t is not
an influence he allows. It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is
an influence which he cannot explain, though he may make believe to do
so. That "protection," for example, which he extends to her from the
common physical perils with which he is more muscularly constituted to
cope--why is it extended? Merely out of pity to a weaker being than
himself? Does other weakness always command his pity? We know that it
does not. No, this "protection" is but a part of an instinctive
reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence
which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or
vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life. He respects
and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink from
profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees before
any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and women are often classed
together, but not because the priests are regarded as effeminately
"helpless"; rather because both are recognized as ministers of sacred
mysteries, both belong to the spiritual sphere, and have commerce with
the occult holiness of things. Also be it remarked that this
"protection" is chiefly needed against the brutality and bestiality of
man's own heart, which woman and religion alike rather hold in
subjection by their mysterious influence than have to thank for any
favours of self-control. Man "protects" woman because he first worships
her, because, if she has for him not always the beauty of holiness, she
at least always suggests the holiness of beauty.

Now when has man ever suggested holiness to the most adoring woman? I do
not refer to the professional holiness of saints and ecclesiastics, but
to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic purity, of spiritual
exquisiteness, which breathes from a beautiful woman and makes the touch
of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments a thrilling
mystery. How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing the _Vita
Nuova_, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and worship
as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of the girl Beatrice.

At that moment [he writes], I say most truly that the spirit of
life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart,
began to tremble so violently that the least pulse of my body shook
therewith; and in trembling it said these words: "_Ecce deus fortior
me, qui veniens dominabi