a crusade that
he may see the lady. On the voyage he falls ill, and lands in Tripoli
sick nigh unto death. The lovely countess, touched by the tales of his
devotion, comes to his bedside; at once the glow of health returns to
the dying lover, who praises God for preserving his life long enough to
permit him to see his lady. When he died, soon after,--for the sight of
the lady did not effect a permanent cure,--the countess had him buried
in the church of the Templars, while she herself took the veil.

But if there is moonshine madness in the ideals of chivalry, there are
also better things. Devotion to woman rises to the point of adoration;
why should it not, when at its base is really the fervor of worship, the
mystic worship of her whom the Middle Ages delighted to honor, Mary, the
Mother of God? Let us content ourselves here with what Lecky has so well
said in his _History of European Morals_: "Whatever may be thought of
its theological propriety, there can be little doubt that the Catholic
reverence for the Virgin has done much to elevate and purify the ideal
of woman, and to soften the manners of men. It has had an influence
which the worship of the Pagan goddesses could never possess, for these
had been almost destitute of moral beauty, and especially of that kind
of moral beauty which is peculiarly feminine. It supplied in a great
measure the redeeming and ennobling element in that strange amalgam of
religious, licentious, and military feeling which was formed around
women in the age of chivalry, and which no succeeding change of habit or
belief has wholly destroyed."

The fact that this love of the Virgin finally became a recognized force
is a proof of how much stronger are love and romance than theology and
dogma; for the strict religious theory of the Church had always been
opposed to the elevation of women to a very high plane of adoration.
While the Fathers of the Church praised and practised chastity as the
highest virtue, and in consequence honored virgins above all others,
they never forgot that it was the sin of woman which had "brought death
into the world and all our woe"; they never forgot to twit the daughters
of Eve with this fact, and to call them _vas infirmius_--"the weaker
vessel." All through the ages when Christianity was struggling to
maintain its own, the saints and martyrs, the holy hermits, in whom the
Church delighted, fled the very sight of woman, and shuddered at her
touch as at a cont