y free to
seduce Heloise; the scandal, the horrible sin, was not the seduction,
but the profanation by married love of the dress of a nun, the sanctuary
of the virgin. So it is with the renunciation of all the world's pleasures
and interests. The ascetic sacrifice of inclination, which the stoics
had conceived as resistance to the tyrant without and the tyrant within,
as a method for serene and independent life and death, this ascetic
renunciation becomes, in this arid theological world, the mere giving up
to please a jealous God of all that is not He. Abelard's regulations for
the nuns, which he gives as rules of perfection (save in the matter of
that necessary half sin, marriage) to devout lay folk, come after all to
this: give human nature enough to keep it going, so that it may be able
to sacrifice everything else to the jealousy of the Godhead. Eating,
clothing oneself, washing (though, by the way, there is no mention
of this save for the sick), nay, speaking and thinking, are merely
instrumental to the contemplation of God; any more than suffices for
this is sinful. On this point Abelard quotes, with stolidest approval,
one of the most heart-rending of anecdotes. A certain monk being asked
why he had fled humankind, answered, on account of his great love for
it, and the impossibility of loving God and it at the same time.

Think upon that. Think on the wasted treasure of loving-kindness of
which that monk and the thousands he represents cheated his fellow-men.
O love of human creatures, of man for woman, parents and children, of
brethren, love of friends; fuel and food, which keeps the soul alive,
balm curing its wounds, or, if they be incurable, helps the poor dying
thing to die at last in peace--this was those early saints' notion of
thee!

To refuse thus to love is to refuse not merely the highest usefulness,
but to refuse also the best kind of justice. Here again, nay, here more
than ever, we may learn from those wonderful letters. They constitute,
indeed, a document of the human soul to which, in my recollection, one
other only, Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, can be compared. But in these
letters,--hers of grief, humiliation, hopelessness, making her malign
her noble self; and his, bitter, self-righteous, crammed with theological
moralisings--we see not merely the dual drama of two ill-assorted
creatures, but the much more terrible tragedy, superadded by the
presence, looming, impassive, as of Cypris in Euri