d.

After the most violent of these outbreaks there is a dead silence. One
guesses that some terrible message has come, warning her that unless she
promised that she would never write to Abelard save as the Abbess of the
Paraclete to the monk of Cluny, not a word from him shall ever come;
and that, in order to keep this last miserable comfort, she has bitten
out that truth-speaking tongue of hers. For after this there are only
questions on theological points and on the regulation of nunneries; and
Abelard becomes as liberal of words as he used to be chary, as full of
encouragement as he once was of insult, now that he feels comfortably
certain that Heloise has changed from a mistress to a penitent, and that
in her also there is an end at last of all that sinful folly of love.
And thus, upon Heloise pacified, numbed, dead of soul, among her praying
and scrubbing and cooking and linen-mending nuns; and Abelard reassured,
serene, spiritually proud once more among the raging controversies, the
ecclesiastical persecutions in which his soul prospered, the volume
closes; the curtain falls upon one of the most terrible tragedies of the
heart, as poignant after seven hundred years as in those early Middle
Ages, before St. Francis claimed sun and swallows as brethren, and the
baby Christ was given to hold to St. Anthony of Padua.

III

The humanising movement, due no doubt to greater liberty and prosperity,
to the growing importance of honest burgher life, which the Church
authorised in the person of Francis of Assisi, doubtless after persecuting
it in the persons of dozens of obscure heresiarchs--this great revival
of religious faith was essentially the triumph of profane feeling in the
garb of religious: the sanctification, however much disguised, of all
forms of human love. One is fully aware of the moral dangers attendant
upon every such equivocation; and the great saints (like their last modern
representatives, the fervent, shrewd, and kindly leaders of certain
Protestant revivals) were probably, for all their personal extravagances,
most fully prepared for every sort of unwholesome folly among their
disciples. The whole of a certain kind of devotional literature, manuals
of piety, Church hymns, lives and correspondence of saintly persons, is
unanimous in testifying to the hysterical self-consciousness, intellectual
enervation, emotional going-to-bits, and moral impotence produced by
such vicarious and barren expenditure