or stale criticisms, Rome thought of nothing but displaying her Atticism and rescuing antiquity from its submergence by medievalism, as she had already saved it from its submergence by the barbarians.

The Spirit of God bloweth where it listeth![400]

As said the father of one of the cardinals, no man was a gentleman unless he hazarded some heresy or other. The sceptic represented by Raphael in the _Miracle of Bolsena_ is a man of high distinction. Ideas, men, nothing was safe from ridicule. Two cardinals were chaffing Raphael for having, as they said, given S. Peter and S. Paul rather too ruddy a complexion. “Bah!” retorted the painter, “they are blushing to see you ruling the Church.” Castiglione one day asked ‘Phaedra’ Inghirami, with a smile, why on Good Friday, when heathens and Jews, heretics and bishops are prayed for, there is no prayer for the cardinals. “Because,” replied Inghirami with great readiness—“because they are included in the prayer for heretics and schismatics.” The same Castiglione found the Duke of Urbino’s chaplain to be rather long over mass, and begged for a more expeditious celebrant. “Impossible,” replied the chaplain, and stooping to the ear of his critic added: “Why, man, I don’t say a third part of the _secretae_.”

The Lateran council in 1512 had, indeed, prescribed canon law and theology as part of the course of study for priests. It recommended them also to believe in the immortality of the soul. But these were only very light fetters on liberty of thought. When Pomponazzi denied in set terms the immortality of the soul, the Venetians, who had the logical minds of the northern peoples, condemned his book to the flames; but Leo X. did not even reply to the demand for his excommunication. Were there not many like him at the Vatican? Were ceremonial and dogma spoken of much otherwise there? The judgment we can pass on Rome is that of Talleyrand: the man who does not know Rome does not know the sweetness of life.

At one time Adrian VI. was anxious to restore severer modes of thought, but his aim did not please the prelates, and Clement VI. hastened to bring back the spirit of the Medici, a “sentimental deism,” to adopt the apt phrase of M. d’Haussonville, and to send “the imbeciles, the ninnies,” as Bembo called them, about their business. The pope supported the Protestants against Charles V. He was quite willing to hear Firenzuola, in his Benedictine’s gown, read him fragments of his dissertations on love. Paul III. plumed himself on continuing this charming system. Bembo became a sort of patriarch; his _Asolani_ served as well for a religious breviary as for a philosophic formulary.

Delightful age, in which nothing was hopelessly stranded in mediocrity! in which the religion of beauty seemed to sum up all aspirations human and divine, all the sanctities!

The cardinals displayed a reasonable magnificence because princes and lords were essential to the kingdom of God on earth.

These were Christian prelates, charged with the duty of guiding a somewhat pagan world. Among them we necessarily meet again the learned doctors of love and wit—Bibbiena, for instance, his Plautus in his pocket, always smiling, always amusing, and philosophising with gusto on the oddities of the moment. “What folly!” is his incessant exclamation. A priest, but one of the fashionable variety! Steeped to the lips in mythology, and so refined, so delicate, that the naïve emotions of a primitive Madonna leave him untouched! Wishing with his exquisite politeness to offer a royal present to Francis I., he ordered, not a Madonna, but a portrait of the beautiful Jeanne of Aragon. That is the man who in the portrait of Leo X. stands near the pope’s chair as the heart of his heart.

And Bembo, who invokes Olympus and speaks of the supreme Beauty, how does he regard the sacred hierarchy? He writes to Isabella d’Este that he “desires to serve her and please her as if she were the pope.”... “Far better to speak like Cicero than to be pope.” And he adds this postscript: “Isabella, my dear, my dear, my dear, I kiss thee with all my heart and soul, and beg thee to remember me, as my big, big love for thee merits.” That was his interpretation of charity! But people were not particularly scandalised at these youthful sallies, any more than it occurred to them to be shocked at finding a bishop’s palace peopled with mythological personages,[401] or the Corso, on a carnival day, gay with masked cardinals.

This intellectual indifference would have had graver consequences if, knowing theology so badly as they did, the clergy had attempted to expound it; but as a matter of fact they only scratched the surface of dogmas; they were far too sensible to speak of things they knew nothing about. The watchword was to render religion lovable. In what respect was Sadoleto, for example—that Fénelon of the 16th century—a worse priest because he was so passionately devoted to the humanities and the arts! Take liberty away, and the degeneracy of Catholic countries was assured.

To-day everything is changed; if Leo X. or Bembo returned to the world, they would be utterly nonplussed by the complete alteration that has taken place. It is in Germany, among their whilom adversaries, that they would recognise the doctrine dear to them, and a freedom of mind that allows a man to call himself a Christian though rejecting the divinity of Jesus Christ. To many present-day Germans, the kingdom of God stands for the whole community of those who believe in the principle of love. God is love: the kingdom of God—that is, a state in which everyone’s actions would be prompted by love—is the final end of God, and at the same time the most universal moral ideal, the sum and crown of morality and religion. Singularly enough, people are apt to imagine—not, of course, that the founders of the Reformation professed this doctrine (the mistake would be too glaring), but—that they opened the door, cut the first notch in the tree, by starting the private reading of the Scriptures. Thus Protestant orthodoxy, which holds by a priestly and quasi-infallible tradition, would appear as a pseudo-catholicism, whilst liberal Protestantism, which pushes forward with open mind in a boundless field of thought, would represent the logical outcome of the work of Luther and Calvin.

On the other hand, it is believed by some that the armour of authority, the spirit of narrowness and officialism sometimes adopted by Catholicism since the struggles of the 16th and 18th centuries, are indispensable to it, and that the Reformation was calculated to rid it of that spirit.

On the contrary, it was at Rome that liberal ideas with the utmost audacity secured a footing. They were vanquished, it is true, and disappeared; but if Luther and Calvin had the glory of defeating them, time in its turn has brought in its revenges, and, of Luther as of Calvin, there is very little now remaining.

The liberal Protestantism of the present day is the antithesis of the primitive spirit of the Reformation.

The Reformation had political and social sides, of which this is not the place to speak; in matters religious, the reformers felt a need of disciplinary reorganisation, very natural, but not peculiar to them; but their essential aim was to create a reaction against free thought, to return as far as possible towards the Middle Ages, to rescue the world from the Roman idealism, which was the work of prelates and women, and had sunk into an intellectual dilettantism. Old Germany desired matter-of-fact, or at any rate well-advertised virtues, a quasi-military pietism, and theological reasoning. It revolted against life in the sunlight.

Frenchwomen were not thwarted by their husbands in regard to their patronage of the aesthetic cult, as they were in matters of morality. The majority of men professed a benevolent scepticism, which made them what we call “moderates,” that is, not warm partisans of moderate ideas, but moderate or even negative partisans of any idea whatever; and consequently they were open to any sort of impulsion, even from women. Montaigne wanted but one thing to make him a mystic—namely, mysticism: and the Montaignes are legion; only we do not come across them; in their characters of moderates they keep in the shade.

In this case the obstructors were the clergy, the mass of whom in France, as in England or Germany, made common cause with the nation, instead of the nation making common cause with them, as at Rome. They possessed about a fifth part of the land, and found themselves tied to it. The village parson, sprung from the soil, and presented to a benefice on leaving school, did his duty there without hope of advancement, in the same spirit that the lord performed his feudal duties—rather like a superior farm-hand, much less accomplished in theology or in platonism than in mixing a sauce for a choice carp, or in roasting to a turn the pullet he brought home under his arm on his return from administering the last rites to a dying parishioner; a jolly good fellow, and a capital gossip, but as far from a mystic movement or a crusade on behalf of the ideal as the poles. If there was to be a Reformation, the only one that would have struck him as useful would have been to authorise him to marry; and French statesmen, although very good Catholics, were very much of the same opinion. Obviously it was still more impossible to depend, for upholders of the ideal, on a mob of artisans, tradesmen, peasants even, highly practical people, who had got their poles shaven in order to come under the jurisdiction of the church courts, and who, though clerks only in name, still helped to root the Church among the people.

To meddle with this obscure and doltish mass with the idea of implanting in it the germ of the beautiful was the last thing women would have thought of.

There remained the world of distinguished abbés, the higher clergy, the court prelates; but, as benefices served to reward merit of the most various kinds rather than to encourage a philosophic system, the upper ranks of the French clergy showed a curious mixture—eminent priests, venerable monks, younger sons or merrybegots of great nobles, professors, judges, men of letters. No one who did not know would ever have suspected that Melin de Saint-Gelais was an abbé.

Fausto Andrelini was not at all ashamed to publish a letter to his mistress side by side with an address to the Cardinal of Amboise, in which he solicited ecclesiastical preferment.

The _bibliennes_ put themselves at the head of this motley crew of great churchmen; they were “clergywomen,” as someone satirically said, and formed the new priesthood, the Salvation Army of that time. Their simple ambition was to raise these men, these priests, by one stroke of their pinions, into the empyrean, as in Italy. Convinced doubtless that—to adopt the phrase of a distinguished lady—“the law of sex and its pious mysteries lead to great sanctity,” they saw shining in the supreme light various groups united by sympathy and tenderness—old St. Jerome sustained by young Paula, Francis of Assisi by sweet Clara; following their example, Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac were going to lend each other mutual support, obedient to the eternal law—to say nothing of innumerable holy maidens who were lovers of Christ “in His sacred humanity,” like St. Theresa, or who encircled their finger with the ring of a mystic marriage, as Jeanne de France did when founding the Annunciade.[402] Faith must needs become love and diffuse a thrilling charm:[403] the priest must cease to fancy himself a policeman. How many poor souls, athirst for love, have fallen very low simply from want of an ideal! There are sick ones who might become artists in sensibility! Women stretch out beseeching hands to God, that He may help them to regard life with confidence, with joy, with love.

Margaret of France was, in the highest degree, one of these French _bibliennes_, no debater and indeed sceptical as to the existence of absolute truth and goodness in this world, but a woman of quick intuitions and contemplative mind. She had faith; she believed in the sacraments,[404] and did not deny purgatory; she in no manner sought with the ladders of reasoning to scale the verities that tower far above our reach; she preferred to take to herself wings and fly aloft. Men appeared to her so petty, so feeble, such ants, that a few merits more or less on their part were but insignificant stages in the long road between them and perfect goodness; she represented God to herself as pure kindliness, indulgence and love, wherefore it was necessary to fly towards him on wings of love. She clung to St. Catherine of Sienna, not as a theologian, but because “nothing but love was her argument.”

This simple explanation of their principles will clearly show in which species of clergy the women would seek their allies; they loved those who loved them. They did not appreciate the courtier bishop who played the hunter or the warrior. Their friends were the scholarly prelates; they knew well that platonic love had little hold, alas! on the brilliant youth of France, and that divine love would not easily subdue them; yet by dint of tenderness they did not despair of success. The protonotary D’Anthe fell sick, and Margaret at once sent him the following prescription—a decoction of “pleasant recollections and sure hope of love,” a little “powder of laughter,” a drop of “true felicity,” an extract of “apple of love,” in short, remedies not in the least heroic. The gay Bandello’s cure was effected with a rich bishopric, that of Agen.

Grave charges have often been brought against this combination of piety and love, and naturally, anyone who does not understand platonism will see a multitude of more or less deplorable _arrière-pensées_ in these “spiritual gallantries.” In the 17th century indeed the grave Nicolle[405] found a happy phrase to describe ecclesiastics who dangled about the petticoats; he calls them “half-married priests.” “Marriage” would be an inept name for the unions of which we speak. It is very natural, surely, that women of feeling should seek their friends and fellow-workers among feeling souls! Besides, experience proves that you can do nothing with reasoners except by force; only the sensitive are converted; only St. Augustines have capabilities for good.

The practical programme of the women consisted first of all in their attaching an extreme value to the development of the sensuous elements in worship; the severity of the Reformers, crudeness and bareness of ceremonial, could never attract them; they loved pomp and decorum. Religion to them was the very essence of art; art in becoming elevated shaded off into religion; only the inexplicable thrill of the awakening aesthetic sense can waft the soul from the expressed to the unexpressed. Pleasure is not the end of art; it is only its vehicle. The end of art is God.

Eglises viz, s’écrie Marguerite, belles, riches, anticques, Tables d’autelz fort couvertes d’ymaiges D’or et d’argent.... Je prins plaisir d’ouyr ces chants nouveaulx, De veoir ardans cierges et flambeaulx, D’ouyr le son des cloches hault sonnantes Et par leur bruyt oreilles estonnantes: C’est paradis icy, me dis-je alors....[406]

One Good Friday, at Brionne, a Norman châtelaine was highly scandalised at the fantastic manner in which the parson rendered the Litany of the Passion; and on leaving the church, she sent for him and the following dialogue ensued: “My dear sir, I don’t know where you learnt to officiate on such a day as this, when people should be in the depths of humility; but to hear you render the service, all our devotional thoughts have been put to flight.” “What do you mean, Madam?” said the parson. “Mean! you have sung the Passion all the wrong way. When our Lord speaks, you bawl as if you were in a market; and when ’tis Caiaphas speaking, or Pilate, or the Jews, you speak as gently as any blushing bride. A fine sort of parson! If you had your deserts, you’d be unfrocked!” The parson wriggled out of the difficulty like a true Norman, with a gibe at the Jews: “My dear lady, I wanted to show that with me Christ is master and the Jews are subject to Him.”[407]

A sort of external sensuousness in worship, therefore, formed an integral part of the feminist religion. As to the substance of that religion, it varied according to the women, and even according to the days, for it was a matter of impressions.

It was fed principally by the reading of the Scriptures.

It is a common error to believe that Luther’s great reform consisted in inculcating the direct and free reading of the Scriptures. The study of the Bible was, one may say, carried to excess among Catholic women. Vivès went so far as to make it one of his principal rules for the education of young girls.[408] And some people even vigorously protested against the abuse of such reading. Before Luther’s time, about 1504, the French satirist Gringoire, as well as certain preachers, denounced it as a positive scourge.[409] Later, Brantôme waxed indignant at seeing the Bible in the hands of children, and Montaigne at finding it discussed at street corners or in back-shops.

But the women in their turn were irritated at the attempts to curb their zeal. These criticisms of men recalled to them that contemptible sneak Adam, who made excuses for himself and shuffled on to his wife the responsibilities of their common thirst for knowledge.

Was their imagination distrusted? they asked. Were they thought incapable of distinguishing between “ancient rubbish and modern trash”? They found in the Old Testament rare beauties, to be sure, but they were very far from admiring everything blindly—the exploits of some of the patriarchs—the inconsistencies even of the Deity himself, who forbids slaughter and yet slew! No, no, the Bible is not the book of love; it is the first of books, but one mustn’t go there to find the secret of “changing all strifes into sovereign charity.”

The Old Testament pleased the friends of the religion of terror—Savonarola, and some French ladies of the old style, devout and mystical at certain moments, but in reality highly materialistic in their tastes and their practical ideas.

Others criticised the Bible as they did everything else. In the Bible, as in other things, what struck them most was the light it threw on life. An artist stops before a landscape, not to analyse the chemical action of the trees, or to discourse on the species of grasses, but to seize the charm of an effect of light, of a picturesque undulation of the ether; at another time, when the light falls differently, the very same landscape would not even attract his attention, because its garb would be less striking. We do not well understand the synthetic religion of these women, we men of “fluid and curt speech,” habituated to analyse everything with mathematical precision—and not to look for grand opera at St. Paul’s. The practised eye of a Renaissance princess allowed itself to be caressed by tints, while our own seeks geometrical outlines. For the Italians and their friends to love was to pray:[410] so that in the _Heptameron_ conversations half philosophic, half ribald, come naturally between mass and vespers, and Louise of Savoy mingles with them a feeling homily, or reads a passage from St. John, “meat so tender ... full of love.”[411]

The reader will understand how difficult it is to state with any exactitude the developments of such a doctrine; they were different with different people, and are to be felt rather than explained. We have not to do here with students shut up in a smoke-filled hall to construct their theses; it is a question of ladies, very great ladies, habituated to the most perfect liberty of action, and permitted by their rank and intelligence to hold direct communion with God, by vision, by intuition of love. They are recognisable by this characteristic. In her work the _Adoration of the Magi_ (a subject well worthy of her pen) Margaret of France gives us her formula: “To initiate oneself into the divine verities, first by philosophy, then by intuition, then by inspiration.” Do not mistake, this is not illuminism or pride: it is simply candour. These noble ladies do not grudge their pity to human misery, though the sight of wretchedness is shocking to their nerves; but they set themselves high above these miseries, just as they do above discussion. Their religion is distinguished. They live on sovereign heights, where they have no trouble from men and are in touch with their goal. God is the first link in a chain, and man the last. As Gerbert said: “In matters of action, mankind holds the first place: in pure speculation, God comes first.” It is meet to follow God rather than man. And those who are able to mount high are compelled by conscience to go to the fount and origin of things, and look ideas square in the face. In this respect the truly primitive women of the 16th century are sharply distinguished from their daughters of the 18th, whom it is natural to compare to them. The exquisite and delightful woman of the 18th century was very superficial: she loved life and the world for their own sake. A few hours before she died Madame Geoffrin,[412] hearing at her bedside a discussion on the best means of securing general happiness, roused herself once more to exclaim: “Add the diligent quest of pleasure, a thing not sufficiently attended to.” A profound and true saying, remarks D’Alembert, and one that Plato himself might have envied. The 16th-century women had a less sparkling wit, but a much more strongly marked temperament. They were concerned only with brotherly love, and instinctively recoiled from intolerance in any form; they wished to fuse the church with the ideal; to them every idealist was religious; but they also carried into the world the pursuit of this high aim of their aesthetic religion—to live for the soul, for God, to live a secret inward life along with the actual life. We may justly praise their piety, their charity towards the poor; and yet they were a mixture: external observances were repugnant to them as being material and obligatory; they loved the large philosophical faith, God and His works.

Here there is more than ever reason to speak of a “stork-love.” What platonism had attempted, religious idealism effected—the superposition of two different worlds. It was vain to expect these great ladies to throw any ardour into terrestrial controversies: Renée of France made her protégé Richardot a Calvinist or a Catholic bishop, indifferently. The material mechanism of divine grace appeared to them to have been devised for the vulgar, and to be of a quite relative truth. They did not see why the delicate ray of grace, the impalpable word of consolation, before it could penetrate into the dark haunts of wretchedness, should necessarily have to borrow the form of a bearded monk or an unkempt parson splashed to the chin. They would rather hear with their own ears that still small voice which said to St. Theresa: “I will not henceforth that ye commune with men, but only with angels.”

Priests were men appointed to the service of the Church, and not demi-gods. Some were pleasant and cultured, just as there were excellent abbesses; but to spend one’s life in the vestries, or not to be able to move a finger without referring to one’s clergyman, struck Margaret as sheer insanity. For herself, she would rather talk with a sceptic or a clever atheist than with a vulgar parson, because after all the atheist would aid her to accomplish her end, namely, to draw near to God through the Beautiful. Nothing was more natural than to love God and abase oneself in deed and in truth before Him, God being intelligence and King of kings; but what was the good of intermediaries, often so gross? Clément Marot, who saw through Margaret with wonderful acumen, defines her as “woman in body, man in heart, angel in head.” The friends of the princess declare that “from the age of fifteen she seemed directly inspired by the spirit of God, in eyes and features, in gait and speech, in all her actions.”

The Bishop of Meaux assures her that by reading a translation of the Gospels he offers her she will be as a holy apostle and will receive directly the Spirit of God, just as well, he adds, “as when we” (that is, the common herd) “receive Him in the Eucharist.”

Thus the women aimed at being angels and the word of God. In this lofty mysticism, they exhibited a striking contrast to the easygoing and lukewarm Catholicism of the mob.

Some of their writings permit us to recognise how, little by little, this great religious work was accomplished in their emotional life.

Vittoria Colonna has left us the type of the final prayer of the Renaissance: a petition for peace and happiness in this world and the next.[413] It is an aspiration, a strain of sweet and tender music, a melody of Gounod, rather than a doctrine: it is the result of the co-operation of souls in one common striving toward the most perfect joys.

We have under our eyes the works of three Frenchwomen who, though contemporaries, show us the progressive stages of this co-operation.

The first, Gabrielle de Bourbon, Dame de la Trémoille, still preserves in her _Château_, “a feminine work,” as she says, a character of morality rather than art. The spirit which will renew everything, chisel everything, which is gaily to open doors and windows, has not yet come by. Within, no doubt, there are ravishing delights—apostolic visions, prophets and sibyls on the vaulted arches as at the Sistine; angel’s food distributed amidst a floating radiance of light! But all is regular, inflexible, and severe; the contemplative heart has begun by employing the besom of discipline.

And externally this castle of the Christian soul, somewhat resembling the Alhambra, shows a rugged and bristling front. Love fires the cannon on the ramparts, whilst Inspiration surveys the country round, and in the tiny garden of Felicity where flows the stream of Pity, good souls gather exquisite white flowers, luscious fruits, and leafy branches.

In another work, the _Spiritual Journey_, a story of the adventures of a soul wandering upon the earth, Gabrielle undisguisedly raises her standard against the new divinities—Presumption who loves flowery paths; Self-love, hostile to terrible dogmas; Vain-glory, uncommonly like Margaret of France. Poverty and Virginity are still her friends, and she gives a naïve, heart-breaking, monstrous description of the world—a giant with innumerable hands, each quivering tentacle of which, at odds with the rest, brandishes some weapon, a book or a sword. Charity defeats this monster, Faith triumphs. Gabrielle de Bourbon, as she herself said, wrote for the simple; she did not plume herself on “understanding Holy Writ.”

But ere long comes a genuine noblewoman, Catherine d’Amboise, lady of Beaujeu, who in her _Devout Epistles_ utters this loyal cry:

J’ay transgressé tous les commandemens ... Pour abréger, aucun je n’en excepte.[414]

She has only one noble thing left to her—her heart; and that she offers to God. Then follow effusions in a lofty strain, full of antiquity, biblical allusions, “sibyl songs,” a plea for mercy and love; and Christ puts on her finger the ring of peace, benediction, and remission of sins; He becomes her spouse and lover, and for guardian gives her an angel. With Catherine d’Amboise we win to a wondrous pleasant and aristocratic paradise, composed of “fair manors and castles.” To the 15th-century woman has succeeded the _biblienne_.

Margaret gives the last upward impulse above the anonymous and often ill-thought-out work of the crowd: to prove her independence, she adopts an abstract and lofty aim.

Not that everything is admirable or even comprehensible in her mystical works. Her correspondence with Briçonnet, where, in interminable letters of eighty or a hundred pages, she twaddles about “confection of tribulations,” “old skins” of the spirit; various writings of hers—_The Mirror of the Sinful Soul_, the _Strife between Flesh and Spirit_, the _Orison to Jesus Christ_, the _Orison of the Faithful Soul_—these are very curious, precisely as types of incomprehensibility and the despair of reason. They do not evidence a very placid psychology: “Worse than dead, worse than sick”—such is the author, according to her mottoes; there were days when she hated doctrine of any kind, the Bible, the Gospels included.[415]

She learnt the death of her brother intuitively, in a dream. From that time the world crushed her; mystics know that thus “the incorporate soul makes her course for the port of salvation.” Margaret’s mysticism became a blind infatuation,[416] a drunkenness of love, in which divine and human elements were commingled,[417] and which manifestly had for object to banish from sight many of the miseries of life.

It is in the book entitled _The Triumph of the Lamb_ that we see best delineated the Christ of her heart, her divine Saviour and emancipator, shedding a radiance above the grimy factory of life. Death itself becomes lovely, and, like a “courteous friend,” opens the gates of heaven to well-nigh all mankind.[418]

Mankind has a right to clemency, unstinted, immeasurable; in fashioning us of a somewhat coarse clay, Heaven did not mean to make us all unhappy. Margaret has a horror of death.[419] But Love reassures her, helps her to pierce the mystery. Not as an avenger, but as a lamb will Christ render justice at the Judgment Day. Men were complaining of the facility of indulgences; Margaret settles the question off-hand; she proposes a general pardon.

Of mysticism, as well as of love, there were already innumerable varieties known. Perugino, Averulino,[420] the preachers of the royalty of Christ, St. Bernardin of Sienna, Savonarola, and many another, carried on the great traditions of Italy. France too, though more stubborn, had her mystics, especially at Rouen and in Picardy, where the palinodists,[421] elects souls, magistrates, municipal counsellors, had long been singing praise to the Virgin and reviling the body:

La chair, quoy? nourriture mortelle! L’esprit d’amour nourrit le cueur fidèle![422]

These palinodists were men of intelligence and ardour. Asking nothing of the clergy, whom they riddled with pungent epigrams, they had recourse to worldly means to spread their ideas, such as competitions and dramatic performances. They resembled the women in their excessive cult of the intellect, their unceasing itch for writing and speaking, their taste for mystery and incognito. It was the same in regard to their impressions: they desired to bring into relief the true life of Christ, that is, the mystic and inward life which they held the rude apostles to have overmuch neglected. Assuredly theirs was a noble aim. Margaret was on excellent terms with the palinodists. Yet the mysticism of platonism was different, implying a much more general abstraction: it mistrusted the senses, the material form, desirous of seeing the reality of things, the essence of God. Among the prelates it gave rise to that exquisite academy of devotion and prayer, the Oratory of the Divine Love, which met at Rome in the church of SS. Silvester and Dorothea Transtevera during the pontificate of Leo X., and which numbered among its members sixty priests and prelates, Sadoleto being one of the chief. They gave all their thoughts to the reformation of morals, and among them prayer rose delicately to Heaven, like those wreaths of fire the Bible shows us on altars pleasing to the Lord.

Feminine mysticism was broader: its aim was to develop happiness, in other words, to lead us to the summit of an ideal world, full of love and purity. Love, having lost the egotistic and licentious character without which the French mind refused to understand it, having become an aspiration for the French as well as for the idealist races, represented the very substance of the world; it was divine and eternal; it gathered up all things, even men, into the heart of God. The Gospel was only the practical expression of this high natural law, of which the pagans long ago had caught glimpses, and to which Seneca ventured darkly to allude when he wrote, “When, tell me, will you love one another?” The Gospel was the sum and crown of human wisdom. Hence Erasmus wished to canonise Virgil, and to add to the Litany a new response—“St. Socrates, pray for us.” Plato was quoted in the pulpit; Anne of France, who was orthodoxy itself, took pains to mingle the philosophers with the Fathers. Trajan was regarded as a model; Louis XII. and Guevara, the tutor of Charles V., lived on the maxims of Marcus Aurelius.

They aimed at a sort of natural mysticism, the object of which would be to express the essence of mundane things. “It is God,” said Rivio,[423] “who giveth to the sky its splendours, to the trees their shade, to the cheering vines their clusters and fruit. It is He who clotheth the earth with fruitful crops, who causeth the trees to bud and the crystal streams to gush forth, who covereth the meadows with a carpet. Wherefore to hunt and fish and reap, to fulfil all the conditions of life,—this is to be a Christian.”

No one had any bent towards naturalism, or imagined that everything that is natural should be regarded as good or beautiful; on the contrary, men wished to elevate and improve Nature, even to excess. Your vineyard, say, always yields bad wine; M. Zola would tell you to drink it, Rousseau to drink water: but these folk of the Renaissance would tell you to distil it into brandy. From Nature they wished to borrow certain quasi-mystical powers which exist in her in force. Hence this mysticism did not, like that of St. Theresa, lead to the deliberate rejection of all earthly satisfactions, to the adoration of death, suffering and humiliation. _Carpe diem_ was their motto, as it was of Horace and Lorenzo de’ Medici. They left to Albert Dürer and other Germanic artists the monopoly of dances of death and maidens carried off in the arms of skeletons.

“For loss of servitors we need not despair, for many others are to be had”: so spoke the fair ladies, not out of indifference, but out of fear lest the mournful idea should trouble their hearts: for “there is none of us, if she regards her loss, but has occasion for deep sorrow.”[424] When we ask history or romance or the drama to carry us for a time out of ourselves, do not we too seek, in reality, the satisfaction of forgetting death—perchance, of forgetting life?

That was the very human root of this mysticism. In turning back to the page of love, no one wished to feel under the fingers the page of death. Far from forgetting life, they affirmed it: the secret of life was life itself. They mocked at death. A skeleton at the feast, a spectre at the ball, were subjects for laughter. Like Boccaccio, Machiavelli sets his gayest stories in a horrible framework of pestilence; rich folk laugh and make love under cool leafy shades; and their excuse is that, but a few paces off, death is grinning at them. Such is the key to this novel mysticism. It is a tragic dance of fragilities; but the dancers see nothing fragile. They forge for themselves an artificial weapon, they prefer beauty to truth.

It followed from the same ideas that they held direct communion with God. The tender worship of the Virgin, fallen a little out of use, no longer throve except stealthily in a corner, like the beautiful plant which the Flemish painters loved to represent in a crystal vase.[425] Communication with heaven was opened by means of conspicuous semaphores, though these unhappily were irregular and far apart. St. Theresa, like a genuine freelance, might speak of storming heaven, and carrying its successive redoubts one by one; but the philosophic idea was different—a simple canter in a friendly country. On some beautiful day in May, when Nature, overflowing with love, scatters her gifts in careless profusion, a certain Knight, Beau-Doulx by name, sets off among the flowery meadows to conquer this “noble and delectable castle of Love,” all sapphires and emeralds from base to turret. He bears with him no cannon, no scaling ladders. Arrived beneath the walls, he sinks on his knees and declares his love. That is all. That is “the realm of Paradise, wherein is love divine.”

Nature hails God in us, and reveals God to us. The song that rises from the sea soars even to the stars; the luxuriant warmth of the air is a symbol of mercy. Such a temple was better loved than the frantic mysticism of certain northern cathedrals. As for the rites of this worship, they were those of platonism. Salvatorio wrote a _Treasury of Holy Scripture after the Poems of Petrarch_: Fra Feliciano Umbruno offered to the ladies of Rome a _Dialogue on the sweet death of Jesus Christ_, this too inspired by Petrarch. Fra Malipiero presented the famous _Spiritual Petrarch_, which appeared at Venice in 1536 and ran into the tenth edition. The spiritualisation of sonnets was effected easily enough: but anyone who wished to amend the _canzoni_ and miscellaneous poems had a troublesome task.

The religion of love found an incomparable interpreter in Correggio. Correggio is _the_ painter of women. How wonderfully he translates their dream of love and confidence, in harmony with the code of aesthetic Christianity! In his _Saint Jerome_, the Virgin is beautiful to look upon, of a human, piquant, smiling beauty; but the whole effect of the picture is derived from the face of the Magdalene, and her intensely caressing attitude: it is the apotheosis of the caress! Never, perhaps, has love all-embracing, soft as velvet, been so warmly expressed: prayer, passion, all is cast into the shade by this contemplation of pure love, this contact, enchanting, radiant, of two beings united by a magnetic tenderness. The child Jesus has behind Him an angel representing heaven; before Him St. Jerome holds an open book; but He turns about, bestowing His gracious smile upon the Magdalene, whom He prefers to all human learning because she is Love.

At the Louvre, too, the _Mystic Marriage_ fills one’s heart with a golden, sunny vision. “It is impossible,” says Vasari, “to see more beautiful hair, lovelier hands, a more natural and charming colouring.” In this ardent “conversation” life seems to be suspended: “The will is changed to love, the memory appears to have vanished, and the understanding has ceased to act.”

Devotion is often accused of being tiresome. It is true that God has no revelation to make to Himself; He is the immortality of the known. The women who lived on such lofty ideas readily assumed a profound and pensive air, an expression of intelligence and trenchancy rather than tenderness. Like the wounded soldier at Austerlitz of whom Tolstoï speaks, they awoke in the vast silence of the night, alone with the clear bright stars.

Where men would have brought their pride, women brought their sweetness. Their language was a little involved and “precious.”

Yet we can see from the correspondence of Margaret of France and Vittoria Colonna, how sincerely they thought themselves happy. These two ladies never saw each other. Vittoria writes that while awaiting the infinite happiness of a meeting, she ventures to reply to the “high and religious” words of the princess, so as to act as balance-weight to that celestial timepiece. “In our day, the long and difficult journey of life compels us to have a guide; it seems to me that everyone can find in his own sex the most appropriate models.... I turned towards the illustrious ladies of Italy to find examples for imitation, and though I saw many virtuous among them ... yet one woman alone, and she not in Italy, seemed to me to unite the perfections of the will with those of the intellect; but she was so high placed and so far away that my heart was filled with the gloom and fear of the Hebrews when they perceived the fire and glory of God on the mountain-top, and durst not draw near because of their imperfection.”

In this first letter the marchioness contents herself with glorifying the humility and charitableness of her noble correspondent, whose daughter she humbly calls herself, or better, her John Baptist, her Forerunner: these personal compliments always play an important part in feminine diplomacy, full of splendid courtesy. She speaks of her group of friends; she often enjoys, she adds, the conversation of Pole, who “is always in the heavens, and only descends to earth to do service to others,” and that of Bembo, one of the labourers of the eleventh hour, perhaps, but eminently worthy, by reason of his ardour, of the wages of the first; and all these friends of hers unite in contemplating from afar this queen of gems, so rich in radiance that she enriches others.

In another letter Vittoria grapples more closely with the burning questions of the day. She affirms her respect for reason, but she prefers religion, “the supreme perfection of our soul,” the perfect beauty. For the better unfolding of her theme she encloses a copy of her sonnets.

This copy, though addressed to the sister of the king, was intercepted in the post by order of the Constable de Montmorency. Whether he read the sonnets or not is very doubtful; in any case he judged them to be pernicious stuff, and seized the opportunity of indulging in the luxury of an explosion. He only gave up the book after a stormy scene at the king’s table.

Vergerio,[426] the amiable prelate who was the pope’s nuncio in France, had great difficulty also in meeting Margaret. How ample was his reward when he succeeded! His first audience, which lasted not less than four hours, seemed to him far too short to satisfy his “spiritual enthusiasm.” He lost not a moment in committing to paper all that had been said, in order to show to what altitudes of Grace and divine Love “mounts the spirit of the queen.” But how was it possible to transfer to paper so much spontaneous eloquence, so much fervour, so potent a charm?... It was not a very comfortable conversation. Margaret could speak no language but French, and as Vergerio was hardly at home in it, she spelt out her words, so to speak, mingling with them as much Latin and Italian as she could. For all this, when Vergerio took his leave, in his ravishment he fancied he saw the glaciers of the human heart melting under the hot beams of faith, and breathed the wonderful breath of God. Whence came this miracle? “Praise be to Jesus Christ, who in our troublous times hath raised up such intelligences—here the queen of Navarre, of whom I speak; at Ferrara the lady Renée of France; at Urbino the lady Leonora Gonzaga,[427] both of whom I have seen here, with whom I conversed for several hours, and who seemed to me endowed with eminently lofty minds, filled with charity, all on fire with Christ; at Rome the lady Vittoria Colonna—to speak of none but your own sex.” And he repeats that the thorns in the Saviour’s vine are fast disappearing; thanks to women, he sees the radiance of light and peace.

Vergerio continued to converse with the queen of Navarre with ever-renewed joy. One is almost ashamed to transcribe with a cold pen phrases so ardently trustful and palpitating: “I have in sooth no greater wealth, no greater consolation than this queen; she has words of infinite warmth, and marvellous means for uplifting to the service of God hearts that are cold and dead. It happens that for eighteen days I did not appear at court, but dwelt in sweet retirement, busy cultivating my soul and sowing within myself the word of God. Then went I where the queen’s glowing charity was found, and I felt that she caused the seed to spring up and wax strong and bring forth fruit, in other words the knowledge of God and the fervent desire to serve Him, and Him alone.”

Such were these lofty spirits, so enthusiastic for the beautiful. They lived on poetry in a sphere apart, cheering one another, mutually calmed and comforted; it was after her interviews with Vergerio that Margaret declared herself a platonist and shook off the yoke of the court. No one hoped, of course, that the whole world would chime in tune; they well knew that when these abstractions filtered down to the mob they would become materialised, and love itself would ofttimes become tainted. But was it not a beautiful thing to sow love broadcast with no hope of reaping, and to go forth like angels of God to pour a little dew on the parched ground?

This was not destined to prevent the wars and massacres of the 16th century; but a glance at the map will show that Catholicism triumphed in the countries where women triumphed; fog and beer and men turned Protestant.

Further, these ideas, crushed as people fancied them, reappeared by degrees everywhere, as from the effect of a resistless germination. From them sprang the 18th century; with them our own age also, for all its matter-of-fact bent, is still entirely impregnated.

And Sadoleto the friend of Melanchthon, the liberal-minded Contarini, the amiable Reginald Pole so much influenced by Vittoria Colonna, Flaminio,[428] Vergerio, would all smile at certain reconciliatory schemes of to-day.