of fleshliness. No knowledge can come out of this straw-splitting _in
vacuo_; and certainly no art out of this indecent pedant's symbolism:
all things are turned to dusty, dirty lumber.

As with the intellectual, so also, in large degree, with the moral:
a splendid will to do right is applied, in its turn, to phantoms.
Here again the letters of Abelard and Heloise are extraordinarily
instructive. The highest virtue, the all-including (how differently
Dante feels, whatever he may say!), is _obedience_. Thus Abelard,
having quoted from St. Augustine that all which is done for obedience'
sake is well done, proceeds very logically: "It is more advantageous for
us to act rightly than to do good.... We should think not so much of the
action itself, as of the manner in which it is performed."

Do not imagine that this care for the motive and contempt of the action
arises from an estimate of the importance of a man's sum-total of
tendencies, contrasted with his single, perhaps unintentional, acts;
still less that the advantage thus referred to has anything to do with
other men's happiness. The advantage is merely to the individual soul,
or in a cruder, truer view, to the individual combustible body to which
that soul shall be eternally reunited hereafter. And the spirit which
makes virtue alone virtuous is the spirit of obedience: obedience
theoretically to a god, but practically to a father of the Church, a
Council, an abbot or abbess. In this manner right-doing is emptied of
all rational significance, becomes dependent upon what itself, having
no human, practical reason, is mere arbitrary command. Chastity, for
instance, which is, together with mansuetude, the especial Christian
virtue, becomes in this fashion that mere guarding of virginity which,
for some occult reason, is highly prized in Heaven; as to clean living
being indispensable for bearable human relations, which even the unascetic
ancients recognised so clearly, there is never an inkling of that. Whence,
indeed, such persons as do not _go in for_ professionally pleasing the
divinity, who are neither priests, monks, nor nuns, need not stickle
about it; and the secular literature of the Middle Ages, with its
Launcelots, Tristrams, Flamencas, and all its German and Provencal
lyrists, becomes the glorification of illicit love. Indeed, in the
letters before us, Abelard regrets his former misconduct only with
reference to religious standards: as a layman he was perfectl