I should in the opposite case have copied the introduction of
Virgin-worship into the original tale. The business of those who
make Mary, to women especially, the complete substitute for the
Saviour--I had almost said, for all Three Persons of the Trinity--is
to explain, if they can, her non-appearance in this case.

Lewis, again, I have drawn as I found him, possessed of all virtues
but those of action; in knowledge, in moral courage, in spiritual
attainment, infinitely inferior to his wife, and depending on her to
be taught to pray; giving her higher faculties nothing to rest on in
himself, and leaving the noblest offices of a husband to be supplied
by a spiritual director. He thus becomes a type of the husbands of
the Middle Age, and of the woman-worship of chivalry. Woman-
worship, 'the honour due to the weaker vessel,' is indeed of God,
and woe to the nation and to the man in whom it dies. But in the
Middle Age, this feeling had no religious root, by which it could
connect itself rationally, either with actual wedlock or with the
noble yearnings of men's spirits, and it therefore could not but die
down into a semi-sensual dream of female-saint-worship, or fantastic
idolatry of mere physical beauty, leaving the women themselves an
easy prey to the intellectual allurements of the more educated and
subtle priesthood.

In Conrad's case, again, I have fancied that I discover in the
various notices of his life a noble nature warped and blinded by its
unnatural exclusions from those family ties through which we first
discern or describe God and our relations to Him, and forced to
concentrate his whole faculties in the service, not so much of a God
of Truth as of a Catholic system. In his character will be found, I
hope, some implicit apology for the failings of such truly great men
as Dunstan, Becket, and Dominic, and of many more whom, if we hate,
we shall never understand, while we shall be but too likely, in our
own way, to copy them.

Walter of Varila, a more fictitious character, represents the
'healthy animalism' of the Teutonic mind, with its mixture of deep
earnestness and hearty merriment. His dislike of priestly
sentimentalities is no anachronism. Even in his day, a noble lay-
religion, founded on faith in the divine and universal symbolism of
humanity and nature, was gradually arising, and venting itself, from
time to time, as I conceive, through many most unsuspected channels,
through chivalry, th